Interactive Fiction With Custom Choices

You reach the fork in the story. The options are: open the door, or walk away. You wanted to knock first, or shout into the dark, or check whether the door is even attached to a wall. The story doesn't allow it. You pick the less bad of two options and move on.

That is the basic limit of most interactive fiction. The choices are real, but they belong to the author. You are steering inside a map someone else drew.

This article looks at why that happens, what interactive fiction with custom choices looks like, and where a tool like What? If? fits.

Why pre-written choices run out

Classic choose-your-own-adventure books and most branching story games work the same way. An author writes a set of scenes and connects them with a set of choices. Every path you can take was written ahead of time.

This is a practical constraint, not a flaw. Every branch has to be written, tested, and connected to the rest. Each additional choice multiplies the work, so authors keep the options few and make many paths converge back toward the same few endings.

The result is that the story feels open until you try to do something the author didn't plan for. Then you notice the walls.

What "custom choices" actually means

The idea of typing your own action into a story isn't new. Text adventures have let players type commands for decades. But traditional parser games ask you to guess the right phrasing, and the game often replies that it doesn't understand.

When people search for interactive fiction with custom choices, they usually want something simpler to describe:

• Options to pick from when they don't have a strong idea.
• The ability to ignore those options and do something else.
• A story that responds to what they did, rather than steering them back to a script.

That last point is the hard one. A custom choice only matters if the story changes around it.

The blank page problem

Fully freeform storytelling has its own difficulty. If every turn begins with an empty text box, many readers stall. Coming up with a good next move, every time, is work. Sometimes you want to be surprised, and sometimes you want to steer.

A good setup for custom-choice fiction offers both: suggestions when you want them, and an open door when you don't.

How What If? handles it

What If? is an AI-powered interactive story app built around this idea. Every choice writes a new story, and the story is generated for you as you play, in real time. No one else has read the version you end up with, because it didn't exist until you made your choices.

The flow is short:

1. Choose your world. You start from a premise. Examples include: what if you stumbled upon a mysterious door in the middle of a forest, what if you were the last person on Earth, or what if you could rewrite history.
2. Make your first move. You decide how your character responds, and the story begins from that.
3. Watch your story unfold. At every turning point, you get four possible paths.

The four suggestions are the starting point, not the limit. If none of them match what you want to do, you can write your own. This is the custom-choice part: you aren't stuck with the options on screen, so where the story goes is up to you.

There is also no final page. The story never ends, so it is easy to fall down a rabbit hole of "what if" paths, one decision leading to the next.

What premium adds

The premium tier adds features that suit longer, more personal stories:

• Infinite unique stories in any genre you can imagine.
• Save and continue your stories anytime, so you can leave one and return later.
• Backtrack to explore the road not taken. If you wonder what would have happened had you chosen differently, you can go back and find out.
• PDF download, so you can keep a copy of your story at any point.

The backtracking feature matters for this kind of fiction. In a printed branching book, you cheat by keeping a finger in the earlier page. Here, the earlier decision is a place you can return to and take another direction.

One more thing is planned but not available yet: printing your story as a paperback book. For now, the PDF download is the way to keep your story.

Who this is for

If you like the feeling of a branching story but keep hitting the edges of the author's plan, this format is designed for you. It also suits people who like to start from a single strange premise and see where it goes, without having to write every line themselves.

It's less suited to anyone who wants a single, fixed, authored narrative with a deliberate ending. What If? is the opposite: open-ended, shaped by whoever is reading.

Closing

Interactive fiction has always promised that your choices matter. The limit has been that you could only choose what someone else thought to offer. Letting you write your own option, and having the story respond to it, removes that limit.

If you want to see how far one decision can take a story, pick a premise in What If? and make your first move.