Yeah that used to be cool. Always a bummer to see creative stuff like that get broken. Like the last week or so a number of people have made branching stuff using multiple audio tracks, but I could see that getting broken later as well. (It’s also bad for accessibility but that’s a separate conversation)
I remember finding a Team Fortress 2-themed adventure game on RUclips, several years ago, where a lot of effort was put into it, with players portraying specific characters and enemies, and progressing the story required clicking on the annotations. Fun times.
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's story only telling me half-truths about their role in the disaster that was the setting for the story. The punchline is that I look for the next book in the series and discover I had accidentally just started reading at book 2.
if you like slay the princess, you should check out the other game the same studio is making called scarlet hollow! the decisions and narrative is even more insane than stp (which was made so they'd have the funding to make scarlet hollow), I have yet to see people who saw the exact same story in a single run
I was anticipating what "Fabula" and "Syuzhet" could Possibly mean. Like, I'm pretty sure I heard about "Fabula" before. But when you showed Cyrillic it hit me like a truck. It's just russian, and I'm a native speaker! What a callback to my life
on branching paths: i believe games have an inherent advantage with the exponential growth issue because they don't HAVE to have a different path for every minute action. they can just "weigh" your actions and lead to the ending that fits them the best
When he started the video with "I love non-linear narratives," 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 "inside joke".
@YevgeniyGritsan And I already knew that there will be someone in the replies bragging about catching someone bragging about catching the obvious teaser
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've realized it I think "Wow what an interesting time jump, what are they doing with that and trying to say?" only to see it's the wrong episode lol
Once I wanted to watch a show and mistakenly I started from a later season and was thinking: This must be in media res and it will be explained later. how dumb I felt later lol
Relatable, I once wanted to watch Twin Peaks, and started by the LAST episode (accidentally ofc) I only realized halfway through, until that point it made a bit of sense, then I realized it was not the first episode....
My half-sleep brain couldn't understand OP wasn't talking about a show called "by traveling the seven seas" and I was like "wait, the grammar doesn't make sense"
There's one nonlinear narrative that you've missed I think... The unreliable narrative. Several people telling what is *roughly* the same story, but from a different perspective, sometimes seeing something somebody else didn'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 *were* present in order to make judgements of the situation. This is not uncommon to encounter in a murder mystery type story.
What you are describing is what is often known as a Rashomon Effect or Rashomon Narrative. Named after the Kurosawa movie which does exactly that. It tells the story of a murdered samurai from many different perspectives, all of which contradict each other. It's even shown as one of the examples during the segment in meta-narrative when explaining what the Fabula and Syuzhet are. As such, it is probably classified under meta-narrative in this framework.
A weirdly neat example of this, simply because it is under a game that is otherwise linear, is Final Fantasy 7. Specifically, the Nibelheim Incident. Everybody is clear that, at some points Sephiroth visited Nibelheim to check the Mako Reactor there, snapped, burnt down Nibelheim, and Zack Fair went to battle him. However, because of all the people involved, what actually happened is a mystery. Sephiroth, as we later figured out, died at Cloud’s hands. Zack did actually fight against Sephiroth, but he abjectly failed. However, he did not die there, but much later. Cloud does not actually want to remember those events because his life was one long trauma train concluding in Zack’s death, causing him to merge what he remember about Zack, Sephiroth, and what he idolized about the general First Class SOLDIER and became an edgy, rude renegade ex-SOLDIER. For Tifa, it was also too long beyond that. And yet, they revisited the events twice more, once to clarify what actually happened to Cloud, and once to clarify what could have happened with Sephiroth. And out of all of those accounts, it is still Cloud’s word against the events of Crisis Core. And even if we take Cloud’s words as correct, all that clarifies is that Cloud was an outcast in Nibelheim, thus he returned as a grunt. But he did fight against Sephiroth and win, not in front of JENOVA - that was Zack, but over the Lifestream. Why Sephiroth snapped is still unclear, and this second account do not need to be made but of course, expanding the word of FFVII was key for Square Enix in the 2000s.
you remind me of my IB english teacher talking about chronicle of a death foretold by gabriel garcia marquez. A lot of things in your comment reminded me about events which took place in the book. While it is a pain to write an essay on. It is a brilliant story writing technique in my opinion. Like through the unreliable narrative you can create sympathy for morally ambiguous characters. For instance: Santiago Nasar (the main character of the book) is murdered by 2 brothers. But the caveat is that the whole town knew he was gonna get murdered before the murder actually happened. (this says a lot about the setting the book is written under) the sympathy comes from the "guilt" the entire town has for being responsible for the killing. The story is written with the narrator interviewing a bunch of people after the murder happens years later and they give their testimonies so its like the reader figures out whats going on as the narrator does in the non-linear fashion. But because of the time difference, they glorify him and gloss over certain aspects of santiago's character. However, santiago himself is a pretty shady dude like he basically sexually harassed a minor as far as I remember And nothing hapened to him. The brothers killed him because he took the virginity of their sister prior to marriage. I think that this also brings out the fact that it is the man's honor which needs defending not the woman's as nothing happened when he assaulted the minor but he was killed for taking the virginity of a woman before marriage and her husband's honor is the one which got fucked. Just my 2 cents on the topic I feel like I lost my point halfway through but yeah its pretty cool looking back on it. A pain to write a comparative essay on it though
clues I have so far: blue = straightforward path? green = alternative/looping/an aside to the main point of the video (1:09, 12:08) red = meta (27:18) black = flashbacks? (20:54) 0:00 meta commentary "i love nonlinear narratives" 0:02 laughing at the people who just came from 27:02 (the disobedient/alternative/looping path) And the joke that won't make sense is the colors changing maybe 0:06 Ok thats the title card lets talk about the thing we are here to talk about 5:41 Idk what this song is from but i'm guessing its important 5:53 see red is meta, and also this calls attention to the song as a clue 10:25 I think this is mostly straightforward meta commentary, the only "clueing" being the authors desire to structure a youtube video as a metanarrative 12:08 "Oh that was a clue"? (also notice background change at 12:17). Might be hinting at looking for arabic numbers elsewhere in the video. Also the way the green changes from skewed at 12:08 to straight at 12:15 feels significant but I don't know what it means 16:38 Clock and soundbite from Return of the Obra-Dinn 27:17 does the skew just indicate sarcasm? or like the jekyll voice of the author? Ok I think I have made enough progess that i would consider everything past this as a spoiler, but I am still confused Arabic numbers 4: 23:09 (blue) 6: 26:32 (red) 5: 39:13 (black) and jacob I hate you for that contrast 1: 43:18 (green) suzhet: 4651 fabula: 5416 both of these have comments on them so I'm obviously not the first one to find this but ??? A man has a dream about being rich with his cuttlefish friends, then wakes up and eats??
5:41 song is from fate stay night, in the same key as L, as they mention in the outro of the video. Going in the description and clicking 4 6 5 1 instead of just opening it as a tab actually nets you a different video. Looking at the URL, it's actually a sequence of videos, and we need the sequence. Currently suspecting that we need to put it back into the order it actually happened in the video, but I'm not getting all the references. Dunno what cuttlefish is, idk where money is, dream is probably prey, and uhh Tacos might be L? The references to dad tho keep throwing me off, might be a branching path. There's a dead end with Fate Stay Night, but dead ends matter. The dad and superhero game probably is another dead end but it also matters. Likely each of the videos does matter even though we are picking out some sequences from it. The way it works out is like the game he talked about, the starting route is the same, and then at the middle point it diverges, but the starting route changes in meaning and perspective.
My problem with "fake choices" is that they take away the player's agency to shape the story , and if it's done badly enough, it could lead to the player feeling that there are no stakes and disengaging. For example, I'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.
