Printing one path out of a level built for many

On 14 August the fifth and final Perpetūra story went live in the browser. Every route in it was built to be equally true. A reader chooses, story by story, and whichever path they take is simply what happened to her. There is no correct version underneath the others, waiting to be found.

That is the same decision as a level with more than one viable critical path. Nothing in the space declares one route the intended one. The designer knows every way through, and has deliberately refused to rank them.

Then I had to assemble a book, and a book is not that kind of space. It reads front to back, on a device with no branches in it. For each woman, I had to decide which version of her life the book would say happened.

Picking a path that was never meant to win

That is a different job from writing the routes. Each story branches into three to five of them, most of them different ways of coming to know one of the people around her, and one of them is always the path where she chooses herself instead. I wrote every route as a full resolution, none of them a lesser draft standing by to lose to the others.

So the ebook was not a best-of. I was not picking the strongest route. I was picking the one the book would say out loud, knowing the others were just as finished and would not be in it. A level with several critical paths never forces a ranking on them. A linear book does, whether the author wants to rank them or not. The format makes an argument I had spent the whole design refusing to make.

It was a strange thing to sit with. I built these women to answer a hard question more than one way, on purpose, because I did not believe any single answer was the honest one. Then a format arrived that could hold one answer each.

What the book does not take away

Book One holds three of the five stories, each one a single route read straight through, with nothing to choose and nothing to unlock. A reader who only ever opens the book meets one version of each woman, with no sign on the page that the others exist.

They do exist, and assembling the book took none of them away. The interactive version is still free in the browser, still every route for all five women, still asking you to choose rather than telling you what happened. The book set one path in ink because ink cannot hold more than one, and left the rest where they were. Book Two follows on 25 September and makes the same decision again, once for each story it holds.

If you want the version where nothing was decided for you, the browser is where it lives. If you want the one that asks nothing of you but to keep turning the page, that is the book.