The Best Way to Make Stories Interactive

Most interactive stories aren't very interactive. You get a page that says "If you open the door, turn to page 42. If you walk away, turn to page 17." It feels like a choice, but someone else already wrote both outcomes. Within a few tries you've seen the whole map, and the story is over.

If you want a story that responds to what you do, it helps to understand why so many attempts fall short.

Why most interactive stories feel on rails

The usual problem is that every branch has to be written ahead of time. That creates a few limits:

• The choices are finite. Someone had to write each path, so there are only a handful, and branches often loop back to the same few endings.
• You can only pick from the menu. If the options are "open the door" or "walk away" and you want to knock, shout, or set the forest on fire, you're out of luck.
• The story ends. Once you reach an ending, you go back to the start and try a different route someone already planned.

This isn't a criticism of authors. A story with a hundred meaningful branches is a huge amount of work, and a story with a thousand is nearly impossible to write by hand. Interactivity costs a lot when every outcome has to be authored in advance.

What makes a story actually interactive

A few things separate a story that reacts to you from one that only looks like it does.

Your decisions change what comes next. If every path funnels back to the same scene, the choice was decoration. A real choice leaves you in a different place than you would have been otherwise.

You can go off-script. The best interactive stories let you do something the author didn't list. Tabletop role-playing games work this way: a game master responds to whatever the players try. That freedom is much of why people love them.

There's no forced finish line. Stories that run until you decide to stop feel more like exploration than a puzzle with a solution.

You can look back. Part of the fun of branching stories is wondering about the road not taken. If you can return to a decision and try the other path, you can explore without feeling you've lost something.

The usual options, and their tradeoffs

There are a few familiar ways to build or experience interactive stories:

• Choose-your-own-adventure books are easy to pick up, but the branches are fixed and the story is short.
• Branching-narrative tools let you write your own interactive fiction, but you have to write every branch yourself, and the work grows quickly with each choice you add.
• Tabletop role-playing with a game master gives you real freedom, but it needs other people, a schedule, and someone willing to improvise the whole thing.

Each one is good at something. None of them gives you an open-ended story you can start alone, whenever you like, where you can do anything you can think of.

How What If? approaches it

What If? is an AI-powered interactive story app built around the idea that the reader should be in control. Instead of walking through branches someone wrote in advance, the story is written in real time as you make choices. As the app puts it, every decision shapes a unique story that no one else has read, because it's written just for you, by you.

Here's how it works:

1. Choose your world. You start from a premise, such as a mysterious door in the middle of a forest, being the last person on Earth, or being able to rewrite history.
2. Make your first move. Your opening decision sets the story in motion.
3. Watch it unfold. At every turning point, you get four possible paths.

Those four paths are suggestions, not a cage. If none of them appeals to you, you can write your own, so where the story goes is up to you. That addresses the "menu only" problem described above.

The story also never ends. There's no final page, so it's easy to slip down a rabbit hole of "what if" paths and keep following one more idea.

The premium features cover the other gaps we talked about:

• Infinite unique stories across any genre you can imagine.
• Save and continue your stories whenever you like.
• Backtrack to explore the road not taken.
• Download a PDF of your story at any time.

A paperback printing option is coming soon, but it isn't available yet.

So what's the best way?

It depends on what you want. If you want to write a polished, fully designed branching narrative for others to play, you'll need to plan and author it yourself. If you want to be the one making the choices, with the freedom to take a story somewhere unexpected, the key ingredients are choices that matter, room to go off-script, a story that doesn't stop, and the ability to look back.

What If? is built around those ingredients. Pick a starting point, make a move, and see where it goes.