That's like... an issue of subverted expectations, no? Would you still have that issue with those fake choices if they were upfront about not mattering? Cutscenes also take away the players agency to shape the story, are those equally problematic? Curious bout others perspecs on this
@eriks1765 I also dislike fake choices. For me, it's not the loss of agency directly, it's that the underhanded-ness is effectively a form of lying to the player. If the player picks up on this at any point, it damages the player's trust the in game, throwing into the question how much agency they actually have. As autosneeze says, there's a strong risk of the player disengaging because they feel like their choices don't have any weight. An excellent example of this is the heavily memed "Yes, Yes, Sarcastic Yes, Maybe later" of Fallout 4's dialogue system. To answer your questions, I would rather no choice over a fake choice. While I'm not a massive fan of cutscenes, they have their place, and importantly they are upfront about what they are. Fake choices that wear that fakeness on their sleeve are pretty rare, but they do exist. You sometimes see them for explicitly cosmetic choices, or to add flavor. The only story beat one I recall is in Bioshock Infinite. To my eye, they only make sense for narratives aiming for a specific feel. Because they are not trying to trick the player, I don't have a problem with them.
I mean if you think about it, video games don’t actually have any stakes. All the video games that make you believe there are stakes are lying to you, and so the ones you’re calling bad because they reveal to you that there aren’t any stakes are the realest video games of all. Except I guess for gambling video games, they do have actual stakes but don’t worry about that
@TastySlowCooker well the narrative is the stakes. being able to experience a narrative shaped by your choices is the expected reward of making choices, why add dialogue choices otherwise? when they show you that your choices dont matter, they are breaking that expectation and doing more harm to the experience than if you never had that expectation.
An interesting anecdote to this is Cane's jawbone. The books pages have been scrambled completely, and the mustery is both how the murder happened, what the true story is, and what the true order of the pages is
23:55 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't gotten the hang of it.
There’s a book I once read years ago that I no longer own. I can’t remember the name or most things about it, only that it was the most complex branching path story I’d ever seen. It was a physical graphic novel with uncountable choices, and each choice was connected to I believe a small colored line that somehow led you to the next page. Some of the events could happen in any order, some were exclusive to certain paths. The book could not be read linearly and it was insanely complicated to look at. There was one giant logic puzzle hidden in the book which I could never solve, but if you found the right choice line by solving it presumably it would take you to a unique part of the narrative. The story itself had layers of complexity that you could discover depending on your choices, but you could also complete the story without delving into the deepest parts. There were multiple endings, and I think in one scene buried several choice lines deep a character could tell you that there was only one good ending. But no matter how hard I tried, or how deeply I looked, I could not find a happy ending for the life of me. If anyone has any recollection of this book or knows what it’s called, I’d love to know. It was truly wild. By the way, I did eventually find the good ending, and I remember the exact choices you had to make for it to this day. I won’t say how, but I will say that in all my life I have never encountered a narrative that looked more directly into my psyche. Just blew my mind. Edit: FOUND IT! It’s a children’s book called Meanwhile. Not sure if it’d hold up reading it as an adult but still really damn good.
13:00 ohmygod Steven Universe is looping... holy mackaroly... the ENTIRE backstory literally gets reframed once you learn the huge twist. and over many seasons of animated show!! several years!!! chapeau, Rebecca Sugar
I find homestuck an interesting example of this, as it is (imo) a meta-narrative about a meta-narrative that can only truly be analysed by examining not only the media itself, but practically everything that surrounds it. god I'd love to hear your thoughts on it
This video, and the one on how Minecraft "isn't a game", made me realize what exactly Tynan Sylvester, the creator of Rimworld, meant when he said the program "isn't a game" either. Yes, you control characters in a world, but there isn't necessarily any goal. You can work towards the Ship to the Stars quest or any of the DLC endings, which all (iirc) end in a state where you can't continue playing on that save (unless you had a previous save where you can instead choose not to go through with it), but you don't have to, and I've always considered those endings as a kind of "Enderdragon" to RImworld - something to work towards if you're the kind of person who really needs some kind of externally-sourced endgoal to strive towards to enjoy a game. Rimworld never necessarily has a true "loss" condition, either - if all of your pawns die, you can't affect the world in any way anymore, but you can still wait a random amount of time (potentially multiple in-game years) for a random "Wanderer joins" event and continue playing on the ruins of your base. Tying it back to the nonlinearity, you can have several different saves of the same map, which you could make into different "timelines" of the same starting condition, if you'd like.
I find Majora'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't realize what it really is at first, so as you play, you get that realization that it's a time loop despite the fact that the loop was established a whole area ago before you realized.
I work in the game industry and studied game design and storytelling in college, this video go much more in depth that anything I've learnt do far or seen at work, brilliant work
It took me until 32:08 to realize Petsco series is styled as a playthrough of a game, not some film of an animated character interacting with a game and many related things in its own world
Loved the video!! if you haven’t played it already, Omori is a really cool example of a looping narrative where everytime you replay and get a different ending you understand the story better
In the visual novel "Better Half" 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'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. This really captures the experience of not having good social skills, so it resonated with me. 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.
After watching this video, I have a concept for a game: you play as the game master, setting up story elements for your party of players to work through; the goal is to get them through successfully despite not knowing what path they will take.
35:59 there's a TTRPG called a Brindlewood Bay. It's about grandmas solving murdercases, the catch is that none of the mysteries have solutions. The game invates the players to create a solutions and then the final scene will flow from it.
I even went through the extremely annoying process to watch it legally. It literally isn’t streaming on any service on the planet and all the physical copies have been out of production for years. Had to track down a used Blu-ray from England and then go through a bunch of steps to get that to play on my American hardware
9:53 This example perfectly illustrates the main problem with fake choices, especially with the games that try to pass themselves off as a form of art. In literature, films, or stage plays, if the main character mentions their relationship with their father right at the beginning, it will influence the entire story that follows. Therefore, if you’re inclined to view games as serious art, these fake choices come across as cheap manipulation.
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're in.
I think the game 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim would make a fun addendum to this video - without trying to spoil too much, the story narrative actively keeps you guessing as to which of these narrative structures the game is going for. There's a combinatorial aspect in that you can choose to play any character's story in any order (without feeling like generic writing), but there are also many looping, branching, recursive, and multiple forms of meta narratives going on. Definitely recommend for those looking for an interesting narrative format.
On the point about the Beginner's Guide, and having a narrator interpreting the (first layer of) the art alongside you spurring you yourself to engage with the art on a level you otherwise wouldn't is quite interesting. It's actually somewhat similar to Petscop, in that sense; in both cases, the audience is subjected to another person's interpretation which initially gets the ball rolling, but the real kicker is when the interpreter tips their hand, showing that they are on some level unreliable, or interpreting the art "wrong." It's almost like that old joke about how the fastest way to get advice on the internet is to knowingly answer your own question incorrectly. When I, the actual audience for the art, suddenly realize that the narrator is unreliable, what's actually happened is that I've been "tricked" into developing my own interpretation. Actually, this makes me think about how even in more traditional stories, there is often a non-linear framing device, such as there being a narrator who witnessed said events and is retelling them, and if that narrator is given any level of character or point of view, suddenly the framing device becomes a story in itself, and thus, you've got a recursive story. Also, the concept of combinatorial narratives is super interesting to me. Seems like you kind of have to leverage the human mind's capacity to create meaning from disconnected points, a la Kuleshov effect. Obviously, like you mention, a very common application is how many video games utilize randomized events, but I can imagine if done right, it could be really cool if there was a larger meta-narrative that essentially "generated" combinations; as the audience uncovers more of the meta-narrative, they are prompted to go back and re-appraise the narrative in a different order, maybe a number of times. Sort of a hybrid application of looping.
I'm a bit disappointed House of Leaves didn't get a mention since it's one of the more mainstream non-linear stories, but this is a really great video on similar topics. I'll definitely check out Slay the Princess when I get the chance.
Borges, my favorite author of all time mentioned! Slay the Princess, my favorite game of all time mentioned! Hal Incandenza, one of my favorite protagonists of all time mentioned! Baccano!, one of my favorite anime of all time mentioned! I was just pointing at the screen saying "oh wow, that's the thing, that's the thing I like" every third line. Great video as always.
