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 our four little rules. They are fiction, they are commercially licensed, and they are intended to be part of the Doctor Who Universe. And yet, on this website, being part of a diverging narrative automatically makes that piece of fiction invalid.

And 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 to the standard which we like to apply to ourselves. Furthermore, the common lack of clarity over which telling has actually happened in the Doctor Who Universe has always remained contentious. So the general judgement was made to ban all splintering path fiction as one genre of media.

So today, my mission is to discuss a series of Doctor Who stories that have divergent storylines -- listed from least complex to most complex. And the our goal today is to answer two questions. 1) Where is the line? When, during this list, does covering these stories become functionally impossible for the website; and 2) depending on where that line lies, is keeping all of these stories invalid justified?

If you're sitting comfortably, we'll begin.

Precedent in valid stories
to be added

Attack of the Graske


Attack of the Graske is a video game designed for living rooms, where the player makes their way through the 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. If you get the quiz right, the Doctor says you're awesome. If you get them wrong, the Doctor tells you the right answer.

But since no realistic page would ever cover something like that, the only choice that effects the wider 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 possibility, 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.

To call back to what I said earlier, there ARE stories we cover on this website that currently have more than one "telling," as it were. To quote our page for 10 Downing Street:


 * In 1974, the Third Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart met with the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street to discuss the approaching poison cloud caused by the Zircon. According to another account, it was the Fourth Doctor, Joan Brown and General Maxwell-Lennon. (COMIC: Doomcloud)

Now, I should be up front and say that another reason that Attack of the Graske was called invalid ages ago is that the protagonist is you, the player. 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, and the countless number of valid stories where Doctor Who the TV-show exists in-universe, 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, and our current page on it is pretty meticulous as-is.

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 essential to discussing if we want to find a way to cover these types of stories. But both elements are actually part of the same thing: player intractability.

When entering the TARDIS, the player is asked his or her 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.

Next, there's the ability to get the Doctor to say unique things based on what you type into chat, be that as a response or a non-sequitur. 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 Saviour 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 moments 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 this source, the human pulled the TARDIS' lever. In other tellings, it was the Doctor who pulled it after the human failed to.

Worlds in Time
So, Worlds in Time is something that personally hits home for me. It's a game I played a lot when I was a kid, and I took a lot of time to try and add details about it to this site. However, it was eventually made invalid after a debate. At the time, there was an official BBC wiki site for it, so our judgement was that we should link to that and otherwise keep it all off of TARDIS Data Core.

This is one of the only times in this site's history that we've decided to give an entire licensed title to another wiki, and additionally a non-Fandom-wiki... And that wiki no longer exists. The game has been offline since 2014, meaning there's a ton of information about it that will likely never be archived, which otherwise would have happened organically on this website.

So the point is that this is one where I'm biased, and parts of this game are lost media. But I do believe, as I did then, that covering this title was always within our reach. Worlds in Time was an online "free to play" MMOG published in 2012. The game would start with a character customization screen, allowing you change your name, gender (male or female only) and race (human, Silurian, Catkind, or Tree of Cheem). This is absolutely a lot more complex than just changing your name. At the time, I created a page called "Companion (Worlds in Time)" to cover this character, which covered the branching details about the character in the behind-the-scenes section mostly.

Of course, the game was an MMOG, so each level is designed with four people being intended to play at once. You could get other players in the game to join your team, but if you didn't have friends who were into Doctor Who, the game had 11 NPC assistants, and would randomly assign three of them to your team. This is a minor escalation of variables, as you could play any specific level with any three of these NPCs, or none of them.

My stance in this case is that we would cover each of these characters as people who existed and knew the Doctor, but we would use language like "possibly" and "according to..." to describe their further adventures. For instance, our page on the assistant Will currently states:


 * Will was an "assistant" of the Eleventh Doctor, recruited by him to try and fix time after a temporal event had disrupted the universe.


 * According to one possibility, this companion may have helped another companion hunt for time shards along other assistants. Other possible assistants in these adventures included Darren, Mal, Meera, Noma, Nneka, Silas, Steven, Talia, Camile, and Gethin. (NOTVALID: Worlds in Time)

So the basic gist of Worlds in Time is there were a bunch of planets and eras in the game you could jump between, and each location had a set number of storylines to discover, bad guys to fight, allies to meet, etc. Aside from some occasional alternate dialogue, my memory was that all of these levels would fundementally play out the same every time you replayed them... But that the real customization was what order you played them in. You basically had a number of planets to visit, including Earth, New Earth, Mars, Alfava Metraxis, Ember, Messaline, Skaro and the Starship UK... And then you picked which storylines you did in what order.

If you all don't mind some non-Doctor Who terminology, as a kid I immediately compared this game to Kingdom Hearts I and II. In these two games, you go to various worlds populated by Square Enix and Disney characters, but often the order you do these levels is extremely optional. Sometimes, you can just leave a planet without finishing the story and go start a different planet. Occasionally, a planet from the second act can be saved until literally right before the final boss. But I don't think this really impacts the story that is told in the game, and if Kingdom Hearts had Doctor Who characters instead of Disney ones, I think we would be able to cover it very effectively.

So in the case of Worlds in Time, it would be enough to just say: "This companion went to Earth, New Earth, Mars, Alfava Metraxis, Ember, Messaline, Skaro and the Starship UK." We don't even need to say "what order these events took place in varied," because it's so inconsequential to the story and arguably a huge part of how our site operates in the first place. We don't consider The Two Doctors invalid for its dubious place in the Second Doctor's story, so why should it matter what order the WiT levels take place in?

So a game taking place in a customizable level ordering shouldn't impact our ability to cover it as a story.

At the end of the day, putting aside level ordering and the NPC assistants, there's only two details that are complex here: the fact that the protagonist has four potential species and two genders. I feel, given the language and tactics we've already introduced in this thread, covering these paths in-universe would be barely more complex than the likes of Attack of the Graske.