Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein

Multipath narratives are a unique thing, because they've never really been against any of out four little rules. Are they narratives/fiction? Yes. Are they commercially licensed? Yes. Were they officially released? Yes. Were they intended to be set inside "The Doctor's universe"? A resounding yes.

The reason we ultimately decided to disallow them was simply... that they were annoying.

It was essentially thought that some multi-path stories were too complicated to be covered in a reasonable way. Thus, instead of going in a case-by-case basis, it was decided to cover none of them to make things easier. The fact that these stories, again, do not violate our basic four rules means reconsidering this has always been a possibility.

Multipath narratives: A theory of coverage

Attack of the Graske

So as I said, the big deciding factor in banning these stories was the belief that the most complex examples were incapable of being covered. So I thought it would actually be in our best interest to start with the most basic, fundamental example of a multi-path game, and one which we could certainly have been covering this whole time: Attack of the Graske (video game)

Attack of the Graske is a video game designed for living rooms, where the player makes their way through a story by selecting different options. It's something like a pop-quiz, where you need to pay attention to get all the answers right. This is also the story which introduced the Graske, who became a staple of Doctor Who spin-off media in the Russel T Davies era.

So, in basic theory and practice there are only two endings to this game.

Ending 1 (the good ending): The human reverse the settings, destroying the Changelings and sending all the original people back to their homes. The little girl celebrates Christmas with her family. The Doctor tells the human he did a good job, and he might come back for them one day.

Ending 2 (the bad ending): The human freezes the base, trapping the Graske but also the kidnapped victims. Back on Earth, we see the Changelings still on Earth, laughing maniacally. The little girl's Christmas is ruined. The Doctor tells the human they aren't ready to be a companion, but they may be one day.

Besides from what's above, you can obviously get the proceeding questions right or wrong. But since no realistic page would ever cover something like that, the only choice that effects a telling of the narrative is if the player picks the good ending or the bad ending.

The brilliant thing about this topic is that we could easily cover this story simply by using your greatest linguistic tool on this website. The magical power of the phrase... "According to one source..."

Or perhaps, more suited in this case, "According to one telling..."

So:

According to one telling, the human chose to freeze the base, trapping the Graske but also those kidnapped. All of the Changelings remained in place, and the Doctor told the human they weren't ready to be his companion.

But, according to a different telling, the human instead chose to reverse the Graske's controls, destroying the Changelings and returning their victims to their home worlds. In this source, the Doctor told the human he might come back for them one day for more adventures.

Now, I should be up front and say that another reason this was called invalid ages ago is that the protagonist is the player themselves. This wiki used to have a strong stance against you having any articles on the website, and many admins claimed that stories which featured the Doctor speaking to you did not take place inside the Doctor Who universe. I won't linger on this long, but considering the countless Tom Baker and Peter Capaldi stories where the fourth wall is broken without justification, I'd say it's generally accepted that this is no longer an issue to our current website.

The Saviour of Time

So again, we're going non-chronologically here, basically sorting a few examples from least complex to most complex.

So The Saviour of Time is a 2017 Twelfth Doctor game which was playable through Skype. While it no longer works, I'm willing to bet many people here have enough chat records of this title to make this a non-issue.

The game surrounded the Twelfth Doctor searching for the elusive Key to Time, and recruiting a human (you) to help him in his journey.

This game, from what I've seen, does not have multiple endings. But it does feature two major elements that will be essentially in finding a theoretical policy to covering. However, both elements are actually part of the same thing: player intractability.

When entering the TARDIS, the player is asked his name, and the Doctor will blindly accept whatever you type after this. Type "Why do you want to know?" and he'll call you that for the rest of the game, which works as it matches the Twelfth Doctor's personality.

Then there's the ability to get the Doctor to say unique things based on what you type either as a response, or as a nonsequitor. If you tell the game that your name is Jack Harkness, the Doctor will say he once knew someone with that name. If you ask about the Cybermen, the Doctor will say: "I may never look at Cybermen the same way after poor PE became one. Actually, I rather hope I never have to look at one at all." This is a reference to Danny Pink.

So the first big question is how do we cover a character who literally has an infinite number of possible names? The answer is to just name the page Human (The Savior of Time), and have it stated in the opening passage:

The human's true name varied widely depending on possible tellings.

Well then, what about all these minor references which only happen if you know which keywords to type in? Here, we could make use of our old allies: according to..., if, and possibly.

So, Danny Pink's page could list under the legacy subsection:

According to a telling of one source, a human might have asked the Twelfth Doctor who the Cybermen were. The Doctor potentially responded that he hadn't been able to look at the race the same since "PE" had been turned into one.

Already, this is acceptable language to cover the most basic user interaction without violating any of our other rules. We only discuss these branches as possible paths in a specific telling of this source.

Additionally, I should note that minor plot beats in this game do have a few forks, but not in major ways. For instance, if the user fails to control some part of the TARDIS enough times, the Doctor will take back over. But this is not so complex that it's impossible to cover. Again:

According to one telling of a potential source, the human pulled the TARDIS' lever. In other tellings, it was the Doctor who pulled it after the human failed to.