A different set of favorites, but a similar experience here: it’s not that often that I see at least two of my favorite pieces of media mentioned: in this case, Infinite Jest and Memento, and one of my favorite authors, Borges.
I will make a prediction: You are a person who doesn't like structure, who feels constrained and suffocated by destiny. Probably try Legacy of Kain next
@jesustyronechrist2330 I'm afraid I quite like structure, and if destiny is suffocating, I'll appreciate it all the same, a stance I think is underdiscussed in non-tragic fiction. I definitely will give Legacy of Kain a spin, though, thanks for the recommendation.
Lol, I was almost about to write a comment about some things relevant things Borges (especially relevant for instance is his short story about the (fictional) author Herbert Quain, and fun fact Space Battleship Yamato 2199 has a reference to him) talks about in his stories, until I saw read your comment and found out I hadn't quite watched to the end
35:25 Umineko. It is a not interactive visual novel with a ton of meta layers. Almost every scene has at least 3 (usually more) radically different (often contradictory) interpretations that give you important insight and that depends on which layer you are interpreting it from. It is true that the first layer is a conventional mystery, but thanks to all the layers on top, it doesn't resemble any mystery story on existence.
@FractalPhilosophyI am gonna say the legendary sentence: I know it is 150 hours long (a little more than the entire LOTR + Hobbit books) but the second read-through is even better. I am on my fifth one and still getting new things.
Was gonna mention Umineko. It is among the best things I have ever read. Recommend playing with the 07 or Umineko project mod for voice acting from the console release, but it is not necessary.
I opened this video, remembered I still hadn't played The Stanley Parable, spent three hours and a half getting through what seemed like an adequate amount of it and opened the video again
I pressed the 0 button. I appreciate you taking the extra mile to use the video presentation itself to deliver the ideas to the viewer not as just info, but also as an experience and memory. TY
Didi anyone else notice thta the "Arabic" (that are actually indian, the ones used in modern-day arabic) numerals are written in the corner? The guy explicitly called attention the weird naming and i only noticed it by the end.
One thing I really like in branching narratives that I don't see done nearly enough is choices that converge back on the path in the moment, but have traceable consequences later on
Braid, a videogame where a main gameplay mechanic is being able to turn back time in any moment of the game, has a level that plays a completely different story when you reach the end of the level and start to play it backwards all through to the beginning. I think that's a pretty neat combination of the combinatorial and loop structures.
One facinating version of looping and branching narratives is Rain world, each death branches us into a lower karma loop while gaining karma brings us into a higher karma loop and the entire goal of the game is living in a world after everyone escaped the looping narrative. Which is also in some sense a meta narrative of looping life. Its a story based on the pure concept of looping narratives of video games. Which is in a way i guess double meta
Nonlinearity and open-ended stories get such a grip on me, like the Daniel Mullins-, Hideo Kojima- and Remedy-stories riddled with rabbitholes and rhyming narratives.
I knew I was in good company. I have been interested in Non-Linear narratives for a while, so clicking on your video was a easy choice. Then I saw your games, anime, and other references. My brain said "This man is my people"... Then at 44:16 I saw the Parties are for Losers poster. More "My People" than I ever thought possible. Enjoy a subscribe you earned it.
Combinatorial narratives have (kind of) examples in literature. Many books were only published posthumously based on the writers unorgaized writings. Examples are Bulgakov's Master and Margarita and Kafka's The Trial. These are published in an order, but we don't actually know if that's how the writer intended them. In both of these there are some chapters where we know that this chapter must be before that chapter, but for a lot of chapters they can be inserted anywhere in the story or could be left out
11:59 I would LOVE hearing you talk about DARK. It is my favorite depiction of non-linear storytelling, of using Time™ as a creative tool and of a lot of other things, as it is my favorite piece of media
Yea Dark is incredible. Maybe one of the best written stories ever (for me it definitely is). It's not just the story itself that's great, it's also a masterclass in how to perfectly deliver the information to the viewer and build on a mystery in a natural way. What I love is how it pretty much never has a character state the answer to something directly or reiterate information we already know. The show always allows the viewer to figure things out and react alongside the characters. When previous points are brought up again they're always built on in some way. I also love how there are no reliable narrators, nor outright deceivers. None of the characters know the whole truth, nobody is entirely right or wrong. Everyone's view has an element of truth behind it but also usually leads them to take actions that make things worse/bring about the events there are trying to prevent
One of my favorite episodes of The Librarians is a nonlinear story. The episode is "and the Point of Salvation." Which if you are interested in watching I'd recommend doing and coming back before finishing my comment..... Ok so you are presented with a time loop and only one of the characters is aware of this loop. He goes through a few of them before realizing that certain events are occuring as if programed- like a zombie triggering at a certain point. Certain mechanics don't work as they should- like hacking something. It instead functions under video game logic. This leads the character to realize that this is a game and he starts to use game logic. The other bigger twist is that he's not just resetting, everyone resets when one of the others dies and he makes the connection that this is an escort mission. He's the player and HE has to escort his friends to safety. At this point if you watched you know that the character designated Player is the goof off. He's the guy everyone thinks is out for himself and only himself but watching this episode we learn that's a facade. He learns more and more about his friends and in the end....He sacrifices himself for them. He listens to the Guardian's story every single time. After they solve the issue, he tells them he doesn't remember any of it but it's implied he does. I also have a love-hate relationship with Homestuck's story which is told nonlinearly and several characters interact in a nonlinear manner (Karkat messages John in reverse while Kanaya jumps around....for some reason I don't remember). Most of my experience with nonlinear stories are either branching or loops. Loops tend to be common in TV. "Window of Opportunity" from SG1 is a good loop story. There's actually a few other time travel stories but a good non time travel one is Avatar where Teal'c gets trapped in what amounts to a video game that is learning from him and adapting. It starts in the same place and loops but the loops change each time. Theres's also 2001/2010 a pair of episodes told a bit out of order. With those two episodes we start in 2010 with a time skip into the future. The plot ends up being the characters needing to send a message back in time and the episode ends with that message being recieved in the past. The story is left alone for a while until we reach the episode 2001 and we are introduced to the civilization that were the antagonists in 2010. So WE know these people can't be trusted and we are forced to watch the story play out as the characters uncover what we already know.
35:59 this reminds me of the album NONE OF THIS IS REAL, where you shuffle the album it creates a random story without knowing what it will be beforehand
the combinatorial narratives section was great for me bc the first thing i thought of, oddly enough, was kendrick lamar's album "DAMN" and how despite being made of multiple individual tracks in a specific order, listening to it forwards in terms of track order tells a different story than listening to it in reverse track order, and this was done intentionally. and then that got me thinking of how listening to a full album on shuffle could lead to a unique storytelling experience, and how by queuing the songs in the specific order you want, you can kind of turn it into a game, like a hands-on game of creating your own special meaning out of an album experience. and then i was like "oh wait, playlist curation is a video game" and now i need to think for a while.
@nova-syzygy333 the second time I watched it was with my brothers and it was better than the first time bc I was answering their questions and answering it made me understand the plot better
4:52 Fuckin' knew it! I played the first episode once and could smell it. Hate when they do fake choices everywhere. Especially since I tend to have decision paralysis when I don't get enough info to make one. I really need to play FE:three houses. Whenever it's brought up it sounds very interesting, but I neither own the console nor like using them. Guess I need to find an emulator. I appreciate how you put titles in upper left when showing what you mean. You should take a look at Pathologic 2/3. It would fit into this video well.
Not sure if you've heard of it, but you might be interested in the Star Gauge. it's a sort of combinatorial classical Chinese poem that was written in the 4th-century. it is what came to mind when watching the combinatorial narrative section.
