Stories That Can't Be Told Linearly

Comments · 1.7K

• ST

  @stevep9177 · 6 months ago

  Youtube used to have branching paths<br><br>RIP annotations

  5.7K

• CR

  @crystalyue5701 · 6 months ago (edited)

  Making an entire video just to gush about how good slay the princess is is always a valid choice.

  1.2K

• SO

  @someguy8375 · 6 months ago

  Once upon a time I found a book series that embraced non-linear storytelling in a way I found absolutely fascinating, placing me right in the middle of the story and forcing me to figure out the calamitous events that had precipitated the protagonists being scattered amongst a now post-apocalyptic wasteland, and presenting me with multiple angles, with each character&apos;s story only telling me half-truths about their role in the disaster that was the setting for the story.<br><br>The punchline is that I look for the next book in the series and discover I had accidentally just started reading at book 2.

  3.7K

• JA

  @jaketepsa6523 · 6 months ago

  This made me think about how multiple times I have been watching a show by sailing the seven seas and get served the wrong episode and before I&apos;ve realized it I think &quot;Wow what an interesting time jump, what are they doing with that and trying to say?&quot; only to see it&apos;s the wrong episode lol

  679

• FE

  @FenisonEn · 6 months ago

  When he started the video with &quot;I love non-linear narratives,&quot; I already knew he was going to make a joke later down the video for people that already watched it so they can laugh and treat it as a sort of &quot;inside joke&quot;.

  1.7K

• PO

  @Posby95 · 6 months ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8QkFFe4zMA&amp;t=1435">23:55</a> This reminds me of how, in the Ace Attorney games, there are also basically two stories: what happened in the crime, and how the player gets to learn about it through trials. Writing the former is easy, but writing the latter? Incredibly difficult. You have to make it so the player, through their pressing and presenting and through watching the lawyer and the prosecutor argue everchanging key points, advances the plot in a particular way that reveals parts of the mystery at the right times at the right speed, without redundance, logic jumps or wasting time. There is a whole guide on Trial Flow in Ace Attorney Online (a site for fans to make their own cases) about how to design trials in this compelling way and I still haven&apos;t gotten the hang of it.

  397

• GE

  @geokou7645 · 6 months ago

  on branching paths: i believe games have an inherent advantage with the exponential growth issue because they don&apos;t HAVE to have a different path for every minute action. they can just &quot;weigh&quot; your actions and lead to the ending that fits them the best

  720

• JA

  @jamesryan6533 · 6 months ago

  I find Majora&apos;s Mask to be an especially interesting example of a looping narrative. Because by nature of it being Zelda, a Medieval-Ish high fantasy, you don&apos;t realize what it really is at first, so as you play, you get that realization that it&apos;s a time loop despite the fact that the loop was established a whole area ago before you realized.

  38

• AU

  @autosneeze7425 · 6 months ago

  My problem with &quot;fake choices&quot; is that they take away the player&apos;s agency to shape the story , and if it&apos;s done badly enough, it could lead to the player feeling that there are no stakes and disengaging. For example, I&apos;ve played many visual novels that offer seemingly meaningful choices with no payoff later down the line, and it was even more apparent when I replayed them. Because of that I tend to dislike when stories give you a fake choice at a pivotal moment.

  1.1K

• ZE

  @zeusalternative1270 · 6 months ago

  I love how Uchikoshi explores non-linear narratives on his videogames. He uses branching timelines but some of them require information only available in another timeline, so as you make decisions and gather information you start to piece together the big picture and you can start from any timeline as is part of the mistery why do you know things that you never experienced on the timeline that you&apos;re in.

  55

• DI

  @DisKorruptd · 6 months ago

  There&apos;s one nonlinear narrative that you&apos;ve missed I think... <br>The unreliable narrative. Several people telling what is <b>roughly</b> the same story, but from a different perspective, sometimes seeing something somebody else didn&apos;t. That, or two people from effectively the same perspective that just remember events differently, a la Mandela Effects. This leaves the viewer/reader/player to, after the fact, be reliant entirely on word of mouth of those who <b>were</b> present in order to make judgements of the situation. This is not uncommon to encounter in a murder mystery type story.

  505

• SE

  @SentientMicrowave-dd7zq · 6 months ago

  In the visual novel &quot;Better Half&quot; the player, at some point, has to choose between two different dialogue options that are saying the same thing, just phrased a bit differently. This represents the character overthinking. It doesn&apos;t matter which option you choose. The character ends up saying something completely different. Showing that no matter how much you overthink, it can still come out wrong. <br><br>This really captures the experience of not having good social skills, so it resonated with me.<br><br>Having some real choices in your story that give the player a feeling of control allows an author to use fake choices to take that feeling of control away which can be a powerfull tool for exploring how a characters mind works.

  36