Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein


 * Please advise, much of this is going to be rewritten before the post ever goes live.


 * Potential titles for forum post: "Revisiting branching fiction" "Multipath Fiction: A Theory of Coverage" "Revisiting fiction with branching elements"

Introduction

 * "Here we are again, engaged in the Founding Conflict."

Multipath fiction is an extremely contentious and controversial topic, to both those who want to see these sources validated and those who don't. As we'll establish in a moment, the rule predates our modern concept of the "four little rules", and indeed was based partially in the website seeking out a "Doctor Who canon."

Over the years, many reason have been given for why these sorts of stories can't be covered. But the most consistent has been that there is no precedent, no theory of coverage, and no realistic way to go about it. And if we have no way to cover the most extreme and outrageous examples of branching fiction, then we can't cover any of it - or so the argument goes.

Today, we're going to have a few goals. First, I'll try to discuss the history of validation and multi-path stories. Then, I'd like to present and analyze a few examples of this "genre" - listed from least complex to most complex. And the our goal for the next three weeks is to answer four general questions.


 * 1) Where is the line? When, during this list, does covering these stories become functionally impossible for the website?
 * 2) Depending on where that line lies, is keeping all of these stories invalid justified?
 * 3) Can we come up with a theory of coverage which allows us to cover some or all of these stories?
 * 4) Is our entire definition of "multipath narratives" actually incorrect? Is there a more nuanced way to look at all of the fiction which we have given this designation?

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

Addressing history and precedent
If you want to understand why multipath stories are invalid, it should be known that the topic dates back to three primary topics: Attack of the Graske, the Find Your Fate novels, and the FASA Doctor Who Role Playing Game.

On the 30th of August, 2005, the TARDIS Canon Policy originally launched, written by User:Freethinker1of1. This page sought to imitate Memory Alpha's canon policy, and mostly sorted potential "sources" into if TARDIS Wiki would consider them canon. Things were very much in flux at this time, for instance the Peter Cushing Dalek films are listed as valid sources, while the novelisations are not. However, something that was set in stone from day one was that the FASA Roleplaying books were not considered valid.

The original intention of this "canon policy" was that further debates could be had to change the rules if the users deemed fit. For instance, in 2008, the Cushing films were changed from "Canon" to "Non-Canon." However, the FASA Roleplaying games being invalid was not challenged at the time. An extremely important note is that the rationale given was that the roleplaying games should be non-canon because they contradict the TV show and various books. The nature of the games had absolutely nothing to do with them being non-canon, and indeed only FASA games were targeted by this.

In March 2008, a forum user at Forum:Need more info on Omega asks about the Search for the Doctor novel featuring Omega, and User:Tangerineduel questions if the novel should be canon according to policy. He argues that as it's not quite a roleplaying book, but also not fully a novel. But most importantly, he argues that covering the book is controversial because there's more than one path, with no clarity on which path "counts" as happening in-universe.

In June 2010, User:CzechOut starts the post Forum:We need a policy on videogames, in anticipation of The Adventure Games. Here, Czech directly states his intention that as the wiki has precedent against the FASA roleplaying books, all games and video games should be considered non-canon.

"Per our canon policy, FASA roleplaying games are flatly disallowed, and I do think there are many problems with using videogames as valid resouces. Frankly, Attack of the Graske is tricky enough, and, to my mind, only exists as canon inasmuch as it gives the tiniest sliver of information about the Graske. But I do not believe the events and storyline described in that game actually exist in the DWU. The Doctor did not stop by your house one day and invite you on a test to see whether you could be a companion. Players of these games — that is to say we — are quite clearly not a part of the DWU.

The other problem with videogames is that, depending on how they're constructed, multiple outcomes can be possible. Thus comes the ugly and thorny issue of which outcome is canonical. Going back to Graske, we can't say whether the outcome where you lose and "don't have what it takes to be a companion" is the one we should adopt as "canon", or whether it's the "happier" ending.

If you'll note at the canon policy page, the policy on games is still said to be "in flux". We need to really hammer that out before we start incorporating material from videogames into articles. My recommendation would be to hold off citing from these things until we have a clearer notion. What would be a nightmare, I think, is if people started playing these new adventure games, while furiously jotting down notes and filling up the articles on Amy Pond, the Daleks, and the Eleventh Doctor — only to find out months from now that in fact the game had a branching architecture and it didn't actually include the same information every time it was played."

- User:CzechOut, Forum:We need a policy on videogames

However, Czech faced minor pushback from users due to the BBC having made a statement saying The Adventure Games were canon. The game Dalek Attack is also debated, as Czech believes it to be a multi-path game while others point to the novel Head Games referencing the events of the game.

The forum goes off topic from there, with Czech making a bulleted list of reasons why City of the Daleks apparently lacks internal consistency with a post-Time War Doctor Who universe, and thus he disagrees with the BBC calling it canon.