Tbh what I like about disspatch and other VN like fate stay night like you mentioned is that those multiple choices that collapse back into the same story sometimes add a "point" system that the game will keep track of until a real choice or ending hass to be decided, it gives weight to them even if it didn't appear like that at the start
I've had trouble putting into words what exactly I like about your videos, but I think I've found a perfect, roundabout way to describe them: you're like the friend I wish I've had my entire life and someone I could see myself spending hours chatting with.
Serial experiments lain to me is about how, when someone's online, their personality becomes an entity of its own separate from its host, and when this entity is perceived by other people it then exists in the real world by being in their mind. When I behave as if Lain (or god) was real, it is de-facto as if she actually were, she thus has a tangible effect on our real world. Very meta
I was honestly waiting for Mouthwashing to be mentioned, as it's one of my favorite horror games with a non-linear narrative Like you've got the flashbacks from before the crash mixing in with the events after the crash, and then they slowly combine into the current timeline of events after revealing how we got there It's so beautifully woven together
EXCELLENT use of this medium as a nonlinear narrative, despite it practically never being nonlinear. The bit at 26:50 made me grin from ear to ear, great payoff from the intro! I love Slay the Princess, recently replayed it, and loved hearing you gush about it :D
13 Sentinels is probably the best non-linear narrative I've played through. And I once read a sci-fi/fantasy book with time travel that followed three character's perspectives - one in a forward-running universe, one in a backward-running universe and one in a timeloop, swapping between them chapter by chapter. That was fun. I love non-linear narratives too.
I mean if you wanna get really technical. the player character isn’t really Chris so deltarune is on the “full agency” end. If you as the player are a character in the story the game creator has virtually no ability to flesh out that character. Undertale itself is kinda weird with this too. sure frisk is a self insert for the most part but they’re also explicitly not the player. Idk where undertale sits. Ig it’s technically also full agency. 4th wall breaks in general are an interesting conversation in this framing. In some respects they can pull parts of the real world into its story or the story can pull itself into the real world depending on your perspective ig. Doki Doki literature club illustrates this nicely.
WTFFFFFF This is LITERALLY exactly what I was thinking about like a week ago????????????? The types of nonlinear narratives and about how you need to do different approaches to compress the amount of possibilities or else it grows exponentially?? You read my mind..
The whole combinatorial thing reminds me of a book series I've been wanting to write. It's essentially just a collection of 6 or so books, where each outlines a different set of events, and can realistically be read in any order, depending on the reader's desires. The chronology of events can be pieced together while reading, and no matter where you start and end, you'll get a unique experience. The whole reason it's still at the "want to write" stage is because, as you can probably imagine, this idea is ridiculously intensive and complicated on my poor brain 😅
33:45 I was thinking about this the entire time, but I'm extra glad you referenced it because I could not for the life of me remember the name. Surprisingly, searching for 'that game about a fake game kinda' doesn't get many useful results.
I think Undertale is a great example of the game that has a recursive meta narrative that changes based on your interpretation as your interpretation of the "kind of game it is" and "kind of gamer you want to be", pieces the narrative for you.
I highly recommend Scarlet Hollow! It's by the same devs as Slay the Princess too and it is truly the most ambitious branching narrative I have seen ever. SH has been in development for around 5 years I believe and they just had the biggest episode to date just a few weeks ago that took... 4 years I think? They made STP while also writing SH too. The newest episode of SH, episode 5, has more text than the entirety of STP all compressed in about a 3 hour-ish ride.
scarlet hollow is probably the best "choose your own adventure" game ever. even when choices lead to the same outcome every little choices has rippling consequences. not to mention each character has 10 hidden relationship variables that determine how they interact with you. creating a graph for that game would be next to impossible lol
I genuinely think Scarlet Hollow may be the single best narrative game of all time. Every single person I've convinced to play it has enjoyed it, and many of them have gone on to get other people into it. The fandom is basically a pyramid scheme atp, people recruiting people who recruit people. It gets its hooks into you
slay the princess might be an example of a game that adapts based on your interpretation of it since your choices transforms the princess into what your choice expected her to be like
Awesome video, you are for sure deeper into this stuff than I am but I am a huge fan of the kind of unveiling of secrets and narrative layers some games do! Also fellow dev here. Do you have your games somewhere to check out? And lastly I want to recommend in the games of madness by one of the guys behind amnesia, he puts a lot of emphasis on simulation and simulacrum, though he calls it game space and narrative space
the german (?) book trilogy Pheromon has an interesting way of nonlinear storytelling, in which chapters alternate between present and 100 years in the future, up until both realities meet. it's certainly an experience
RUclips used to have branching paths
RIP annotations
Yeah that used to be cool. Always a bummer to see creative stuff like that get broken.
Like the last week or so a number of people have made branching stuff using multiple audio tracks, but I could see that getting broken later as well. (It’s also bad for accessibility but that’s a separate conversation)
Although it was not non-linear, one classic video which lost a huge amount of metadata from the removal of annotations, was _John Williams is the Man_
I remember finding a Team Fortress 2-themed adventure game on RUclips, several years ago, where a lot of effort was put into it, with players portraying specific characters and enemies, and progressing the story required clicking on the annotations. Fun times.
they still do 😜
it's called Shorts (for those with ADHD)
@FractalPhilosophy if only there was a universal platform that allowed the interlinking of various media...
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's story only telling me half-truths about their role in the disaster that was the setting for the story.
The punchline is that I look for the next book in the series and discover I had accidentally just started reading at book 2.
Then turns out, there never was book 1.
what's the name of the book?
i also want to know
this is what I felt when reading gene wolfe's book of the new sun series, as well as some of the culture series books
This is how it felt for me to accidentally skip from book 1 to book 3 in the silo series lmfao
Making an entire video just to gush about how good slay the princess is is always a valid choice.
if you like slay the princess, you should check out the other game the same studio is making called scarlet hollow! the decisions and narrative is even more insane than stp (which was made so they'd have the funding to make scarlet hollow), I have yet to see people who saw the exact same story in a single run
@meriewandererI’ve heard that that game pinholes you into the same scenarios a lot unlike slay the princess
I was anticipating what "Fabula" and "Syuzhet" could Possibly mean. Like, I'm pretty sure I heard about "Fabula" before. But when you showed Cyrillic it hit me like a truck. It's just russian, and I'm a native speaker! What a callback to my life
in your defense he really said it like суйжет which is obviously confusing
Он призвал всех русских:)
Fabuła is iirc story in polish
Haven't heard that word in a looking time
@Howdyasdo It's a latin word
Same, lol. I was like wtf is Syuzhet and how have I never heard that term? Me, a native Russian.
on branching paths: i believe games have an inherent advantage with the exponential growth issue because they don't HAVE to have a different path for every minute action. they can just "weigh" your actions and lead to the ending that fits them the best
Yep. This is literally Fallout's karma system
@jereciuciohaven't played fallout but yeah.
Hiiii niko :3
Bioshock 2
signalis does this
When he started the video with "I love non-linear narratives," 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 "inside joke".
And I already knew that there will be someone in the comment section bragging about catching the obvious teaser 😜
@YevgeniyGritsan And I already knew that there will be someone in the replies bragging about catching someone bragging about catching the obvious teaser
Unlike U!...
@ASE_Ridern123 And I already (dies)
@midvightmirage *Sighs* I knew this would happ- 💀
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've realized it I think "Wow what an interesting time jump, what are they doing with that and trying to say?" only to see it's the wrong episode lol
Once I wanted to watch a show and mistakenly I started from a later season and was thinking: This must be in media res and it will be explained later. how dumb I felt later lol
Can someone explain to me what OP is talking about? ("by sailing the seven seas"?)
@ewthmatth🏴☠️ piracy lol
Relatable, I once wanted to watch Twin Peaks, and started by the LAST episode (accidentally ofc)
I only realized halfway through, until that point it made a bit of sense, then I realized it was not the first episode....
My half-sleep brain couldn't understand OP wasn't talking about a show called "by traveling the seven seas" and I was like "wait, the grammar doesn't make sense"
There's one nonlinear narrative that you've missed I think...
