“When I was analysing the structures of CYOA works a few years back, I began to recognise some strong recurring design patterns. I came up with some home-brewed terminology, but didn’t ever lay it out in a nice clear way. This is a non-exhaustive look at some of the more common approaches”
“Time Cave. A heavily-branching sequence. All choices are of roughly equal significance; there is little or no re-merging, and therefore no need for state-tracking. There are many, many endings.”
“Gauntlet. Long rather than broad, gauntlets have a relatively linear central thread, pruned by branches which end in death, backtracking, or quick rejoining. The Gauntlet generally tells one anointed story, which can be adorned with optional content or prematurely ended with failure; if there are multiple endings, they’re likely to derive from a Final Choice. Gauntlets rarely rely on state to any great extent (if they do, they are likely to evolve into a branch-and-bottleneck structure.)”
“Branch and Bottleneck. The game branches, but the branches regularly rejoin, usually around events that are common to all versions of the story. To avoid obliterating the effect of past choices, branch-and-bottleneck structures almost always rely on heavy use of state-tracking (if a game doesn’t do this, chances are you are dealing with a gauntlet).”
“Quest. The quest structure forms distinct branches, though they tend to rejoin to reach a relatively small number of winning endings (often only one). The elements of these branches have a modular structure: small, tightly-grouped clusters of nodes allowing many ways to approach a single situation, with lots of interconnection within each cluster and relatively little outside it. Re-merging is fairly common; backtracking rather less so. Quests generally involve some level of state-tracking, and do poorly when they don’t. The minimal size for a quest is relatively large, and this category includes some of the largest CYOAs.”
“Open Map. Even though quests are structured by geography, time still plays an important part: there’s a built-in direction of travel. But take a CYOA structure, make travel between the major nodes reversible, and you have a static geography, a world in which the player can toodle about indefinitely. Often this is a literal geography and relies on extensive state-tracking both explicit and secret for narrative progress. But it’s not an uncommon mode for things with assumptions grounded in the hypertext-novel idiom”
“Sorting Hat. The early game branches heavily and rejoins heavily (branch-and-bottleneck is a likely model here), ultimately determining which major branch the player gets assigned to. These major branches are typically quite linear – sometimes they look like gauntlets, but they might be choiceless straight-shots. Sorting Hats almost always rely substantially on state-tracking in the early game, and often bottleneck at the decision point.”
“Floating Modules. A mode only really possible in computer-based works. There is no tree – or, while there may be scattered twigs and branches, there’s no trunk. No central plot, no through-line: modular encounters become available to the player based largely on state, or perhaps randomly.”
“Loop and Grow. The game has a central thread of some kind, which loops around, over and over, to the same point: but thanks to state-tracking, each time around new options may be unlocked and others closed off. This is a very general pattern, and can co-exist with many others”
“An important variation of loop-and-grow structures is spoke and hub: the game has several major branches, but they all originate at and return to a central node or set of nodes. The player may go out along each spoke once, or many times.”