The first game with exclusionary paths

[Segnbora]

By which I mean: make one set of choices and these are your experiences, make different choices and you will have different experiences.

I'm struggling to think of one earlier than "The Camping Trip" by GoblinBoy. Obviously "School Dreams 3" had at least four thoroughly exclusionary paths. Was that the beginning of this particular technique in erotic gaming? If so, he invented it, didn't he?

 

[Catapo]

Since the genre of erotic games was created by Japan I would assume they "invented" every mechanic that we see nowadays even if those games never got released in the west.

 

[Segnbora]

Since the genre of erotic games was created by Japan I would assume they "invented" every mechanic that we see nowadays even if those games never got released in the west.

Fair point.

 

[Sphere42]

I am pretty sure those existed long before video games as a whole were invented. CYOA books with "do A: go to page #x, do B: go to page #y" for the branching structure. Text-based adventure games were full of the programming equivalent and I find it hard to believe no one ever tried packaging porn that way even if it flopped.

 

[Segnbora]

Also fair. I was really just thinking about adult games, but as Catapo said it's extremely likely that the Japanese got there long before GoblinBoy.

 

[scrumbles]

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is one of the oldest text games (1981), if not the first one actually. I don't know if it had alternative routes itself, but it was followed by many more games for adults, with multiple paths/endings and a two-word parser. I guess some of thrm are currently hosted on archive.org

 

[anne O'nymous]

I'm struggling to think of one earlier than "The Camping Trip" by GoblinBoy. Obviously "School Dreams 3" had at least four thoroughly exclusionary paths. Was that the beginning of this particular technique in erotic gaming?

I don't remember the names, but most of the erotic games I played in the early 90's already had this king of mechanism. So no, it's not the beginning in erotic gaming.

Also, the technique is far to be something that came with gaming. A 1930's play (I forgot its name, sorry), was depicting a trial and wrote in such way that part of the jury was chosen among the public. Therefore, every representation was kind of unique. While there isn't a infinity of possible ending, the play had probably at least three possible ones (guilty, not guilty, undetermined).
Globally speaking, we can assume that the moment literacy started to be available for public (even if it was a small part of it), some authors searched a way to write stories offering more than one ending. We know that, during late middle age, some fortunetelling techniques

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. While not being intended to tell a whole story, it still rely more or less on the same kind of mechanism than modern Choose Your Own Adventure.
Therefore, it's to be expected that some people, between Ancient Greece and the 1930's play, tried to used this kind of mechanisms for effective stories. They just weren't popular enough and never made it through history. And, while not strictly being "two or more ending stories", there's also all the cases of satirical political parodies with a two level reading, like LaFontaine fables by example.

This said, searching for references on the fortunetelling techniques, I found this manuscript with a

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. Apparently it was wrote by

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in 1891. So far, at my knowledge, it's the first example of multiple ending story, and so the beginning of this technique.

 

[Fliptoynk]

meh... the japanese might've just got the idea from dnd rpg

 

[FeropsisFenarue]

meh... the japanese might've just got the idea from dnd rpg

D&D doesn't exactly have exclusionary paths because the game can be as open or closed as the DM wants it. Even two DMs running the same pre-built Module might differ on how they interpret different scenarios in the game. One DM has a party that wants a kill fest might keep the exclusionary path, but another with a heavy roleplay slant, and very skilled/diplomatic/convincing characters might keep those paths open.

But thats not the point of the thread. The thread is about Visual Novels, and making them such that your choices have meaning and consequence, and its something that older Japanese VNs had back in the 90s and 2000s - but is in fact going away because its cheaper to build linear VNs and players have become lazier and no longer want to figure out the combinations of answers to get the unique routes. Its more the pity that machine translation was the best you could get for these games, because the stories were actually quite good.

Also funny is that Japanese VNs used to have variety of situations in a single game, incest, pure love, MILF, threesome, harem, ect. But now that they are more common, have more competition, they've almost all converted to very straight-forward single kink games. That is, almost any game that features incest is only incest, and there's only the one character. There used to be games where the mom/son incest route might be a secret or bonus scenario. Not anymore.

Western VNs on the other hand used to be stupid and straight-forward (Meet and Fuck, anyone?) but with people willing to pay more or put more time in, they've become more complex.

So in conclusion, Japanese VNs used to have exclusionary paths long before Western VNs were even a thing, but Japanese and Western VNs have swapped lately, with Western VNs offering more choice and variety per game, and Japanese VNs being largely vanilla fuck fests with little choice or story to them.

 

[woody554]

"early branching plot" is probably the genre you're looking for. probably the first type of "hyper-text novels", as they used to be called, that were ever made.

here's some 448 of modern ones, but they go back a 100 years. go nuts.

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