Several months later, User:Tangerineduel makes a closing post of sorts, stating:

"The video games (old and new) conventionally have a single ending and have key moments of story throughout them. It is the story/plot that we use as our source rather than the individual character/player actions. In the canon policy and on the GAME page this would be noted."

- User:Tangerineduel, Forum:We need a policy on videogames

So precedent was set. Video games would not all be invalid by default, but any game with even the most slightly-branching details would be far more likely to be called non-canon.

Now, an interesting note is that Attack of the Graske wasn't actually marked at invalid until December 2012. This was a result of Thread:117868, wherein User:MystExplorer asked why this game wasn't marked at NON-DWU, at which point Czech indicated it must have been added and then removed. However, according to what I can tell, it's actually a situation where no one ever added the invalid template, and the admins just presumed it was already there.

In 2012, Forum:Doctor Who: Worlds in Time brings the topic of video games back into the forefront. This is one of the first debates I took part in on the website, and as I'll discuss later I think the wrong judgement was made with this one. It's during this forum that Czech presented User:CzechOut/Video game policy, his pitch for how the wiki should go-about covering games.

Czech' biggest issues at this point remains the concept of "you" being the main character, and he feels strongly against the concept. Two specific examples here would be Human (Attack of the Graske) and Companion (Worlds in Time), which he specifically rails against in the debate. In his pitched policy, only games with characters "created and named by the game developer" should count as canon. In the debate, Czech hammers home that "Any game which centrally has a character you created and uses items you created is fanfic."

He also states that in a situation where a game has a good ending and a bad ending, "the outcome which is considered canonical by this wiki is the one in which the player succeeds."

Towards the end of this debate, it is pointed out by User:Tybort that the Decide Your Destiny and Find Your Fate novels have never been selected out as canon or non-canon. The topic is also connected directly back to the FASA games, and how T:CANON still stated in 2012 that they were non-canon for contradicting "primary sources." Czech states:

"Clearly, the current wording at T:CAN is not the real reason the FASA thing is banned. Narrative contradiction is the rule of the DWU, not the exception, so you can't throw something out just because it doesn't jive with another story. The real reason for the ban must surely be that RPGs are internally unstable narratives. They don't come out the same each time you play them. So anything which happens differently each time you play it shouldn't be considered a part of our tardis.wikia.com canon, because we don't know which outcome to go with. This would mean things like the DYD and FYF books would also be slapped with a warning. I don't see anything wrong with saying: Only those narratives with a consistent narrative, experienced in the same way for all those that consume that narrative, may be considered a valid source for the writing of articles. [emphasis his, not mine]"

- Czech, Forum:Doctor Who: Worlds in Time

In the forum, I strongly disagreed with this suggestion, as I felt it was a little bit much. But in the end, the rule was implemented, and from that point forwards, all branching stories were considered automatically invalid on the website. Forum:Decide Your Destiny and Find Your Fate are NOTDWU from here on out clarified that Decide Your Destiny and Find Your Fate were impacted by this. Czech includes an admin chat with User:Tangerineduel where the two decide to invalidate the books for being too complex.

"yeah, i think this is one case where if people complain, tough it's too much work"

- Czech, on why Find Your Fate and Decide Your Destiny were invalidated

Now, the most recent update on this front was that in December 2020, it was apparently noted that AUDIO: Flip-Flop technically is a "branching story". Thus, based on Czech's definition from 2012, it shouldn't be something we cover.

On this wiki, calling a story in the Big Finish Main Range "invalid" would be paramount to blasphemy, so an alteration was hastily added (to my understanding, without discussion, since we didn't have a place to discuss it even) to T:VS. This alteration clarified that when a story depicts the branching nature of its story as "timey-wimey-ness", then it should be valid. This is a very broad change to the rules, the ramifications of which has never been discussed.

Now before we go any further, I think we have to address the elephant in the room: the dated nature of these older debates, mostly due to the constant references to the TARDIS Canon Policy.

In mid-2012, while these changes were still going on, T:CANON was changed drastically. It moved from being the main space where the website clarified what was and wasn't canon, to a page all about the concept of canon not existing for Doctor Who. This is, in a basic sense, the same version of T:CANON that we have today. After this, Tardis:Valid sources was created, becoming the new home to dictating what topics we do and do not cover.

For a time, the "Non-Canon" category was replaced with "Non-DWU." But this changed in November 2015 with Thread:180396. Here, it was agreed upon by most users that Non-DWU was not a satisfactory term for invalid content. Not only did it imply that all non-valid stories fail Rule 4 and Rule 4 alone, at the end of the day the term was not fundamentally different from "non-canon."

And so, as Czech put it, “Consensus to change was (lukewarmly) established.”

