This blog post has a more than usually technical title, for which I apologize. It’s inspired by some recent conversations in which I hear people saying “branching narrative” to mean “narrative that is not linear and in which the player has some control over story outcome,” apparently without realizing that there are many other ways of organizing and presenting such stories.
这篇博文的标题相较通常来说更有技术性，对此我深表歉意。文章的灵感来自于最近的一些交谈，我发现人们用“分支叙事”（branching narrative）这个词来描述“非线性的叙述，玩家对故事结局有一定的掌控”，但他们没有意识到还有许多其他方式可以组织和呈现这样的故事。
There is a fair amount of craft writing about how to make branching narrative thematically powerful, incorporate stats, and avoid combinatorial explosions, as well as just minimizing the amount of branching relative to the number of choices offered.
Jay Taylor-Laird did a talk on branching structures at GDC 2016, which includes among other things a map of Heavy Rain. And whenever I mention this topic, I am obligated to link Sam Kabo Ashwell’s famous post on CYOA structures.
关于如何使分支叙事的主题性更强，如何整合数值状态，避免组合爆炸，以及精简相对于所提供选择数量的分支数量，已有相当多的技术文章。
杰伊·泰勒-莱尔德（Jay Taylor-Laird）在 GDC 2016 上发表了关于分支结构的演讲，其中包括一张《暴雨》（Heavy Rain）的分支结构图。每次提到这个话题，我都有义务链接山姆·卡博·艾许威尔（Sam Kabo Ashwell）关于 CYOA 结构的著名文章。（译注：CYOA，Choose Your Own Adventure 的缩写，意为“选择你自己的冒险”，用以描述一种互动式叙事的术语，玩家通过在故事中做出选择来影响情节的发展，通常包含多分支和不同结局。）
This post is not about those methods of refining branching narrative; instead it’s describing three of the (many!) other options for managing the following very basic problem:
这篇文章并不是要介绍这些优化分支叙事的方法，而是要介绍应对下述基本问题的其他（很多！）选择中的三种：
My story is made of pieces of content. How do I choose which piece to show the player next?
我的故事由多个内容片段组成。我如何选择下一步向玩家展示哪个片段？
In this selection I’ve aimed to include solutions that can offer the player a moderate to high degree of control over how the story turns out, as opposed to affect or control over how the story is told.
应对这个问题，我着眼于在“故事如何发展”上给玩家提供中高程度的控制权，而非只是影响或控制故事的讲述方式。
I’ve also picked approaches that are not primarily based on a complex simulation, since those — from Dwarf Fortress to Façade — tend to have a lot of specialist considerations depending on what is being simulated, and often they’re not conceived of the same way in the first place. So with those caveats in place…
我也选择了那些不主要基于复杂模拟的方法，因为这些方法——从《矮人要塞》（Dwarf Fortress）到《Façade》——往往根据被模拟的不同内容有很多专业的考虑，而且它们通常并不是一开始就以相同的方式构想出来的。因此，让我们先把这些说清楚。
Quality-based narrative is the term invented by Failbetter Games to refer to interactive narratives structured around storylets unlocked by qualities.*
A storylet is typically a paragraph or two of text followed by a choice for the user (each option is referred to as a branch in Failbetter parlance) and text describing the outcome of that choice.
Qualities are numerical variables that can go up or down during play, and represent absolutely everything from inventory (how many bottles of laudanum are you carrying?) to skills (what is your Dangerous skill level?) to story progress (how far have you gotten in your relationship to your Aunt?). The StoryNexus tool implements QBN; so did Varytale, while that was still around, though in a hybrid form that allowed storylets themselves to contain CYOA-styled segments.
"基于变量的叙事"（Quality-based narrative，下文简称 QBN）是由 Failbetter Games（译注：独立游戏工作室，主要作品为《伦敦陷落》‘Fallen London’）发明的术语，用来指代围绕由变量解锁的故事块（storylets）构建的互动叙事。
故事块通常是一两段文本，接着是玩家的选择（在 Failbetter 的说法中，每个选项称为一个分支），以及描述该选择结果的文本。
变量（Qualities）是在游戏中可以增减的数值变量，它们代表从库存（你携带了多少瓶鸦片酊？）到技能（你的“危险”等级是多少？译注：此处指《伦敦陷落》中的技能属性。）再到故事进度（你与舅妈的关系进展到了哪一步？）的所有事物。StoryNexus 工具实现了 QBN；Varytale 在它还运营的时候也实现了QBN，尽管是以一种混合形式，允许故事块本身包含 CYOA 风格的部分。（译注：StoryNexus 和 Varytale 都是基于浏览器的互动小说创作工具）
A major advantage of QBN is that it allows a lot of short stories to slot together in interesting ways. Fallen London, the archetypal piece of quality-based narrative, contains many many narrative arcs about different characters and situations scattered around the city. Some arcs are basically one storylet long: something happens, you respond, you get an outcome, the end. Your skills may determine whether you succeed or fail at a given challenge, and the outcome of the branch you chose may adjust your stats, but the narrative consequences may be slight or rather loosely coupled. Other arcs are much longer, especially in the Exceptional Stories, which are premium content for paying users: my story The Frequently Deceased includes roughly a hundred branches’ worth of content.
QBN 的一大优势在于，它能让许多短篇幅故事以有趣的方式组合在一起。《伦敦陷落》是基于变量叙事的典型作品，游戏中包含了许多关于不同角色和情境的叙事弧线，散布在城市各个角落。
一些叙事弧线基本上是一个故事块的长度：发生某件事，你做出回应，你得到一个结果，故事结束。你的技能可能会决定你在某个挑战中的成败，你选择的分支结果可能会调整你的属性数值，但对叙事结果的影响可能是轻微的，或结合得相当松散。
其他叙事弧线则更长，尤其是付费内容“特别章节”中：我所写的故事《常逝者》（The Frequently Deceased）包含了大约一百个分支的内容。
A storylet in one place may require you to use a resource that you got somewhere else, but the connection between resource-acquisition and resource-use is often up to the player, and you may not even remember what the chain of causality is.
某处发生的一个故事块可能需要你使用在别处获得的资源，但是资源获取和资源使用之间的联系通常取决于玩家，你甚至可能不记得因果链是什么。
On the other hand, sometimes those chains form up together in colorful ways: one storylet demands a resource you know you can get somewhere else in the city, so you go and acquire it, then come back, and you’ve effectively woven together a new sidequest that wasn’t necessarily intended to be part of the same story flow. There’s a lot of cool potential here, potential that replicates some of the fun of procedural narrative but puts the control in the player’s hands rather than in the hands of an algorithm. Say I’m trying to make friends with a bishop, but in order to raise funds to donate to his church, I go off and do a bunch of odd jobs for Hell: that’s a bit of player-implemented irony that is implicitly possible in the system but left totally open-ended.
另一方面，有时这些因果链会以丰富多彩的方式组合在一起：你知道一个故事块所需要的资源能在城市别处得到，因此你去获得它，然后回来，这样你就有效地编织了一个新的支线任务，尽管这个支线不需要被设计成当前故事线的一部分
这其中蕴藏着巨大的潜力，这种潜力既能够带来程序化叙事那样的乐趣，但主导权在玩家手中，而不是依赖算法。比如我试图和游戏中的一位神父交朋友，但为了筹集资金捐赠给他的教堂，我跑去做了一大堆邪恶的怪活儿：这是一场由玩家自己实现的讽刺，在系统中确实隐含着这种可能性，但完全没有固定做法。