I've been following the interactive fiction scene for almost 10 years now, including the recent resurgence of hyperlink/choice-based games, and I think there's a lot to be learned from some of the best people there (Jon Ingold of Inklewriter, Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Victor Gijsberg, Dan Fabulich, the Failbetter Games team).
I'm generally a fan of what these folks have done (though Sam Kabo Ashwell is a name I only recognize in passing, not from having played anything) -- I've been following the same people for a bit longer, I guess 13 years -- though I'm not sure I've played any choice-based game that I enjoyed more than the Lone Wolf series. Possibly that's because of nostalgia, but I think it's also that the nouveau CYOA scene uses a lot of small, accretive consequences rather than chunky ones, and the chunky ones seem to move me more.
That being said, I think there are a lot of reasons why you can't take design conventions from
either gamebooks
or modern choice-based games and import them directly into a cRPG like TTON. Gamebooks have much, much shorter playing time, so insta-death is relatively low consequence and, in fact, helps pad out the experience of winning by requiring multiple runs. As for modern choice-based games, they exist is isolation from other game elements that are integral to a typical cRPG (like character building, combat, commerce, party-building, leveling, etc.), and for that reason can do things that wouldn't work quite so well in a more robust game. Fallen London might be a little different, but after having played it for a month, I came to the conclusion that it's basically a lousy game wrapped in atmospheric text that succeeds by exploiting the same weaknesses in player psychology that other F2P games exploit. Since I consider the F2P "addictive, unfulfilling grind" business model a grotesque and perhaps even immoral one, I would be loath to import anything from FL for fear that it might carry its taint with it. (Which is to say: the aspects of FG that seem to "work" from a design standpoint might work only because they are part of an overall Skinner box architecture, and one might unwittingly start to commit himself to a Skinner box design by taking a design element that ultimate requires a Skinner box design to be effective. Gah, that is pretty incoherent, but I can't say it better.)
Also, I think it's telling (of something?) that I don't think that any IF has really reached the levels of old -- the new hyperlink stuff is easier to play and more digestible, but I don't think Emily Short has done anything as good as Metamorphoses/Galatea/City of Secrets/Savoir Faire, I don't think Plotkin has done anything as good as Spider & Web, I don't think any of the narrative-heavy ones are as good as Adam Cadre's Photopia, and Ingold may have peaked with All Roads. That may just be my nostalgia talking, though.
Good point. I didn't even realize it would be such a trigger to some (to whom I apologize). Yes, I meant it's not good design practice in general, and it's a particularly frequent occurrence in 80s gamebooks. But also, I did mean that choice-based game design has indeed improved since the 80s, and it's one of the fields where 2015 > 1985, definitely. I've been following the interactive fiction scene for almost 10 years now, including the recent resurgence of hyperlink/choice-based games, and I think there's a lot to be learned from some of the best people there (Jon Ingold of Inklewriter, Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Victor Gijsberg, Dan Fabulich, the Failbetter Games team).
