Dan Hemmens reviews some extremely simple games

The title of this article comes from an old quote from (I think) Sid Meier: “a game is a series of interesting choices.”

Perhaps nobody has embraced this maxim more literally than the folks at Choice of Games. They make games that are a sort of online choose-your-own-adventure, branching narrative thingy. It's not earth-shatteringly original – Japanese RPGs have arguably the same structure (plus fighting) but there's something rather compelling about something so simple. I also really like their name – I think it's the fact that so many big modern RPGS have the word CHOICES emblazoned on the back that it's amusing to see the concept applied to such simple little indie games.

So far there are three games on their site: Choice of the Dragon, Choice of Broadsides, and the fan-created Popcorn, Soda ... Murder.

The two games produced by CoG directly are pretty cool. The fan-game is ... well ... a bit poo.

Choice of the Dragon

Choice of Games' first outing is Choice of the Dragon. In this game you play a dragon, and you get to do dragon stuff. You hoard treasure, you capture princesses, and fight off enemies.

One of the cute things about this sort of game is that because it's not a big, mainstream release, it isn't constrained by a lot of the things that cause problems with conventional RPGs. It's just really cool to play a game where instead of starting off as a nobody who kills rats, you start off as an enormous freaking dragon who eats entire armies.

Choice of the Dragon is short and simple. You describe your dragon, pick your name, then proceed to conquer a kingdom, fight off rivals, seek out a mate and battle an evil wizard. It works chiefly because it makes you feel utterly awesome.

One of the key qualities I look for in a game is that nebulous creature called immersion. This is one of those tricky bits of terminology that doesn't really mean the same thing to everybody, but basically if I'm playing a game in which I'm supposed to be something, I want that game to make me feel like the thing I'm supposed to be. The nice thing about Choice of the Dragon is that it makes you feel like, well, a dragon.

The “choices” in the game are all relatively simple – conquer the kingdom by brute force or trickery, defeat your rivals by brute force or trickery, impress a mate with brute force or trickery, and fight an evil necromancer by brute force or trickery. There are a few ways you can actually fail the game, you can get killed by the gods if you destroy too many temples (I've done this one once) and you can lose the major fights if you don't play to your strengths, although since the most optimal path is also the most obvious (react to every situation the same way, thus boosting one of your stats well above the others, thereby allowing you to solve problems more effectively using that one stat) it's comparatively rare.

Indeed some of the most significant choices in the game are the ones that happen almost entirely in the player's head. Some of the most positive feedback the designers have had – as I understand it – came from the simple fact that players were permitted to pursue a same-sex relationship in the game. Choosing the sex of your imaginary dragon has precisely no effect on the game, male and female dragons don't even get different pronouns – you're always referred to as “you” after all – and no differentiation is made between the two at any stage (indeed you can also choose both or neither if you want, you're a dragon after all). Never the less, the fact that the game, in essence, allowed you to have a mechanically supported homosexual relationship made for a vastly better game for some people.

Conversely, some of the least interesting choices are the ones which are most mechanically significant. It is of tremendous mechanical importance whether your character gets their head cut off for blasphemy, but in all honesty I expected something a bit less ... final for setting my character up as a god.

Choice in games in general is an interesting paradox. The greater the consequences of a choice, the more constrained you are to choose the optimal solution. The more you invest in victory, the more your choices are limited by your desire to achieve that victory. The great strength of Choice of the Dragon is that most of the time all you are really choosing is precisely how you want to win. This isn't great if you're gaming for the challenge, but if that's what you're after you're probably not looking at multiple-choice-interactive-fiction.

Choice of Broadsides

The Choice of... crew's second outing is more ambitious than the first and not necessarily more successful. Choice of Broadsides puts you in the role of a pseudo-British Naval officer, at war with pseudo-france. You capture ships, encounter a dashing pseudo-French naval officer by the name of Villeneuve (who can either become your bitter enemy or your great friend - you can even shag him/her if you want), engage in sub-Austen courtship of manners, and generally buckle swashes.

There's a lot to like about Broadsides. It gives you the option to flip the gender roles of your pseudo-Napoleonic society, which neatly gives players the freedom to choose a female character without sacrificing the "feel" of a single sex environment. Once again, this highlights the remarkable importance of utterly cosmetic changes in this kind of game. The difference between playing a male or female character is nothing more than a pronoun shift, but having the sailors under your command referred to as a "body of women" rather than a "body of men" makes a remarkable difference, arguably moreso than any of the more complicated choices that you make throughout the rest of the game.

Unlike Choice of the Dragon, Choice of Broadsides gives you a whole lot of stats. Your dragon is described in terms of three opposed pairs of statistics (Brutality/Finesse, Cunning/Honour, and Disdain/Vigilance) while your Naval Officer has closer to a dozen (Sailing, Gunnery, Tact, Combat, Patronage, Likability, Intelligence, plus wealth, seniority, some kind of measurement of your personal agility which I've never really worked out, and so on).

The problem with this is that the way the individual stats interact is quite opaque, and it is by no means obvious how one goes about raising one's stats to the required levels, or what levels one needs to succeed in some tasks. I've played the game several times, and I've frequently failed tasks because I was insufficiently agile - now as far as I can tell the game doesn't track an "agility" stat, and I'm really not sure which of the other stats it comes off (I'd assumed combat, but I'm beginning to think it might be sailing, of all things).

