[HN Gopher] Standard patterns in choice-based games (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
Standard patterns in choice-based games (2015)
Author : Ariarule
Score : 238 points
Date : 2025-01-13 00:35 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com)
| flpm wrote:
| This is very interesting, thanks for posting! Makes me think of
| the big choice diagrams in Detroit: Become Human. I wonder if
| there is any literature about this?
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I'm curious about Alpha Protocol. Probably the #1 game I've
| played for _choices matter_.
|
| Detroit is interesting, in that it includes some choices made
| by passing or failing QTEs. They really did the "You will get
| emotionally stomped if you screw this up!" well in that game. I
| don't know its structure well, as I only played it once. (So
| experience only one path.)
|
| Unless you count time caves like The Stanley Parable!
| photonthug wrote:
| > I wonder if there is any literature about this?
|
| Came here looking for the same.. some kind of map from the game
| design angle more towards game theory.
|
| Fun semi related tangent, I was curious to know authors
| background, and the About page quotes Borges "garden of forking
| paths" which jives nicely with tfa. Cataloging rather than
| inventing is an underrated activity in math sometimes, and we
| need to do both. Game garden taxonomy!
| dejobaan wrote:
| This is great. I've been a game dev for about 30 years, much of
| which I've spent working with narrative design/writing teams. One
| thing I've learned to watch out for, especially among junior
| designers, is what the author labels the "Time Cave."
|
| Narrative branching, done well, is fantastic--it gives the player
| agency and lets them make the story their own (as it were). But
| when you're creating the story graph, it's easy to get lost in it
| and lavish care on one path at the exclusion of the others. You
| can easily end up with one or two long, greatly-detailed paths,
| and (because dev time is finine, and you need to move on to
| writing other parts of the game) a pile of other paths that are
| shorter and less interesting. If the player takes one of the
| shorter ones, they end up missing out on all your coolest stuff.
| The tools I would design for the kinds of games I created
| specifically made it easy to create a main story trunk with side
| paths (that rejoined the trunk), and more difficult to
| branch/loop/etc.
|
| Of course, that's not the only (or even the best) way to do
| narrative design--Disco Elysium is a masterwork because it did
| the branching, merching, loops, jumps, random checks, and so
| forth, so well!
| spencerflem wrote:
| Your games rule :)
| esperent wrote:
| What game is it?
| spencerflem wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejobaan_Games
|
| Played so much AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! back in the
| day, still never 5 starred everything. Holds up IMO. Their
| other games are cool too
| dejobaan wrote:
| You are too kind; thank you!
| chii wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to try get a story-focused game to have
| branching paths, akin to the old choose-your-own-adventure
| books. Until LLMs can proactively create new stories for the
| player to enjoy dynamically, i think it's always fraught with
| peril that the player fails to get the full story (or have to
| repeatedly play it and choose something else to try).
|
| My personal preference would be to have a single, on rails
| story, where the player don't truly have a choice. It's an
| interactive movie.
|
| Or, pick a sandbox mechanic, and let the player do what they
| want directly, and compute the consequence (the most common
| type being the physics system).
| spencerflem wrote:
| imo its not necessary to get the "whole" story, or replay it
| to see every possibility
|
| just seing "my" story is enough
|
| interactive movie type games are great but they're a
| different experience from choice style games which are also
| great, (and ofc the article shows that there's many styles
| within this too, all with a different experience)
|
| I don't believe LLMs can recreate the same authored
| experience that has a point of view. I think they'll be okay
| at genre work soon enough though, for better or worse. But
| thats not a type of game I'm personally interested in.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I completely disagree, there are plenty of branching games
| which are extremely good and which would be severely worse if
| they weren't branching: Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3
| come to mind.
|
| We are very very far off from an AI being able to come up
| with compelling stories that are logically coherent.
| chii wrote:
| > there are plenty of branching games which are extremely
| good
|
| i think you mean there's barely any good ones. The examples
| you come up with are the exceptions that prove the rule.
| Look at a game like Dishonered, where the story have _some_
| branches, but it's half-assed imho. There's plenty more
| games where having gone for a branching story made the game
| more expensive, less deep, and harder to sell as a result.