The unreliable narrative. Several people telling what is *roughly* the same story, but from a different perspective, sometimes seeing something somebody else didn'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 *were* present in order to make judgements of the situation. This is not uncommon to encounter in a murder mystery type story.
I think that falls under the meta narrative or recursive meta narrative.
What you are describing is what is often known as a Rashomon Effect or Rashomon Narrative. Named after the Kurosawa movie which does exactly that. It tells the story of a murdered samurai from many different perspectives, all of which contradict each other.
It's even shown as one of the examples during the segment in meta-narrative when explaining what the Fabula and Syuzhet are. As such, it is probably classified under meta-narrative in this framework.
A weirdly neat example of this, simply because it is under a game that is otherwise linear, is Final Fantasy 7. Specifically, the Nibelheim Incident. Everybody is clear that, at some points Sephiroth visited Nibelheim to check the Mako Reactor there, snapped, burnt down Nibelheim, and Zack Fair went to battle him. However, because of all the people involved, what actually happened is a mystery. Sephiroth, as we later figured out, died at Cloud’s hands. Zack did actually fight against Sephiroth, but he abjectly failed. However, he did not die there, but much later. Cloud does not actually want to remember those events because his life was one long trauma train concluding in Zack’s death, causing him to merge what he remember about Zack, Sephiroth, and what he idolized about the general First Class SOLDIER and became an edgy, rude renegade ex-SOLDIER. For Tifa, it was also too long beyond that. And yet, they revisited the events twice more, once to clarify what actually happened to Cloud, and once to clarify what could have happened with Sephiroth. And out of all of those accounts, it is still Cloud’s word against the events of Crisis Core.
And even if we take Cloud’s words as correct, all that clarifies is that Cloud was an outcast in Nibelheim, thus he returned as a grunt. But he did fight against Sephiroth and win, not in front of JENOVA - that was Zack, but over the Lifestream. Why Sephiroth snapped is still unclear, and this second account do not need to be made but of course, expanding the word of FFVII was key for Square Enix in the 2000s.
This is utilised really well in jeff vandermeer's area x series imo
you remind me of my IB english teacher talking about chronicle of a death foretold by gabriel garcia marquez. A lot of things in your comment reminded me about events which took place in the book. While it is a pain to write an essay on. It is a brilliant story writing technique in my opinion. Like through the unreliable narrative you can create sympathy for morally ambiguous characters.
For instance: Santiago Nasar (the main character of the book) is murdered by 2 brothers. But the caveat is that the whole town knew he was gonna get murdered before the murder actually happened. (this says a lot about the setting the book is written under) the sympathy comes from the "guilt" the entire town has for being responsible for the killing. The story is written with the narrator interviewing a bunch of people after the murder happens years later and they give their testimonies so its like the reader figures out whats going on as the narrator does in the non-linear fashion. But because of the time difference, they glorify him and gloss over certain aspects of santiago's character. However, santiago himself is a pretty shady dude like he basically sexually harassed a minor as far as I remember
And nothing hapened to him. The brothers killed him because he took the virginity of their sister prior to marriage. I think that this also brings out the fact that it is the man's honor which needs defending not the woman's as nothing happened when he assaulted the minor but he was killed for taking the virginity of a woman before marriage and her husband's honor is the one which got fucked.
Just my 2 cents on the topic
I feel like I lost my point halfway through but yeah its pretty cool looking back on it. A pain to write a comparative essay on it though
clues I have so far:
blue = straightforward path?
green = alternative/looping/an aside to the main point of the video (1:09, 12:08)
red = meta (27:18)
black = flashbacks? (20:54)
0:00 meta commentary "i love nonlinear narratives"
0:02 laughing at the people who just came from 27:02 (the disobedient/alternative/looping path)
And the joke that won't make sense is the colors changing maybe
0:06 Ok thats the title card lets talk about the thing we are here to talk about
5:41 Idk what this song is from but i'm guessing its important
5:53 see red is meta, and also this calls attention to the song as a clue
10:25 I think this is mostly straightforward meta commentary, the only "clueing" being the authors desire to structure a youtube video as a metanarrative
12:08 "Oh that was a clue"? (also notice background change at 12:17). Might be hinting at looking for arabic numbers elsewhere in the video.
Also the way the green changes from skewed at 12:08 to straight at 12:15 feels significant but I don't know what it means
16:38 Clock and soundbite from Return of the Obra-Dinn
27:17 does the skew just indicate sarcasm? or like the jekyll voice of the author?
Ok I think I have made enough progess that i would consider everything past this as a spoiler, but I am still confused
Arabic numbers
4: 23:09 (blue)
6: 26:32 (red)
5: 39:13 (black) and jacob I hate you for that contrast
1: 43:18 (green)
suzhet: 4651
fabula: 5416
both of these have comments on them so I'm obviously not the first one to find this but ???
A man has a dream about being rich with his cuttlefish friends, then wakes up and eats??
Retracing what I do in the combinatoric section may be useful to you
💜
5:41 song is from fate stay night, in the same key as L, as they mention in the outro of the video.
Going in the description and clicking 4 6 5 1 instead of just opening it as a tab actually nets you a different video. Looking at the URL, it's actually a sequence of videos, and we need the sequence. Currently suspecting that we need to put it back into the order it actually happened in the video, but I'm not getting all the references. Dunno what cuttlefish is, idk where money is, dream is probably prey, and uhh Tacos might be L? The references to dad tho keep throwing me off, might be a branching path.
There's a dead end with Fate Stay Night, but dead ends matter. The dad and superhero game probably is another dead end but it also matters. Likely each of the videos does matter even though we are picking out some sequences from it. The way it works out is like the game he talked about, the starting route is the same, and then at the middle point it diverges, but the starting route changes in meaning and perspective.
Money: Moneyball, 17:26. It says Bottom of the 9th. That's 0, just like the non meta narrative key. It resets.
28:10 maybe Baldur's gate?
My problem with "fake choices" is that they take away the player's agency to shape the story , and if it's done badly enough, it could lead to the player feeling that there are no stakes and disengaging. For example, I'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.
That's like... an issue of subverted expectations, no? Would you still have that issue with those fake choices if they were upfront about not mattering? Cutscenes also take away the players agency to shape the story, are those equally problematic? Curious bout others perspecs on this
@eriks1765 I also dislike fake choices. For me, it's not the loss of agency directly, it's that the underhanded-ness is effectively a form of lying to the player. If the player picks up on this at any point, it damages the player's trust the in game, throwing into the question how much agency they actually have. As autosneeze says, there's a strong risk of the player disengaging because they feel like their choices don't have any weight. An excellent example of this is the heavily memed "Yes, Yes, Sarcastic Yes, Maybe later" of Fallout 4's dialogue system.
To answer your questions, I would rather no choice over a fake choice. While I'm not a massive fan of cutscenes, they have their place, and importantly they are upfront about what they are. Fake choices that wear that fakeness on their sleeve are pretty rare, but they do exist. You sometimes see them for explicitly cosmetic choices, or to add flavor. The only story beat one I recall is in Bioshock Infinite. To my eye, they only make sense for narratives aiming for a specific feel. Because they are not trying to trick the player, I don't have a problem with them.
I mean if you think about it, video games don’t actually have any stakes. All the video games that make you believe there are stakes are lying to you, and so the ones you’re calling bad because they reveal to you that there aren’t any stakes are the realest video games of all. Except I guess for gambling video games, they do have actual stakes but don’t worry about that
Also games where you hunt vampires have stakes but that’s not the point either
@TastySlowCooker well the narrative is the stakes.
being able to experience a narrative shaped by your choices is the expected reward of making choices, why add dialogue choices otherwise?
when they show you that your choices dont matter, they are breaking that expectation and doing more harm to the experience than if you never had that expectation.
