Making a choice: The Melete Effect and establishing a poetics for choice-based narratives

In this dissertation, I establish a poetics for Choice-Based Narrative and situate this form as a foundational form of Interactive Narrative. A Choice-Based Narrative is a story that allows for choices to arise at designated junctures within a given experience. The story is predetermined in advance by the creative writer or author of the experience and can have many different outcomes. The spectator (viewer/audience/reader/user) then participates in the process of making a choice and the result of their choice impacts the direction of the narrative. These types of narrative exist in a diverse range of mediums across the creative and performing arts including interactive film, interactive theatre, hypertext, Interactive Fiction, video games and books. As a part of this creative practice research an original Choice-Based Narrative was written. This work, The Melete Effect, was used as a process to understand how Choice-Based Narratives are written and structured. Through a series of iterations (pre-defined writing periods) the development of the narrative shaped and pushed the direction of this practice-led research. This resulted in establishing a new body of literature and in providing a brief historical overview of the form. This research also involved several author, illustrator and editor interviews with those involved with the Choose Your Own Adventure series published by Bantam Books (1979 to 1998) which was a book series critical to the development of this form. It was through this research that several new Praxi (methodologies) for creating Choice-Based Narrative were discovered. These Praxi were designed to aid practitioners in further developing their own practice and to provide an insight into the creative writing process. They consist of the Story Choice Framework (an approach designed to assist creative writers in developing Choice-Based Narratives), the notion of Sans Medium (that narrative can exist without a medium container) and Tessellations (a new method for visual representation of Choice-Based Narratives). Finally this research established that there are four qualities that all Choice-Based Narratives share: they are episodic and epic, they use priming and misdirection, genre is used as a narrative shortcut and that they allow counterfactuals to influence characters and plot. These four qualities represent the poetics of Choice-Based Narrative and represent an original contribution to this field of research.