| lmm wrote:
| If you're not going to have choices matter, why make the
| story in an interactive medium at all? Branching paths
| require a lot of compromises, but there are still things you
| can do much better with handwritten stories than in a sandbox
| style.
| chii wrote:
| > why make the story in an interactive medium at all?
|
| have you not seen the success of the COD Modern Warfare
| franchise? Their single player game is essentially an on-
| rails shooter, with pivotal story points completely
| scripted (you "press the buttons"). There's no choice,
| there's no branching (of the story).
|
| But people like to shoot, like to run around, etc. It feels
| like they have control, and it feels like the heroics in
| the story is their contribution.
| lmm wrote:
| I thought we were talking about a story-focused game,
| which that is not.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Halo is the same. It is essentially a very long hallway
| with enemies to take care of before you can move to the
| next hallway. Also, I recently played through the first
| Halo again and it was still quite fun.
| watwut wrote:
| You skip through the "pivotal story points" and ignore
| them.
| zelos wrote:
| Isn't that dismissing 90% of games? The story can exist
| purely to give emotional context to the action of the game.
| lmm wrote:
| I meant in the context of a story-focused game, which is
| indeed less than 10% of games in general.
| zelos wrote:
| Oh, in that case I agree then: linear story-focused games
| feel like the developers misunderstood the concept of
| 'game'.
| spencerflem wrote:
| They're good too! See: the 'walking sim' genre (<3
| beginner's guide) or interactive fiction like Turnadot
| (once rated #49 of all time)
|
| https://thebeginnersgui.de/
|
| https://www.ifarchive.org/if-
| archive/games/competition2019/T...
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Humorously, this comment takes a giant swipe at 50 years of
| CYOA and Interactive Fiction.
|
| There are over 14,000 games listed on https://ifdb.org.
|
| Perhaps you should play some of them and adjust your
| perceptions.
| trothamel wrote:
| Also node the 52,000 visual novels at https://vndb.org/v .
| arkh wrote:
| > My personal preference would be to have a single, on rails
| story, where the player don't truly have a choice. It's an
| interactive movie.
|
| I can't bother to play those kind of games. A movie will be
| able to deliver its stories a lot better than a game.
|
| But with choice and branching you get to appropriate the
| protagonist(s) and some story events can be a lot more
| impactful then. Lately I played Cyberpunk for which you have
| some choices in most missions and the endings hit different.
| If anyone involved in the DLC story is around: kudos to
| everyone involved in making the "face in the crowd" ending.
| You play some almost super heroic character and due to your
| choices (which involve betraying and killing a lot of people)
| you get to survive: alone and back to generic human power
| level.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| > A movie will be able to deliver its stories a lot better
| than a game.
|
| I don't agree. Something like SOMA would just be a generic
| sci-fi B-movie but it's an awesome game, even though
| there's no real choice and is in essence just a walking
| simulator.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I'm the opposite, apparently. I loved CYOA books as a kid
| _because_ they could be reread, so I ended up seeking games
| that boasted multiple endings, including "bad" endings. When
| playing more linear games, I appreciated them for what they
| were, but there was a disappointment that I could not try
| different options along the way.
|
| I think both have a clear place in gaming, since different
| gamers obviously look for different things.
| watwut wrote:
| I strongly disagree. I was actively preferring those games
| and found it fun to try out different endings.
|
| > My personal preference would be to have a single, on rails
| story, where the player don't truly have a choice. It's an
| interactive movie.
|
| I stopped to play those games. Movies are better at being
| movies then games.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I stopped to play those games.
|
| English nit, if you mean you no longer play those kinds of
| games, as I think you do baaed on context, you should write
|
| "I stopped playing those games."
