There’s a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count, and it usually starts the same way. Someone — a writer, a designer, sometimes an executive — says they want a “branching narrative” for their game. Everyone in the room nods. Everyone thinks they understand what that means. And then, about three meetings later, it becomes very clear that nobody was talking about the same thing.
Branching narrative is one of those terms that sounds self-explanatory right up until you actually try to build one. Then it falls apart fast.
The Wikipedia Version
At its most basic, a branching narrative is a story structure where choices made by the player lead to different story paths, potentially resulting in different outcomes or endings. Think of a tree — a shared trunk of story that splits into branches based on decisions. Simple enough, right?
The problem is that definition is so broad it’s almost useless in practice. It describes everything from a visual novel with hundreds of unique endings to a game where you pick dialogue options that change nothing but the NPC’s reaction before the story continues on exactly the same path it was always going to take. Both get called branching narratives. Both feel completely different to play. And both get pitched, designed, and budgeted as if they’re the same thing — which is where projects start going sideways.
The Vocabulary Problem
Here’s what makes this genuinely complicated: there isn’t a single authoritative source that defined branching narrative and made it stick. It wasn’t coined in a paper or a textbook. It evolved out of practice — from tabletop RPGs, from choose-your-own-adventure books, from early text adventures — and different communities developed their own vocabulary along the way, often without talking to each other.
The people who tend to be most rigorous about this are the ones making text-based interactive fiction — Twine games, long-form choice-driven stories — because their entire product is narrative decisions, so they’ve had to develop real language for the distinct structures involved. They’ve got terms like branch and bottleneck (sometimes called a foldback structure), where story paths diverge but always funnel back to the same fixed point before diverging again. There’s parallel paths, where different routes cover similar story beats from completely different angles. There’s the hub and spoke, where a central location or moment anchors the story between branching episodes — Telltale games used this constantly. And there’s the gauntlet, which is essentially linear with cosmetic variations, the kind of thing that gets called branching in a pitch document and then quietly isn’t.
Game writers hopefully know these structures. Narrative designers must know these structures. But they’re not household terms, even inside the industry — and outside of it, almost nobody uses them at all.
The Multiplayer Curveball
There’s one more thing worth flagging before we go any further, because it comes up constantly in multiplayer and live service game pitches: emergent narrative.
Emergent narrative is what happens when a player creates their own story through their actions in a system rather than following authored paths. The tale of the EVE Online heist that brought down a corporation. The Minecraft world that became a city. The DayZ encounter that ended in an unlikely alliance. Nobody wrote those stories. They arose from the collision of systems and player behavior.
Some people consider this the ultimate form of branching narrative — infinite branches, none of them authored. And there’s an argument to be made there.
But for the purposes of this series, I’m drawing a line. Branching narrative, as I’m going to use the term, means authored paths — deliberate choices between outcomes that a writer or designer actually built. Emergent narrative is a fascinating topic and it deserves its own series. But it’s a different conversation, and conflating the two is part of how we end up in those three-meetings-later situations where nobody is talking about the same thing anymore.
So What Are We Actually Talking About?
By the end of this series I want to give you a working vocabulary for the distinct structures that tend to get lumped together under “branching narrative” — what they look like, how they feel to play, and when each one is actually the right tool for the job.
I also want to introduce a term I’ve been using in my own work for years: the Collapsing Narrative. It describes something that already has a name in some circles — but the existing name, I’d argue, actively misleads the people who hear it. More on that in Part 3.
For now, the most important thing to take away from Part 1 is this: when someone says they want a branching narrative, the first question you should ask is which kind. Because the answer changes everything — the writing workload, the design complexity, the budget, and most importantly, how the player is actually going to feel when they’re inside it.
Next up: a field guide to the structures that actually exist. Each one gets a name, a one-sentence explanation, a real game example you’ll recognize, and a diagram simple enough to draw in Microsoft Paint — because if you work in games long enough, you will absolutely need to sketch one of these on a whiteboard for someone, and it helps to know what you’re drawing.