An interesting anecdote to this is Cane's jawbone. The books pages have been scrambled completely, and the mustery is both how the murder happened, what the true story is, and what the true order of the pages is
23:55 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't gotten the hang of it.
I paused the video to like it three times only to realise i already did that
this might be the most creative video i've seen on youtube in forever..
26:34 this hits hard and I didn't even skip through the video :(
There’s a book I once read years ago that I no longer own. I can’t remember the name or most things about it, only that it was the most complex branching path story I’d ever seen. It was a physical graphic novel with uncountable choices, and each choice was connected to I believe a small colored line that somehow led you to the next page. Some of the events could happen in any order, some were exclusive to certain paths. The book could not be read linearly and it was insanely complicated to look at. There was one giant logic puzzle hidden in the book which I could never solve, but if you found the right choice line by solving it presumably it would take you to a unique part of the narrative. The story itself had layers of complexity that you could discover depending on your choices, but you could also complete the story without delving into the deepest parts. There were multiple endings, and I think in one scene buried several choice lines deep a character could tell you that there was only one good ending. But no matter how hard I tried, or how deeply I looked, I could not find a happy ending for the life of me.
If anyone has any recollection of this book or knows what it’s called, I’d love to know. It was truly wild.
By the way, I did eventually find the good ending, and I remember the exact choices you had to make for it to this day. I won’t say how, but I will say that in all my life I have never encountered a narrative that looked more directly into my psyche. Just blew my mind.
Edit: FOUND IT! It’s a children’s book called Meanwhile. Not sure if it’d hold up reading it as an adult but still really damn good.
That sounds so cool what
Oh that book, and wasn’t the first choice(?) about what type of ice cream to get
@_CadenBingo. God I was probably like eight when I read it but man that book stuck with me
This is such a cool find! Thanks for sharing about it!
YOU HAVE UNLOCKED ANCIENT MEMORIES FOR ME, I totally remember Meanwhile and yes it was such a banger
Фабула и сюжет!
Я чаще слушаю видео, чем смотрю, и долго не могла понять, что это за "сюжет"!
Umineko! Monogatari! Zero Escape!
Holy niche Zero Escape is close to my heart.
I thought that markipliers lost in space was a neat example of nonlinear media
20:35 GOD DAMN IT I LOST AGAIN
this is some scott mccloud levels of demonstrating what youre talking about at the same time. good stuff
I thought the linear story example at 0:11 was Jonah and the whale until I got to "meeting with goddess"
13:00 ohmygod Steven Universe is looping... holy mackaroly... the ENTIRE backstory literally gets reframed once you learn the huge twist. and over many seasons of animated show!! several years!!! chapeau, Rebecca Sugar
I find homestuck an interesting example of this, as it is (imo) a meta-narrative about a meta-narrative that can only truly be analysed by examining not only the media itself, but practically everything that surrounds it. god I'd love to hear your thoughts on it
This video, and the one on how Minecraft "isn't a game", made me realize what exactly Tynan Sylvester, the creator of Rimworld, meant when he said the program "isn't a game" either. Yes, you control characters in a world, but there isn't necessarily any goal. You can work towards the Ship to the Stars quest or any of the DLC endings, which all (iirc) end in a state where you can't continue playing on that save (unless you had a previous save where you can instead choose not to go through with it), but you don't have to, and I've always considered those endings as a kind of "Enderdragon" to RImworld - something to work towards if you're the kind of person who really needs some kind of externally-sourced endgoal to strive towards to enjoy a game. Rimworld never necessarily has a true "loss" condition, either - if all of your pawns die, you can't affect the world in any way anymore, but you can still wait a random amount of time (potentially multiple in-game years) for a random "Wanderer joins" event and continue playing on the ruins of your base. Tying it back to the nonlinearity, you can have several different saves of the same map, which you could make into different "timelines" of the same starting condition, if you'd like.
Tynan Sylvester has a game design book he wrote that’s pretty good as well
@FractalPhilosophy minute i saw rimworld i started celebrating.. so peak
Wow, Homestuck really prepped my understanding of narratives as a whole for more than I expected it to.
same, homestuck is so non linear it gets us used to it
Real, homestuck is THE non linear narritive
homestuck mentioned yaaa
Reading a bunch of SCP stories for years actually really helped me read through Homestuck recently. Felt like reading any other regular story
@WD_Gaster66SBURB as a game does feel like it would fit into SCP.
I find Majora'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't realize what it really is at first, so as you play, you get that realization that it's a time loop despite the fact that the loop was established a whole area ago before you realized.
23:23 Would be cooler if there wasn't an ad right there, which happens because RUclips usually puts ads when the screen changes color.
I work in the game industry and studied game design and storytelling in college, this video go much more in depth that anything I've learnt do far or seen at work, brilliant work
It took me until 32:08 to realize Petsco series is styled as a playthrough of a game, not some film of an animated character interacting with a game and many related things in its own world
Calling me out because i got confused why recursive is meta on the thumbnail is DIABOLICAL 😭
My dumahh finally getting the answer🥀
Loved the video!! if you haven’t played it already, Omori is a really cool example of a looping narrative where everytime you replay and get a different ending you understand the story better
In the visual novel "Better Half" 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'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.
This really captures the experience of not having good social skills, so it resonated with me.
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.
After watching this video, I have a concept for a game: you play as the game master, setting up story elements for your party of players to work through; the goal is to get them through successfully despite not knowing what path they will take.
35:59 there's a TTRPG called a Brindlewood Bay. It's about grandmas solving murdercases, the catch is that none of the mysteries have solutions. The game invates the players to create a solutions and then the final scene will flow from it.
22:49 This is now one of my favorite videos ever because I can prove at least one other person has seen Baccano! besides myself.
I even went through the extremely annoying process to watch it legally.
It literally isn’t streaming on any service on the planet and all the physical copies have been out of production for years. Had to track down a used Blu-ray from England and then go through a bunch of steps to get that to play on my American hardware
@FractalPhilosophy Non-piracy L
@FractalPhilosophy True ownership W
+Respect
9:53 This example perfectly illustrates the main problem with fake choices, especially with the games that try to pass themselves off as a form of art. In literature, films, or stage plays, if the main character mentions their relationship with their father right at the beginning, it will influence the entire story that follows. Therefore, if you’re inclined to view games as serious art, these fake choices come across as cheap manipulation.
17:40 I was not expecting a summoning salt reference in this video
29:30 as soon as I heard "Petscop" I was just like "no no no no, don't do this to me, not again, don't drag me back in"
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're in.
I think the game 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim would make a fun addendum to this video - without trying to spoil too much, the story narrative actively keeps you guessing as to which of these narrative structures the game is going for. There's a combinatorial aspect in that you can choose to play any character's story in any order (without feeling like generic writing), but there are also many looping, branching, recursive, and multiple forms of meta narratives going on. Definitely recommend for those looking for an interesting narrative format.
On the point about the Beginner's Guide, and having a narrator interpreting the (first layer of) the art alongside you spurring you yourself to engage with the art on a level you otherwise wouldn't is quite interesting. It's actually somewhat similar to Petscop, in that sense; in both cases, the audience is subjected to another person's interpretation which initially gets the ball rolling, but the real kicker is when the interpreter tips their hand, showing that they are on some level unreliable, or interpreting the art "wrong." It's almost like that old joke about how the fastest way to get advice on the internet is to knowingly answer your own question incorrectly. When I, the actual audience for the art, suddenly realize that the narrator is unreliable, what's actually happened is that I've been "tricked" into developing my own interpretation. Actually, this makes me think about how even in more traditional stories, there is often a non-linear framing device, such as there being a narrator who witnessed said events and is retelling them, and if that narrator is given any level of character or point of view, suddenly the framing device becomes a story in itself, and thus, you've got a recursive story.
