#this was so fucking frustrating to do the tumblr post editor fucking sucks ass and kept breaking with every picture i added

[northern-passage]

just found one of my favorite pieces of writing advice when it comes to interactive fiction, i think if you've read literally any of my work, it will be pretty obvious how much i use this in my own writing. i actually couldn't remember where i read this for the first time and on a whim i went through my twitter likes and found it in a thread. i'm going to transcribe it for ease of reading, but this is all coming from Alexander Freed (@/AlexanderMFreed on twitter)

he has a website here with other compiled writing advice about branching narratives and game design, though he never posted this there and hasn't really updated recently (but still check it out. there's some specific entries about writing romance, branching and linear & other game writing advice)

original twitter thread here

It's Tuesday night and I feel like teaching some of what I've learned in 15 years of branching narrative video game writing. Let's go in-depth about one incredibly specific subject: neutral / fallthrough / catchall response options!

Player ownership of the protagonist in choice-based branching narrative games (a la BioWare, Telltale, mobile narrative games, etc) is a vital aspect of the form.

The ability for the audience to shape a Player Character, to develop that character's inner life in their own mind, is unmatched in any other medium.

The Player determines the character's actions and THE MOTIVATIONS for those actions. The character's psychology can literally be as complex as the Player can imagine. However, this works best when there's enough space for the Player to develop those motivations. No game can offer enough options to support every interpretation imaginable; much of the character has to live in the Player's head, without necessarily appearing on the screen.

That's complicated. We're going to unpack it.

Generally, when presenting choices to a Player, we want those choices to be as interesting and compelling as possible.

But compelling, dramatic choices tend to be revealing of character. And no game can support hundreds of options at every choice point for every possible character motivation a Player might imagine.

This sort of narrative CANNOT maintain its integrity if the Player is forced to constantly "rewrite" their characterization of the Player Character on the fly. You want your Player to feel like they have more than enough viable options at any given moment.

At the simplest level of writing, this is where "fallthrough" responses come in.

In the examples above, each moment contains a response which furthers the story but doesn't imply a huge emotional choice for the Player. The Player is asked to choose A or B, agree or disagree, but can sidestep the issue altogether if desired.

These "neutral" responses are vital if both A and B don't appeal to the Player... or if, perhaps, the Player likes A but not the WAY A is being expressed. Milquetoast option C works for anyone; thus, the Player is never forced to break character because of a lack of options.

Questions work well for this sort of neutral option. Tacit agreement and dead silence also serve, in certain sorts of stories--as a Player, I know what's going on in my silent character's head and the game won't contradict it.

The important thing is that I'm never forced to take a path that's outright WRONG for my character. Even if other characters misinterpret the Player Character's motivation, my character's inner life remains internally consistent.

"Neutral" responses aren't the only ways to go, though. Some responses are appropriate for any character because they're tied to the base character concept.

Here, for example (from @/seankmckeever's X-Files), the Player is a marine on a mission. The Player can respond abrasively to her partner's fear or look into the issue (out of compassion or genuine belief), but our fallthrough is actually the TOP response.

There's no version of our marine who would absolutely break character by picking "Stay calm and on mission." It's not blandly neutral; rather, it reinforces aspects of the character we can be sure of and gives the Player an option if nothing else works.

Different sorts of narratives will use different sorts of fallthroughs. A comedy might treat the option to say something funny as a fallthrough, of sorts--it's entertaining and will never violate the characterization the Player has created.

In a quest-driven RPG, a fallthrough response can often boil down to "How do I move to the next step of this quest?"

That said, the strongest moments in a narrative will often have no "fallthrough" response at all. They'll work by creating multiple responses that, by overlapping, cover all reasonable Player Character actions while still leaving room for the Player to ascribe motivation.

[rpschtuff]

Look I understand getting with the times and needing to adapt to change but the new editor and Trim Reblog settings are not that great

The two issues mentioned in the post, specifically the second is a huge fucking inconvenience. After a few posts, Trim Reblogs starts seeing you and your partners response as ONE POST. ONE. AND THEN YOU HAVE TO CUT THEM BOTH OFF. that is not helpful at all and make rping more of a pain on the ass than something that people can enjoy.

This isn't directed towards you, your post was very helpful in explaining everything. I'm just saying that's it's over all shit

Yeah, I get that it's frustrating. It sucks when familiar things have to change, and when the change isn't fluid or seamless. I'm reluctant to switch to the new system for that exact reason -- but like I said, the only reason that it's a problem is because so many people are still using Editable Reblogs. If everyone was using Trim Reblogs, there wouldn't be an issue at all. Avoiding the problem on your end is what creates the problem on someone else's end. So the more people switch over, the less irritating all of this will be.