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think a good idea is to have a tree-like checkpoint-save
| system so you can always go back to the state you were in
| before descending down into a branch and go down another one
| without replaying everything up to this point. It encourages
| replays and exploring all content.
|
| Papers please had something like this.
| chii wrote:
| and if i recall correctly, also Detroit: Become Human
|
| It also tells you the % of people that managed to reach a
| certain ending or branch.
| seanhunter wrote:
| There a lot of great games with branching narratives, for
| example The Outer Wilds, Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher 3, all
| the FromSoft games have extremely powerful narratives with
| multiple branches and multiple possible endings based on
| player choice. Done well there's a lot of replayability that
| arises from the desire to experience different paths within
| the overall general experience, as well as the immersion that
| comes from the player truly feeling they have agency in the
| world in the way that an on-rails experience just cannot do.
| For example there was one quest in the Witcher 3[1] where I
| remember being haunted by the consequences of an extremely
| difficult choice I had to make and wondering for days whether
| or not I had done the right thing. I eventually replayed the
| game and when I got to that point .... decided to make the
| same choice. _sigh_. So I still don 't know whether I did the
| right thing. I just couldn't bring myself to try the other
| branch - it just wasn't right for me. One of the most
| powerful things a game has ever done to me, and very true to
| the complex and ambivalent moral tone of the books in my
| opinion.
|
| Done poorly, you end up with something like Fallout 4.
| Theoretically there are choices but they don't matter that
| much and many of the branches get little to no QA love so
| have bugs and problems (eg when I did my playthrough of
| fallout 4 I unwittingly managed to avoid the main choice
| you're supposed to be forced into doing which is to choose
| which faction to align yourself with) which had numerous
| buggy consequences because the devs clearly had never
| expected anyone to play in this particular way (I basically
| did a breadth-first traversal of all the different quests but
| put off a couple of key decisions because I couldn't make up
| my mind. In the end this pushed me past the point where I was
| supposed to make the choice and I ended up friends with just
| about everyone. Except the institute. Screw those guys). Yet
| another reason that game was so disappointing.
|
| [1] The whispering hillock. If you know, you know.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I felt that The Outer Worlds did quite a good job, too.
| From the devs who built Fallout New Vegas.
|
| Funny little game. I find it quite charming in its
| eccentricities.
| chii wrote:
| > Done poorly
|
| yep, and i argue that most game devs wouldn't do it well
| enough to justify it. The limited time and resources
| available means they're almost certainly better off not
| branching, but make one good main story and polish it.
|
| Take a look at the examples you listed - they're all award
| winning games, from developers with serious experience,
| grit and determination to make the best game. They spent
| ages, and lots of resources to do it.
|
| Even big studios, with similar or more resources, fail at
| making such branching good. It's a folly to think that a
| smaller game developer with more limited resources could
| make it better. Disco Elysium is almost an exception that
| proves the rule (or another example is Pathologic).
| atombender wrote:
| While I enjoyed playing Fallout 4, I was really annoyed
| with how it forced you into a specific path that lead
| inexorably towards a very specific ending no matter, as you
| say, what you do.
|
| At the end, you have just two options: You can join the
| institute, or make war with them. I actually really didn't
| care about this faction and wanted to get out of that
| storyline, but that's what the game offers you.
|
| Of course many games lead you to a specific denouement,
| which is typically one where you've defeated all the bad
| guys and win. But those games don't make any pretenses
| about making choices, whereas Fallout does.
|
| I was really impressed with how many choices you had in
| Baldur's Gate 3. They definitely recorded an insane amount
| of dialogue just to cover all the possibilities. But I did
| find myself annoyed with the ending here, too, which only
| allows two choices at the end.
|
| If there are two choices to make, it's basically the same
| as one, because the story just stops there. I'd rather
| games stop pretending. Don't pretend that there are so many
| gray areas. Just let the good guys win over the bad guys.
|
| An alternative approach for such a game would be to have
| the decision tree be oriented around a kind of moral
| compass throughout, and your deeds decide what you can do.
| So if you keep killing or betraying people, you become more
| evil, maybe physically deteriorating into a kind of ghoul,
| while normal people start to fear you and refuse to barter
| or make allegiances. But as you get more evil, you gain
| access to eldritch abilities, make friends with monsters,
| and so on. There may be a point where you can make amends
| and return from evil, or vice versa, but at some point
| there's a point of no return where the final trajectory has
| been decided.
|
| There are some games that have some something like this,
| where you have a "reputation" among the good guys that you
| can lose by doing misdeeds. Not sure if exactly what I
| describe has been done, however.