There's a maxim in game design that if the player doesn't see it, it didn't happen. Playing a game is, in large part, about responding to feedback, and if you don't know why something went a particular way, you can't adjust your playstyle to account for it. With its increased complexity, Broadsides winds up containing a lot of choices and checks that are invisible, at least to the casual player. By comparison Dragon is extremely upfront every time your stats change, and is mostly upfront about what abilities you need to win at stuff. Broadsides gives you so much to keep track of that I, at least, mostly ignored the whole stat system.

Ironically, the increased number of options led - for me at least - to a decrease in replay value. It was easy, after the first playthrough of Dragon to say "okay, cool, I've been a Brutal, Honourable, Vigilant dragon, now I'm going to try being a Finessey, Cunning, Disdainful dragon". Because Broadsides is more technical and less archetypal, it's a lot harder to get the same level of enthusiasm. Perhaps I played it wrong, but I tended to finish the game with most of my stats hovering in the mid sixties, with no real feeling that my character on this playthrough was uniquely my own.

That's not to say that Choice of Broadsides isn't a fun game, you get your fair share of swashbuckling action, you get to fire broadsides and fight duels, and bring credit or disgrace to the Royal Navy, but I'd personally have preferred it if the game hadn't included quite as much raw data to process.

Popcorn, Soda ... Murder?

I'm in two minds about the last game on the list, the fan-created Popcorn, Soda ... Murder?. On the one hand, it's a fan-creation, and one shouldn't judge fan-created content by the same standards as content created by professionals. On the other hand, the people behind Choice of Games very much aren't professionals, they're doing this in their spare time, bringing in a little bit of extra cash from advertising revenue, and they do apparently pass seventy-five percent of the money they get from fan games on to the creators.

Given this, the one third-party game they've got highlights how difficult it can really be to make this format work. Dragon and Broadsides have their flaws, but they're both good examples of what they are – simple choice-based branching adventure games.

Popcorn, Soda ... Murder, by contrast, highlights everything that can go wrong with the format, combining everything that is bad about linear narratives, with everything that is bad about interactive media.

In Popcorn you play an off-duty detective who is present in a movie theatre when the projectionist is murdered. Specifically, he is murdered by somebody who sneaks out of the movie theatre and forces shards of glass down his throat.

First things first. Forcing shards of glass down somebody's throat is a flat-out stupid way of trying to murder them. It's certainly a stupid way to try to murder somebody in a movie theatre.

From there you have to investigate the crime scene. This means clicking on a series of multiple choice buttons, each of which loops back on itself, so that you can and must look at every single item and find every single clue, speak to every single NPC and generally read every single bit of text included in the game.

This immediately sacrifices the two big strengths of interactive media. It sacrifices choice, because the game requires you to read everything, with no branches or optional sections, and it sacrifices replayability, because although the game does have multiple endings, you have to play through the exact same content over again to get the “right” solution.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the multiple choice medium is just wrong for a mystery. Because you want all of the information, there is nothing to be gained by selecting the order in which you view it rather than getting it all at once in a logical sequence. Worse, the multiple choice format is completely nonsensical for making deductions, because by definition you're picking options from a list, and there's no way to know whether you're making a genuine deduction or just guessing. The designer tries to get around this limitation by making you explain your deductions but this is has exactly the same problem, you can't explain your reasoning about something by picking choices off a list.

All of these structural limitations are compounded by the fact that the mystery itself is badly written. Or maybe the bad writing of the mystery is compounded by the structural limitations. It's infuriating enough if you're reading a book or watching a film, and the lead detective makes a ludicrous leap of deduction and you want to go “no, that's completely stupid!”? Now imagine how much more irritating that would be in an interactive medium in which the game would not let you progress until you stumbled, by chance, on that stupid leap of deduction. Then imagine the game doing that about a dozen times.

The game is utterly linear right up until the end, it's theoretically possible to misidentify the killer, but you've effectively eliminated most people (none of them for good reasons, but the game has told your they're eliminated so they're eliminated) so you're likely to get the right guy first time (SPOILER SPOILER). When you do confront the killer however, he spins you this ludicrous story about the victim trying to frame him by committing suicide (an option that the game, through the character of “Benjamin Elyot” has already rejected when you get the option to bring it up during the deduction section). You then have one chance to find the “single flaw” in the killer's story. You have to choose this “single flaw” from a list of close to a dozen options, none of them explained, and none of them expressing the perfectly legitimate concern that “this story is patently bullshit.” Then, to add insult to injury, if you fail to find the single subtle flaw in this guy's nonsensical, badly written story, you have to start all over from the beginning and do all of the linear, non-optional “deduction” sections, which the second time around are effectively an exercise in clicking the buttons in the right order.

Fail.

ChoiceScript

The last thing to say about Choice of Games is that they provide the basic source for their games on their website. I have had a bit of a poke around this, and it's actually remarkably intuitive and easy to use. It's nowhere near as swish as Inform 7 but it's a good, strong, simple tool for designing multiple-choice based games. It's not perfect, and I'm sure experienced coders would far rather just program directly in Java, but for hobbyists like me it's good fun.

I'm working on a thing about vampires, because hell, vampires are awesome.