Personally, I plan to toggle between the legacy and beta editors based on what my partners are doing, which I really do recommend as a middle ground. It lets you adjust to the new system more gradually, allows easy cutting of posts no matter the situation, and is mindful of those who are stuck with the beta editor.

I'm starting to wish Tumblr would just commit to the new editor already and give it to everyone, instead of this weird middle ground we currently have. This piecemeal approach is causing so much confusion and headache.

[thewanderingace]

Okay I need to vent about something for a second and I'm putting it under a read more so you can all just ignore it. Really. Ignore this. It's about the updates to the site that Tumblr has announced via the changes page like this and specifically about gifmaking on this site.

So first is this that the changes blog shared here

I got so excited when I saw this on the changes page! Finally I can rearrange my gifs when uploaded using the fucking beta editor which I hate so much! I much prefer using the original editor. It's faaaar superior. Better photo/gif arrangement and it doesn't break up everything into separate blocks making it impossible to select a large portion of text to copy or delete. The beta post editor makes it so you have to it one block at a time and I fucking despise it. But if I don't use the beta editor to post my sets then I can't use the edit button on mobile and sometime (a lot of times) I need to do that.

But I digress. Anyways, I checked it out and yes I can now upload all my gifs at once and rearrange them but my god it is the most un-userfriendly version ever! It still sucks so much! When you select a gif to move it stretches out the set and then you can't even tell where it is you're putting the gif you are attempting to move. And it doesn't always work properly and sometimes it just fucks everything up. It's so frustrating!!

So I still despise the beta post editor and then, while super annoyed by this still, Changes posts this:

I am irrationally upset about this.

Why is tumblr continuing to make things 10x harder for gifmakers on this fucking site!? I do not want my gifs to be forcibly changed to looping mp4s. I work hard on my gifs, I work hard on the editing and arranging and coloring. So now that won't matter because they're gonna be turning into ugly ass mp4s?

And I have so many questions about this! Like, they just drop this with no explanation at all?

What do they consider to be "pages with a lot of GIFs"?? Do they mean every single fucking fandom blog on this site? Cause there are a lot and they are full of hundreds of gifset! Like my own blogs! Or do they just mean the search and specific tag tumblr pages? If it changes one of my gifsets into several looping mp4s instead of several gifs will that fuck up the arrangement of the gifs or will they remain in the order I put them in? As of right now only one video is allowed per post so how does that work with gifsets? Will this degrade the quality of the edit? Will it compress them like it did when they switched all of our .gifs into .gifvs? Or when they changed the dimensions? And if the tag search is considered "a lot of GIFS" but my post or my blog isn't will it be an mp4 on the search but a gif on my blog? Or will it change it to an mp4 on everything? How will they determine any of that? How does any of that work? Can we opt out of this force change? How do you even make a looping mp4??? If this change is a permanent no choice we're changing them all sort of thing do I need to learn how to make looping mp4s???

I just...

I hate this so much. Please for the love of god do not turn my gifs into stupid looping mp4s. Please just leave things as they are. Fix actual problems instead of changing things like this. Please.

I understand that this might make things load a little faster but what I don't think staff understands is the difference between gifmaking on tumblr vs other social media sites. On other sites, gifs are used as single image reactions. Gifsets and gifset edits do not exist on other social media sites. They only exist here. And this website keeps making it more and more impossible to make them. Only one is allowed to posted at once and they used as reaction images. And sure tumblr uses single gif reactions too but for the most part gifs are an art form. Gif makers create entire sets that are meant to be viewed together. They created big beautiful overlaid edits that could not and should not be used on places like twitter or instagram. Because those sites are not made for them!! Tumblr was!! If you turn all the gifs into mp4s it destroys the whole point of a gif. I've read do many stupid articles about how gifs are useless now because videos load faster bit they don't take into account the beautiful edit work that goes into tumblr gifmaking. What we want here on tumblr is not faster loading but gargage quality reaction images. We make high quality large edits. There is a difference.

I don't know what to do with this information and change upsets me and I am upset about this. Gifmaking is one of my favorite things to do. I love making gifs. It's creative and calming and fun but everything tumblr does lately seems like it's trying to kill this for us and that upsets me greatly.