Also, the concept of combinatorial narratives is super interesting to me. Seems like you kind of have to leverage the human mind's capacity to create meaning from disconnected points, a la Kuleshov effect. Obviously, like you mention, a very common application is how many video games utilize randomized events, but I can imagine if done right, it could be really cool if there was a larger meta-narrative that essentially "generated" combinations; as the audience uncovers more of the meta-narrative, they are prompted to go back and re-appraise the narrative in a different order, maybe a number of times. Sort of a hybrid application of looping.
I'm a bit disappointed House of Leaves didn't get a mention since it's one of the more mainstream non-linear stories, but this is a really great video on similar topics. I'll definitely check out Slay the Princess when I get the chance.
Borges, my favorite author of all time mentioned! Slay the Princess, my favorite game of all time mentioned! Hal Incandenza, one of my favorite protagonists of all time mentioned! Baccano!, one of my favorite anime of all time mentioned!
I was just pointing at the screen saying "oh wow, that's the thing, that's the thing I like" every third line. Great video as always.
A different set of favorites, but a similar experience here: it’s not that often that I see at least two of my favorite pieces of media mentioned: in this case, Infinite Jest and Memento, and one of my favorite authors, Borges.
I had this feeling in other video from him lol
I will make a prediction: You are a person who doesn't like structure, who feels constrained and suffocated by destiny.
Probably try Legacy of Kain next
@jesustyronechrist2330 I'm afraid I quite like structure, and if destiny is suffocating, I'll appreciate it all the same, a stance I think is underdiscussed in non-tragic fiction. I definitely will give Legacy of Kain a spin, though, thanks for the recommendation.
Lol, I was almost about to write a comment about some things relevant things Borges (especially relevant for instance is his short story about the (fictional) author Herbert Quain, and fun fact Space Battleship Yamato 2199 has a reference to him) talks about in his stories, until I saw read your comment and found out I hadn't quite watched to the end
This video was very cleverly made not something you see very often for a normal RUclips video essay
You sir know how to use narrative
35:25 Umineko. It is a not interactive visual novel with a ton of meta layers. Almost every scene has at least 3 (usually more) radically different (often contradictory) interpretations that give you important insight and that depends on which layer you are interpreting it from.
It is true that the first layer is a conventional mystery, but thanks to all the layers on top, it doesn't resemble any mystery story on existence.
Hmm I’ll have to check it out. Sounds interesting!
Sounds like HOL lol, will for sure have to check it out
@FractalPhilosophyI am gonna say the legendary sentence: I know it is 150 hours long (a little more than the entire LOTR + Hobbit books) but the second read-through is even better. I am on my fifth one and still getting new things.
Was gonna mention Umineko. It is among the best things I have ever read. Recommend playing with the 07 or Umineko project mod for voice acting from the console release, but it is not necessary.
@FractalPhilosophy I'm surprised you've never read it. It's genuinely life-changing.
I opened this video, remembered I still hadn't played The Stanley Parable, spent three hours and a half getting through what seemed like an adequate amount of it and opened the video again
30:10 Don't turn left at the crossroads
I pressed the 0 button.
I appreciate you taking the extra mile to use the video presentation itself to deliver the ideas to the viewer not as just info, but also as an experience and memory.
TY
Reasons why I love the Monogatari series:
Peakgatari mentioned
Didi anyone else notice thta the "Arabic" (that are actually indian, the ones used in modern-day arabic) numerals are written in the corner? The guy explicitly called attention the weird naming and i only noticed it by the end.
JORGE LUIS BORGES IS A LEGENDARY PULL, I did a school project in him 4 years ago and the Library of Babel is just so interesting
YAY NEW FRACTAL PHILOSOPHY VIDEO
homestuck was the 1st thing that popped into my head when i saw this video
me to
me too
I’m kinda surprised life is strange or Detroit: become human wasnt mentioned!
One thing I really like in branching narratives that I don't see done nearly enough is choices that converge back on the path in the moment, but have traceable consequences later on
Chronicle of a Death foretold has a really interesting way to show non-linearity!
Braid, a videogame where a main gameplay mechanic is being able to turn back time in any moment of the game, has a level that plays a completely different story when you reach the end of the level and start to play it backwards all through to the beginning. I think that's a pretty neat combination of the combinatorial and loop structures.
One facinating version of looping and branching narratives is Rain world, each death branches us into a lower karma loop while gaining karma brings us into a higher karma loop and the entire goal of the game is living in a world after everyone escaped the looping narrative. Which is also in some sense a meta narrative of looping life. Its a story based on the pure concept of looping narratives of video games. Which is in a way i guess double meta
Nonlinearity and open-ended stories get such a grip on me, like the Daniel Mullins-, Hideo Kojima- and Remedy-stories riddled with rabbitholes and rhyming narratives.
I knew I was in good company. I have been interested in Non-Linear narratives for a while, so clicking on your video was a easy choice.
Then I saw your games, anime, and other references. My brain said "This man is my people"...
Then at 44:16 I saw the Parties are for Losers poster. More "My People" than I ever thought possible.
Enjoy a subscribe you earned it.
Each time you release a video I know it’s going to be a good video
Combinatorial narratives have (kind of) examples in literature. Many books were only published posthumously based on the writers unorgaized writings. Examples are Bulgakov's Master and Margarita and Kafka's The Trial. These are published in an order, but we don't actually know if that's how the writer intended them. In both of these there are some chapters where we know that this chapter must be before that chapter, but for a lot of chapters they can be inserted anywhere in the story or could be left out
11:59 I would LOVE hearing you talk about DARK. It is my favorite depiction of non-linear storytelling, of using Time™ as a creative tool and of a lot of other things, as it is my favorite piece of media
Yea Dark is incredible. Maybe one of the best written stories ever (for me it definitely is). It's not just the story itself that's great, it's also a masterclass in how to perfectly deliver the information to the viewer and build on a mystery in a natural way.
What I love is how it pretty much never has a character state the answer to something directly or reiterate information we already know. The show always allows the viewer to figure things out and react alongside the characters. When previous points are brought up again they're always built on in some way. I also love how there are no reliable narrators, nor outright deceivers. None of the characters know the whole truth, nobody is entirely right or wrong. Everyone's view has an element of truth behind it but also usually leads them to take actions that make things worse/bring about the events there are trying to prevent
One of my favorite episodes of The Librarians is a nonlinear story. The episode is "and the Point of Salvation." Which if you are interested in watching I'd recommend doing and coming back before finishing my comment.....
Ok so you are presented with a time loop and only one of the characters is aware of this loop. He goes through a few of them before realizing that certain events are occuring as if programed- like a zombie triggering at a certain point. Certain mechanics don't work as they should- like hacking something. It instead functions under video game logic. This leads the character to realize that this is a game and he starts to use game logic. The other bigger twist is that he's not just resetting, everyone resets when one of the others dies and he makes the connection that this is an escort mission. He's the player and HE has to escort his friends to safety.
At this point if you watched you know that the character designated Player is the goof off. He's the guy everyone thinks is out for himself and only himself but watching this episode we learn that's a facade. He learns more and more about his friends and in the end....He sacrifices himself for them. He listens to the Guardian's story every single time. After they solve the issue, he tells them he doesn't remember any of it but it's implied he does.
I also have a love-hate relationship with Homestuck's story which is told nonlinearly and several characters interact in a nonlinear manner (Karkat messages John in reverse while Kanaya jumps around....for some reason I don't remember). Most of my experience with nonlinear stories are either branching or loops. Loops tend to be common in TV. "Window of Opportunity" from SG1 is a good loop story. There's actually a few other time travel stories but a good non time travel one is Avatar where Teal'c gets trapped in what amounts to a video game that is learning from him and adapting. It starts in the same place and loops but the loops change each time. Theres's also 2001/2010 a pair of episodes told a bit out of order.
With those two episodes we start in 2010 with a time skip into the future. The plot ends up being the characters needing to send a message back in time and the episode ends with that message being recieved in the past. The story is left alone for a while until we reach the episode 2001 and we are introduced to the civilization that were the antagonists in 2010. So WE know these people can't be trusted and we are forced to watch the story play out as the characters uncover what we already know.
