A Vision of CYOA Future

In this article, game writer Sande Chen reports on Gary Whitta's vision of what would be a compelling choose your own adventure experience.

At the GamesBeat Summit in April 2020, Gary Whitta, screenwriter of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, laid down his vision of the future of interaction fiction in an interview session called "Choose Your Own Adventure: The Evolution of Storytelling through the Next Generation." Unfazed by the uncanny valley, he wished games weren't limited by technology and were more lifelike.

Whitta has written for The Walking Dead game and said that game designers try to include a player decision every 26 seconds, but if it were really true-to-life, he mused, decision-making would be every second.

Speaking of role-playing games, he hoped that in the future, NPCs would include more adaptive AI so that their responses would sound more improvised and less scripted.

He marveled how it would be if a player could talk to any NPC and not just the ones with ! on top of their heads. A player could end up getting involved in numerous stories within one game world.

But he did concede one difference between reality and interaction fiction that would have to remain: A game story has to be logical out of fairness to the player.  In the real world, life is unfair and illogical, but in a game, players don't want to invest time to find out it made no difference at all.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.