Systemic Stories

Found an old Choose Your Own Adventure in the bookstore underneath my office building the other day. It's from late in the series run, with a number well over 100, and is clearly after the writers had mastered the form, and well into when the writers were bored with the form.

Reading it again has reminded me why I always felt that the Choose Your Own Adventure books were pretty limited as entertainment - there is no logical system to determine whether or not you will succeed, or that will help you predict results. The Choose Your Own Adventure books are essentially large branched narratives - and the pleasure of them is exploring all of the nodes, and seeing the many possibilities, not figuring out how to reach a specific ending. This is clearly detectable in the very late entries in the series where the writers start to experiment with the format, even going so far as to include 'cheater's' endings which could only be found by leafing through the book - there was no way to reach those endings by navigating the book as expected.

I preferred the Lone Wolf books, and a series that escapes my memory at the moment that actually pitted two book equipped players against one another. Both of these series included mechanical systems whereby your player could use certain skills, items, or actions to influence the outcome of a choice. Players choosing options well suited to the task, that they had bonuses or advantages with would perform, on the whole, better. Very simple, and actually not the point I'm coming around to making, but something that remains very true for me.

When I am exploring a system as opposed to a place, I want to be able to poke the system and see what happens - I need access to levers or knobs, or inputs of some type, and then I desire to see how fiddling with different knobs will affect the outcomes of the system. In a broad sense, a Choose Your Own Adventure book can function this way, but in this case, every decision point is a different knob, and many knobs are totally non-pertinent to each specific outcome. The large number of knobs and difficult to parse interrelatability make that system much more difficult for me to explore, and therefore less interesting. Where a Choose Your Own Adventure book works well is as a way to explore a place or event - it gives you paths into the many different nooks and crannies of a story, without concern about probabilities, realism, etc - it makes it easy to tour those nodes or events, without providing any information about how they work.

So, I am wondering what it would look like to write a story about a system. To follow the logic above, a traditional piece of fiction gives a reader a guided tour of a place, time, or story - and that generally matches my personal expectation for a novel, and what I think I get out of a novel. So what interests me today is how I would write a piece of traditional fiction that did that for a system, instead of a story. Or perhaps, more interestingly, viewed its story as a system. Is a system even interesting if you, the reader, have no control over which levers and knobs are turned? Is that the same as asking why folks like on-rails storytelling video games? I think the two things could be different, but I am unsure on what that piece of fiction would look like. Off to do more thinking.

I call bullshit

I was going to update this once a week, so as I had a place to work out small ideas, and as a sort of healthy rigor thing, and then today has been epically shitty. So, no post today. But I will get something up tomorrow.