Show locked choices?

[Orpheus]

This question is more for readers than authors, but I couldn’t figure out a good place to post it. Hopefully some of you authors are also readers

Do you prefer seeing locked choices, or would you rather have them hidden?

I lean towards hiding them, but I started wondering recently if seeing the hidden choices and wondering how to access them is more interesting/exciting for readers.

I remember when I was a kid reading the Give Yourself Goosebumps adventure books I always got most excited about the handful of pages I couldn’t quite seem to get to, and had fun puzzling out how to reach them without cheating.

 

[Gatsha]

I prefer to see locked choices. I'd say this is purely a preference thing, though: some people are going to be bugged if they see options they aren't able to click, and some are going to be bugged if they find out there were options they couldn't see.

Maybe it depends on how you want your story presented? If you want it to feel like a game where the player tries to reach particular outcomes, seeing more might be preferable. If you want it to feel like a personalized, immersive experience, less is better.

For me, seeing behind the curtain doesn't bother me, so seeing more is fine. I find it more interesting to see what I couldn't pick than to have a seamless experience.

It may also be worth considering that if you will have a ton of choices that won't be accessible, it's better to hide them. Say for some reason the choice is going to regularly be things like "pick a number one to one hundred." If you're going to do this regularly and actually have one hundred chapters branching off from a single source, it may be a good idea to hide what they can't pick.

 

[Dissonant Soundtrack]

I lean towards showing them. Unless a reader is looking in the story map (which is a whole issue), they wouldn't even know there was another option to try. And if your story gets bugged, such that no option is valid, they might just think it dead ends and stop.

 

[insertnamehere]

It depends greatly on the individual story. That said, many stories will have chapters with identical titles but mutually exclusive conditions, often as a way of conditionally updating some variable, and showing them both may confuse readers. Others use hubs that have many different potential events and accessible locations based on information the reader learns and actions they may take, so showing all of these future options will probably spoil the story. Others still may place chapters off other chapters (especially the Introduction) but not actually intend for that chapter to be accessed normally, instead designing the game to only take the reader there through links; showing such chapters has both of the issues above.

If it is generally clear that the reader would have been able to access the hidden chapter had they made different previous choices, or if the author wants to communicate this to their audience, then it would be better to show inaccessible chapter.