| seanhunter wrote:
| That alternative approach is basically what happens in
| Dishonoured and Dishonoured II where there is a "chaos"
| meter which determines how much the world descends into
| disorder based on your choices to kill people or let them
| live. There are multiple "clean hands" options and there
| are always ways to complete any particular mission or
| level with clean hands. There are some elegant ways the
| world's chaos state are revealed to the player. For
| example in Dishonoured, the child Emily's drawings[1] are
| more or less happy reflecting the chaos of the world.
|
| [1] https://dishonored.fandom.com/wiki/Emily_Kaldwin#Emil
| y's_Dra...
| codazoda wrote:
| This is fantastic. Does anyone have any book references that help
| you do writing in some of these formats.
| egglemonsoup wrote:
| not sure if this perfectly addresses your question, but
| "Designing Games" by Tynan Sylvester is a great resource
| livrem wrote:
| There is this collection of 1980's internal design documents
| from Flying Buffalo that you can buy:
|
| https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/296847/t-t-solo-desi...
|
| It is old, but I do not know of any other books really on this
| topic. I enjoyed reading it anyway. One of the documents in it
| describes a simple manual algorithm for how to number the
| sections in a reasonable way (just randomly assigning numbers
| is not very reasonable, as anyone will learn from reading a
| book where the author did that). I implemented that in a simple
| pandoc filter:
|
| https://github.com/lifelike/pangamebook
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Reminds me of Disco Elysium Explorer[1]. Conversations 7, 8, 9,
| and 10 are great real life examples.
|
| 1. http://134.0.119.41
| quotemstr wrote:
| Nier Automata is my favorite example of the relatively rare "Loop
| and Grow" pattern. You play through the game three times, with
| each iteration enriching and elaborating on the story and
| characters. Brilliant and weird narrative structure.
| twic wrote:
| Isn't Loop and Grow roughly the same as Metroidvania? Or does
| Metroidvania not require an actual repeating loop, whereas Loop
| and Grow does?
| tunesmith wrote:
| This is fun, and holds true in the creative writing group I run.
| We use a website I programmed that helps us collaborate on
| writing branching fiction. We have a mapping utility that creates
| graphs like in the article, except more animated (d3.js, elkjs).
|
| As different authors can start their own new stories, one thing I
| often have to deal with is that they want to design their story
| to have both long path lengths (multiple chapters before an
| ending), and also high choice count. Those of you who know
| something about geometric series know that this causes problems.
| I often have to tell them they can't have everything they want,
| which causes minor drama. :)
|
| As a result, one of our stories basically shot its "choice
| budget" in the first few chapters, leading to many linear paths
| in the latter parts of the narratives, which is fun in its own
| way.
|
| Another of our stories has just started playing with the
| "gauntlet pattern" as the article describes. For this one, we
| decided that all chapters must be in the "same universe", just
| following different characters' perspectives, and are planning
| for certain "anchor chapters" where all characters come together
| for a meeting. Probably the detective questioning them as a group
| (it's a murder mystery).
|
| All of our stories are supposed to be literary, so usually in
| third person, sometimes first, never the second-person. So we
| don't tend to use choices and chapters as directions and rooms;
| it's all about how the plot moves. We also don't track state;
| they're designed to be able to be printed as books people can
| page through.
|
| Overall a super-fun project for me and a handful of other
| writers, it's been a consistent way to spend a few hours of fun
| each week.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You can still track small state via the reader. I vaguely
| remember a choose your own adventure as a kid:
|
| If you picked up the key earlier, turn to page XX
|
| Otherwise, turn to page YY
|
| It was entertaining to a) suddenly realize I had missed an
| important detail or b) allow me to "escape" if I can't find the
| key or just don't like that part of the book.
| dasfsi wrote:
| One book I read did a similar thing, but managed to do it
| spoiler-free. There was a magical crystal, I think, that did
| some magical things. When you pick it up, the book says "To
| use the crystal, look at paragraph (current paragraph + 20)"
| and the author actually managed to do that for the most
| paragraphs from then onwards
| iainmerrick wrote:
| An old gamebook series that did _lots_ of this is Steve
| Jackson 's _Sorcery!_ -- I wonder if that could be what you
| 're thinking of?
|
| More recently, Jason Shiga has used clever mechanics like
| this a lot in comic book form, notably in _Meanwhile_. He
| 's just finished a three-part series aimed at younger
| readers, _Adventuregame Comics_. All Shiga 's stuff is
| great, highly recommended.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| I usually read text IF following all paths at once, with
| heuristic combinations of breadth-first and depth-first
| search in order to maintain the unexplored front small. Not
| much different from drawing a map in a computer RPG.
