Interactive & Branching Fiction

Interactive Fiction interests me because it has spent decades confronting a problem that AI may now reshape: every choice we offer the player multiplies the stories we have to write.

A linear narrative can dedicate all its resources to a single path.

A genuinely branching narrative requires creating scenes, dialogue, and consequences that a large share of users may never experience.

That complexity has historically constrained what interactive formats could achieve.

Generative models introduce a new possibility: that certain layers of the story can respond dynamically to the player without every variant having to be written in advance.

Yet that also introduces the opposite problem.

A story capable of generating infinite possibilities is not necessarily a better story.

If anything can happen, choices can lose their meaning.

That is why I suspect the most interesting future will not lie in replacing the author with an infinite narrative, but in combining a deliberately authored structure with generative layers capable of reacting to each user.

AI can solve part of the branching problem.

It does not solve the problem of deciding what deserves to be part of the story.