Although these kinds of books can be fun, I don''t think a game that just does this would be that fun. If you have played Wing Commander and seen the way they have the movie sequences with the option of what you do or say, I think that the idea would end up just being a multiple choice movie. You need a little more of gameplay without just clicking on 1, 2, or 3... That is just my opinion though, unless you were talking about the actions within the game choosing different story paths, in which case I am with you 100% (being that I am creating the Non-linear event web )

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - The future of RPGs Thanks to all the goblins in the GDCorner niche

So how would it be played? Would it be completely words on a screen with a multiple choice option, or would it be an animation with a multiple choice option, or would it be gameplay with the option placed at intervals (ie, you wander around and get to the door where you have the choice of A:Opening it, B:Knocking, C:Blowing it away with your las-pistol) or whatever..

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - The future of RPGs Thanks to all the goblins in the GDCorner niche

This idea reminds me of a starship adventure game that was done in HTML. It has an actual combat and task resolution system and hero promotion mechanism. Much (though not all, unfortunately) of the number crunching was handled server-side. For a fun little choose-your-own adventure type game, it was pretty fun.

I think something like this works best when it can clearly outcompete in terms of atmosphere, gameplay, and overall costs with other games. What I mean is that it would be ideal whenever you wanted to do a game that couldn''t realistically be done graphically (i.e., too expansive, too nuanced, or too detailed).

Given the HTML and Java explosion over the last many years, I wonder why we haven''t seen more of these?

--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Funny that you should mention HTML for use like this, but I wrote my story Web originally in HTML ready for the non-linear event web system... But as for why there aren''t more of these types of stories, for some reason they only use them for porno stories

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - The future of RPGs Thanks to all the goblins in the GDCorner niche

I think there are quite a few HTML versions out there. You just have to know where to look. I was looking into it a long time ago. Mixed with Flash it could be interesting.

I used Cookies, HTML and java-script to create an online quiz show (up to 1000 questions) using only one HTML file. It kept score and even showed randomly created right and wrong pages between questions. The same concept could be used to pull off the stories. It wouldn''t be hard to make a VB APP to make the creation of them easy.

You just need a good story and great graphics, audio and video.

Ben
http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com