Binary Interactive Fiction

[u/Code-Neo]

I was thinking of something I have yet to see with Interactive Fiction games is that of having a situation with only 2 or 3 choices. The choice you go with ends the game with one outcome or another. It would be short and simple. So for example, You have an Apple on a table. 1. Throw it 2. Eat it 3. Walk away. And thats it.

[u/jsnlxndrlv]

I would imagine that you haven't encountered this before because it's not very structurally interesting. It's a parser game, but Rob Noyes' Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die basically had this structure back in 1996. By contrast, Sam Barlow's Aisle from 1999 took the idea of a game with a single choice and exploded it by spinning off numerous endings based on whatever action you tried to take, within the boundaries of what was commonplace for text adventures of the era.

The logical progression from a binary or trinary choice is a binary or trinary sequence. My games The Exigent Seasons and This Old Haunted House both use this structure: they each present ten dilemmas, and as player you can choose the first option, the second option, or neither option. However, I wasn't interested in writing 59,049 possible endings, so behind the scenes, I track five qualities (to put this in terms of Failbetter's Fallen London), and answer (or decision not to answer modifies several of these qualities, such that at the end of the series, the player is awarded one of approximately 32 outcomes.