| rzzzt wrote:
| "Scorpion Swamp" has a map-style story layout, you are also
| encouraged to re-create the map on paper as you explore. This
| also means that you can get back to earlier locations where
| enemies will either respawn or rest on the second read-
| through.
| jandrese wrote:
| I remember some books that were explicit about tracking the
| state. There was an old space adventure story I read as a kid
| where you wrote your stats out on a piece of paper:
| shields: 100 lasers: 100 troops: 100
| hyperdrive: 50 days: 0
|
| As you read the book it had you encounter hostile threats and
| even roll dice and do lookups on tables at the end of the
| book to decide what happens next. There would be places like
| "To hyperjump over the rift you need at least 40 hyperdrive
| points left, add 3 days and turn to page 88. To go around add
| 7 days and turn to page 41." There were even fights against
| enemy ships where you had to roll for both sides and do chart
| lookups to see how many troops you lost in the boarding
| actions and how badly the ships were damaged. You could even
| lose a fight and end the run right there.
|
| The plotline involved you racing to some planet to deliver
| news of an impending invasion or something and if you didn't
| get there within I think 30 or so days the news would be too
| late and you would lose.
|
| However, being the nerdy kid that I was I mapped out every
| single possible route in the book and then simulated all
| events going perfectly on each route and there didn't appear
| to be a single way to actually win. The author had not done
| the math right and the absolute fastest you could finish was
| like 40 days even if you got crazy lucky with the dice.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| _gauntlet_ looks like GTA V 's story mode pattern.
|
| GTA2 with it's competing gangs seem to have a "state" tracker in
| the form of reputation scores with the game, while having an open
| world map. As your reputation/state changed opportunities would
| become available/unavailable.
|
| I still think GTA 2's system is impressive.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Ai can produce a new type of game where choices are dynamic and
| outcomes are generated by LLM agents. Fiction is an hallucination
| and LLMs are master hallucinators.
|
| Basically LLMs have to be given assets and game components that
| they can easily compose.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Having had an LLM tell me a story, my answer would be that this
| is a dumb idea. LLMs have no concept of realistic cause and
| effect.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Nah I think not considering this idea at all is the extremely
| dumb and brain dead opinion. LLMs can tell stories. Realistic
| causes and effects aren't even consistent in human stories. A
| good story isn't 100 percent dependent on this.
|
| The LLM walks the line between hallucinating too much and
| sometimes not. Either way you can pretty much guarantee that
| almost all stories made in games now are already mostly
| written by an LLM. It's just the writing is edited and
| curated by a human.
| woolion wrote:
| I've done a short LLM-powered VN, and LLM actions were
| restricted to local interactions only because of how weak
| it is at making up the story. It's great at removing the
| parser-based interactions, but I think that's it.
|
| There's a second technical problem that such stories are
| represented by a form of state-machine and that you would
| need to recompile it on the fly, making many checks very
| difficult (you would need to be able to check reachability
| on the fly, chunk transitions, etc). I think it would take
| years to get to the level of some of the great IF games
| with an LLM, and not just a cool PoC.
| usrusr wrote:
| As a grumpy old symbolic ai hand I do wonder if it was
| possible to build a (perhaps crude) ontology based
| simulation with consistency, cause and effect and so on and
| then use the results of that for prompting an LLM.
|
| But as a consumer, I lean far to the side of "give me a
| handcrafted tunnel experience with the illusion of choice"
| in the divide between consequences yes or no. I don't think
| I'd actually want this "simulation behind an LLM facade".
| _If_ I 'm in the mood for reading (or for listening to
| voice actors reading to me), I'd rather have it be
| something more meaningful than just a game state. But to
| those on the other end of the spectrum, this might actually
| be the holy grail of game building.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Fiction is an hallucination and LLMs are master
| hallucinators.
|
| They're jacks of all trades, master of none.
|
| This has its uses, but they have limits, and for now at least,
| those limits are under the threshold for that.