35:59 this reminds me of the album NONE OF THIS IS REAL, where you shuffle the album it creates a random story without knowing what it will be beforehand
ebk
The visual novel Echo is another great example of non-linear storytelling
Arrival is one of my favorite examples of fabula vs. syuzhet, people who clicked on this video would probably be interested in that, I'd recommend
the combinatorial narratives section was great for me bc the first thing i thought of, oddly enough, was kendrick lamar's album "DAMN" and how despite being made of multiple individual tracks in a specific order, listening to it forwards in terms of track order tells a different story than listening to it in reverse track order, and this was done intentionally. and then that got me thinking of how listening to a full album on shuffle could lead to a unique storytelling experience, and how by queuing the songs in the specific order you want, you can kind of turn it into a game, like a hands-on game of creating your own special meaning out of an album experience. and then i was like "oh wait, playlist curation is a video game" and now i need to think for a while.
Looping narrative is why tenet is my favorite movie of all time
Tenet mentioned :o
My mother doesn’t understand why I like Tenet. Probably because I’m the only one in the family who gets it. :(
@nova-syzygy333 the second time I watched it was with my brothers and it was better than the first time bc I was answering their questions and answering it made me understand the plot better
How it feels when you have to skip half the video because the media he is describing looks so peak that you want to experience it yourself.
4:52 Fuckin' knew it! I played the first episode once and could smell it. Hate when they do fake choices everywhere. Especially since I tend to have decision paralysis when I don't get enough info to make one.
I really need to play FE:three houses. Whenever it's brought up it sounds very interesting, but I neither own the console nor like using them. Guess I need to find an emulator.
I appreciate how you put titles in upper left when showing what you mean.
You should take a look at Pathologic 2/3. It would fit into this video well.
i was waiting for the slay the princess mention :) i'm so glad i caught onto that foreshadowing
Not sure if you've heard of it, but you might be interested in the Star Gauge. it's a sort of combinatorial classical Chinese poem that was written in the 4th-century. it is what came to mind when watching the combinatorial narrative section.
Tbh what I like about disspatch and other VN like fate stay night like you mentioned is that those multiple choices that collapse back into the same story sometimes add a "point" system that the game will keep track of until a real choice or ending hass to be decided, it gives weight to them even if it didn't appear like that at the start
I've had trouble putting into words what exactly I like about your videos, but I think I've found a perfect, roundabout way to describe them: you're like the friend I wish I've had my entire life and someone I could see myself spending hours chatting with.
Thanks! This kind of comment means a lot
Serial experiments lain to me is about how, when someone's online, their personality becomes an entity of its own separate from its host, and when this entity is perceived by other people it then exists in the real world by being in their mind. When I behave as if Lain (or god) was real, it is de-facto as if she actually were, she thus has a tangible effect on our real world. Very meta
I was honestly waiting for Mouthwashing to be mentioned, as it's one of my favorite horror games with a non-linear narrative
Like you've got the flashbacks from before the crash mixing in with the events after the crash, and then they slowly combine into the current timeline of events after revealing how we got there
It's so beautifully woven together
EXCELLENT use of this medium as a nonlinear narrative, despite it practically never being nonlinear. The bit at 26:50 made me grin from ear to ear, great payoff from the intro! I love Slay the Princess, recently replayed it, and loved hearing you gush about it :D
13 Sentinels is probably the best non-linear narrative I've played through. And I once read a sci-fi/fantasy book with time travel that followed three character's perspectives - one in a forward-running universe, one in a backward-running universe and one in a timeloop, swapping between them chapter by chapter. That was fun.
I love non-linear narratives too.
6:33 there's a third option called "being deltarune"
EDIT: to be clear I mean the red heart thing on one end and Kris on the other
Gay furries narrative structure?
I mean if you wanna get really technical.
the player character isn’t really Chris so deltarune is on the “full agency” end. If you as the player are a character in the story the game creator has virtually no ability to flesh out that character.
Undertale itself is kinda weird with this too. sure frisk is a self insert for the most part but they’re also explicitly not the player. Idk where undertale sits. Ig it’s technically also full agency.
4th wall breaks in general are an interesting conversation in this framing. In some respects they can pull parts of the real world into its story or the story can pull itself into the real world depending on your perspective ig. Doki Doki literature club illustrates this nicely.
'the red heart thing on one end and Kris on the other' rhythm doctor 🤯🤯
@jesustyronechrist2330 I love gay furries narrative structures
Ahh I love protagonists that arent the main character you're playing as
Susie
the way as soon as I clicked the video I was already visualizing the the Stanley parable doors room so when it showed up I burst out laughing
I was expecting a homestuck shoe to drop and got blindsided
3:21 this makes me appreciate modern games even more now a days because of all the cut scenes that have to be made based on player choices
WTFFFFFF This is LITERALLY exactly what I was thinking about like a week ago????????????? The types of nonlinear narratives and about how you need to do different approaches to compress the amount of possibilities or else it grows exponentially?? You read my mind..
Billions of people, some are going to have similar thoughts, especially when u share the same interest
The whole combinatorial thing reminds me of a book series I've been wanting to write. It's essentially just a collection of 6 or so books, where each outlines a different set of events, and can realistically be read in any order, depending on the reader's desires. The chronology of events can be pieced together while reading, and no matter where you start and end, you'll get a unique experience.
The whole reason it's still at the "want to write" stage is because, as you can probably imagine, this idea is ridiculously intensive and complicated on my poor brain 😅
33:45 I was thinking about this the entire time, but I'm extra glad you referenced it because I could not for the life of me remember the name. Surprisingly, searching for 'that game about a fake game kinda' doesn't get many useful results.
24:28 her story is such a banger
This video was more entertaining than i thought it would be. I loved it. it was amazing
Love also the movies Memento, Lola Rentt, and Doctor Who episodes that offer such non-chronologic storytelling
I think Undertale is a great example of the game that has a recursive meta narrative that changes based on your interpretation as your interpretation of the "kind of game it is" and "kind of gamer you want to be", pieces the narrative for you.
26:12 - You got me good there
I highly recommend Scarlet Hollow! It's by the same devs as Slay the Princess too and it is truly the most ambitious branching narrative I have seen ever. SH has been in development for around 5 years I believe and they just had the biggest episode to date just a few weeks ago that took... 4 years I think? They made STP while also writing SH too. The newest episode of SH, episode 5, has more text than the entirety of STP all compressed in about a 3 hour-ish ride.
Seconded! Scarlet Hollow is so good.
scarlet hollow is probably the best "choose your own adventure" game ever. even when choices lead to the same outcome every little choices has rippling consequences. not to mention each character has 10 hidden relationship variables that determine how they interact with you. creating a graph for that game would be next to impossible lol
I genuinely think Scarlet Hollow may be the single best narrative game of all time. Every single person I've convinced to play it has enjoyed it, and many of them have gone on to get other people into it. The fandom is basically a pyramid scheme atp, people recruiting people who recruit people. It gets its hooks into you
slay the princess might be an example of a game that adapts based on your interpretation of it since your choices transforms the princess into what your choice expected her to be like
Awesome video, you are for sure deeper into this stuff than I am but I am a huge fan of the kind of unveiling of secrets and narrative layers some games do!
Also fellow dev here. Do you have your games somewhere to check out?
And lastly I want to recommend in the games of madness by one of the guys behind amnesia, he puts a lot of emphasis on simulation and simulacrum, though he calls it game space and narrative space
@26:14 "ascended beyond such labels" 😂 stealing that, ty
that's one fractal philosophy
I SCREAMED 0:50
edit: ok so im a few minutes in and this is turning into a fandom bingo lmao
thanks for this because it will be a big resource for me trying to write and DMing some games
the german (?) book trilogy Pheromon has an interesting way of nonlinear storytelling, in which chapters alternate between present and 100 years in the future, up until both realities meet. it's certainly an experience