Teatime with a Vampire

Played: 7/6/24
Playtime: 35m, 4 endings - 3 short, one very long and very good

This work gave me cause to ruminate over the nature of multi-ending IF (MEIF for short). It’s got 14 of them. I have far from a categorical knowledge of this class of IF, but have seen enough to start to wonder about them. “Endings” is kind of a loaded term anyway, right? “Endings” implies a finality, a closure, in the context of fiction, a dramatic culmination. These are things you build towards, planting thematic resonances, scattering then gathering plot threads, evolving relationships and character traits to some final overarching statement of satisfying surprise or inevitability.

They are such fragile, complicated things, it’s a wonder authors can do ONE of those in a given work. What hubris stirs these IF artists to presume 5, 10, 14? There’s a few approaches to multi-ending that have enough merit to be enumerated.

The first is to eschew linear narrative constructs altogether - make the multiple endings the POINT of the work. There is little narrative flow beyond the simplest …and then… , it is the ENDINGS that carry all that weight and the more you see, the better you understand the narrative mosaic. Or, more often, the gag. Because this approach challenges our relationship with traditional narrative, it is particularly suited to humor.

The second is to use interactivity to change the player’s relationship to the narrative, but not the fundamental plot beats themselves. The varied ‘endings’ then reflect how successfully the player aligned to a linear plot - I do not mean this as a judgement. In classic IF this is the ‘You have Died’ ending. You failed to advance along the plotline beyond point X. One might conclude that this is the LEAST interesting MEIF, in that the “ending” is clearly not a NARRATIVE one, and the player is intended to try again and again until the true ending is achieved. A more interesting approach is to allow the player character choices responding to the plot - are they complicit in horrors, a victim of bad choices, or exonerated by thematic alignment? Great dramatic effect can be wrung from player ‘plot failure.’ The challenge is to craft the choice architecture to manage the different endstates in a way that feels organic and satisfying.

The most difficult by FAR is the branching narrative, where player decisions are meant to influence the plot. Cold mathematics quickly steps in to nP the space beyond human capacity, so the art here is to judiciously choose a manageable number of threads, then architect choices in a way that feels more open than it is. THEN ensure that everyone of them justifies itself against every possible permutation of player choice that terminates there! One approach to this problem gave us ‘hidden score threshold’ IF, where choices add up to a scorecheck at key branching crossroads. More manual solutions also exist, most successfully in smaller, tighter works.

There is some real existential hand wringing to do over MEIF for the prospective author. The first question to answer is ‘How do I want the player to engage this work?’ Will they be playing through only once, experiencing a narrative tailored to their specific choices, the majority of the work going unseen? Are they to Ash Ketchum that sh*t and greedily gobble up all of it? Somewhere between? How do you signal to a player which of those is the desired mode? And how does your game respond when players do whatever wild thing they want to do anyway?

Classic IF authors instinctively understood that if you characterize an ending as “FAILURE” players will want to reengage to get the win. That’s kind of a gimme. More elaborate constructs still feel pretty elusive to me - I have seen some very successful comedy pieces, one memorable mosaic ending dramatic piece. Telltale came as close to branching narrative success as I can think of right now. I have seen some dramatic failures in all those types though. The critical thing to understand about MEIF is that for subsequent runs, the player’s eyes are glazing over parts they’ve seen before. The more text you put before an interesting choice point, the more like drudgery it will feel to the player, and the more the endings need to justify or compensate that.

All of which brings us back to … Teatime. I played through four times. The first three endings were kind of unsatisfying. Variations on ‘life is hard and couch is comfortable, but should probably get up.’ But not really dramatically satisfying (though buoyed by energetic, fun text). Also, not for nothing, longer to re-click through than their resolution justified.

My FOURTH run though, I kind of took the game’s broad hints of ‘this is probably the path you should engage’ and did. I was treated to some Videodrome/Alan Wake II reminiscent stuff that was flat excellent, including a graphic presentation change, some talk show format clowning that had interesting choices, impactful character moments, and took a fun, funny, kind of endearing path to a dramatically satisfying close. It was also 4-5 times LONGER than the already kinda long other branches. Meaning, if there are multiple endings buried in that branch I will never see them.

But y’know what? I don’t need to see anymore. The remaining 10(!) paths could be long or short. If short, my experience says maybe not as satisfying as repeated clicking will warrant. If long SOOO much repeated text to get through, and hard to imagine it improves on the one I already got. That one long path was worth the price of admission, and I’m glad I stuck it out.

Which only made me ask… Given the narrative tightness of the longest path, what was the POINT of all those other endings? This work gave me cause to ruminate over the nature of multi-ending IF (MEIF for short). It’s got 14…