|
| I have actually tried using them to make a text adventure to
| help learn German. The result was at the lower end of the
| quality range I've witnessed from LLM output: a nice first
| draft, not shippable, missing a core element, missing a lot of
| content, too simple, the kind of thing where you'd give the
| output of the LLM as a code challenge to a job candidate to see
| how they improve it.
| jandrese wrote:
| An AI can easily produce a filler slop story. They struggle
| much harder with creating something new and interesting. For a
| CYOA type story for kids that might be reasonable, although
| they tend to make a hash of the details. There are more
| problems, like does the AI know when to stop? Can it recognize
| or generate a bad end or a good end without explicit
| instruction from the player?
|
| Something like:
|
| Generate a choose your own adventure story about a young boy
| shipwrecked on an island populated by hostile pirates. A hidden
| cave holds treasure. There is a jungle on the island. Dangerous
| jungle creatures inhabit the island and the boy can not fight.
| Also hidden on the island is a boat. Each story section is
| around 200 words long and ends with a multiple choice question
| for the player to select which path they want to pursue next.
| The story is complete either when the boy dies or finds the
| boat, after no more than 20 story segments.
|
| I have some doubts the AI will be able to handle all of that
| and keep it interesting and coherent. This sort of storytelling
| requires some attention to detail that LLMs usually struggle
| with.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Nicely timed I'm making a CYOA game right now so very interested
| learn more.
| ardleon wrote:
| Hi, I've just 'finished' an app to make interactive text
| stories/games and I'm looking for people to test my app with
| real stories, if you're interested I could help you with your
| story so you can publish it online wherever you want.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I'd give it a look my email is in my profile
| ardleon wrote:
| ok, the only thing is that the application is in Spanish,
| at the time I did not contemplate that it was multilingual,
| among other things because I made it for me, if you are
| still interested I will write you and send you a link.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I don't quite understand what "floating modules" are. Is it
| something akin to sidequests in a CRPG or a "sandbox VN"?
|
| One interesting (and very complex) approach I've seen in VNs is
| multiple interleaved paths. Each path looks like a branch and
| bottleneck, but at certain points a decision taken on one path
| blocks or forces an outcome on another. You can linearize it into
| a single "branch and bottleneck" with extensive state tracking
| (this is how it's implemented, after all), but it's far easier to
| model it as multiple paths.
| numbsafari wrote:
| I loved the Lone Wolf and associated books as a kid. One of my
| favorite things about them was seeing glimpses of possible story
| paths as I flipped around the book. When I would get to the end
| knowing I had missed some enticing possibility in the story line,
| I would immediately flip back to the beginning and start over.
| eugenekolo wrote:
| This was actually a really cool analysis. Fun to see how these
| things can be broken down so cleanly into graphs.
| tantalor wrote:
| Here's the story map for The Stanley Parable:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fm...
|
| Looks like a "Time Cave"
| yapyap wrote:
| could chess be considered a choice-based game?
| rzzzt wrote:
| IIRC in one of the "Fighting Fantasy" books the hero is captured
| and can choose if they want to spend the rest of their lives in a
| standing-only or a sitting-only cage - the story ends badly
| either way. I was a bit angry reading it as I didn't have a "save
| state" earmarked with the index finger.
| hcs wrote:
| I picked up some TutorText books recently, a programmed
| instructional series from the late 50s to 60s. At the end of
| every section there's a multiple choice question, one answer
| leads to the next section, the other to an explanation of why
| that answer was wrong. Pretty pure Gauntlet, I don't think
| there's any follow up questions on a dead end path, though I
| haven't mapped them all out fully. I like the idea of tailoring
| explanations to specifically anticipated misconceptions.
|
| Indexed here: https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show
|
| And some exposition from Hackaday a few years ago:
| https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-tale-of-tutor-texts/
|
| It looks like I need to take a closer look, that last article
| says
|
| > often the wrong answer pages take you on a detour path to
| correct your thinking before rejoining the main line of the book.
|
| which is what I was hoping to find.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > To avoid obliterating the effect of past choices, branch-and-
| bottleneck structures almost always rely on heavy use of state-
| tracking (if a game doesn't do this, chances are you are dealing
| with a gauntlet).
|
| I do not see that branch-and-bottleneck relies on use of state-
| tracking any more than gauntlet.
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