Now, the reason I bring this up is that I think since 2015, and especially since the REAL early days of 2005-2008, the site has changed. Not only in priorities, but in our ideology.

This wiki used to cover Ten Doctors. That was it. And we used to have very strict guidelines about what did and didn’t fit, because we were trying to figure out what was canon to the Doctor Who franchise. Is Unbound canon? No. Is Scream of the Shalka canon? No. Is Dimensions in Time canon? No.

But now, consider the following. The Timeless Child arc has introduced the idea that there are potentially hundreds of rogue, uncatalogued incarnations of the Doctor. Big Finish has began releasing audio stories using alternate scripts from early Fourth Doctor stories, which we have covered without even needing a debate. Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat have released contradictory stories depicted the regeneration of the Eighth Doctor, both covered with equal footing. And we do not debate the canonicity of these sources, because we instead are bound to a set of internal rules which we view as entirely removed from the concept of canon.

And I believe that when we go about these debates, we truly have such a different perspective about these things that it does bring merit to revisiting this topic. I think, for instance, that covering self-insert characters is a lot less controversial for those reading this post today than it was to the editors of 2012. And a video game contradicting some element of the TV series is a lot less likely to be brought up as proof of why it shouldn't "count" on the website.

Are branching narratives non-canonical? Perhaps. Maybe Czech was right on that front. However, I don't think this should effect if they are considered valid on Tardis Wiki. Thus, I think it's entirely fair for us to re-evaluate the stories that these few forums so swiftly discarded.

Why are branching stories invalid... right now?
One of the things you'll find on this wiki is that topics like this have a long history, where the reasoning given when precedent was first set is not exactly the reason given now. More recent debates, from my memory, have preferred to contextualize invalidating branching stories through some reading of our "four little rules," rather than the concept of canon and continuity.

So based on what I have read, these are the primary reasons that an admin today would say branching stories are invalid:


 * 1) Because these stories depict a non-consistent series of events, we can not say which version certainly took place within the Doctor Who Universe.
 * 2) Diverging narrative stories are often not even real narratives, thus they fail (the old) Rule 1, Only stories count. Not only were branching narratives considered to fail the old Rule 1, some would argue Rule 1 was partially created because of the forums cited above.
 * 3) Covering these stories is not only against Rules 1 and 4, but is technically impossible. We could not cover these stories if we wanted to. Covering multipath stories on a wiki is ugly, difficult, headache inducing, and should never be attempted.

Personally, I don't think the first one stands up ten years later. If you actually read through Rule 4, there is no language in the text about a concrete version of a source needing to be the definitive version that is "set in the Doctor's universe." It merely states that the intent needs to have been that the story was set in the Doctor Who Universe at the time of publication. Indeed, we cover several non-GAME stories which have more than one "version" which is known to exist, such as special editions and a few other examples I'll point to later.

As for argument 2, it's obvious that this deserves re-evaluation now that Rule 1 has fundamentally regenerated, now being Only works of fiction count. However, even if Rule 1 was still Only stories count, I think branching narratives are still narratives.

At the end of the day, in spite of what some people will tell you, reason #3 has always secretly been the primary reason that these sources were made not-valid. If you take the time to go and read through these old forums you'll see this brought up often. Not only were the "four little rules" not considered when this choice was made, this decision predates the four little rules.

In the past decade, whenever I have approached revisiting this, the overwhelming feeling has been that there is some hesitation to allowing any branching storylines, because some of the more complicated ones would be truly, truly difficult to cover. And so, to make things easier, we cover nothing and call it a day. And it's always been about that much more than it's ever been about T:VS.

So that is the primary inspiration for this post. I basically wanted to figure out... Where is the line? If we really think some branching narratives are impossible to cover on a technical level... Then is it really justified that all branching narratives should be not-valid?

Furthermore, my mission statement today is also to construct a theory of coverage. To kind of establish the basic theory of how wiki-fying branching narratives would function. This is important to do, as evidently there is no historical approach that was ever made to do this.

Precedent in Valid stories
Before we discuss the theory of coverage, we should first talk about the history and precedent that valid sources can deliver to us.

As we've established, in 2010 the release of The Adventure Games created a sort-of War on Video Games, where the games were so controversial with some on the website that an attempt was made to invalidate them.

So what was really the issue? Well, in the games, you can lose. You can actually die, or worse, cease to exist. The feeling among some was that this meant that these games had multiple endings, and thus no one narrative... Or at the very least, no such thing as a unified gaming experience. If Amy and the Doctor could die, in game, how was this set inside the Doctor Who universe?

This topic had to be dropped when the BBC ultimately put out a statement saying that games were, in fact, set inside the Doctor Who universe.

Since then, the Adventure Games have been covered as valid stories with little controversy. So how do we reconcile a story that has, as it's been said, multiple endings?

Well, there's a general acceptance that sometimes in video games, there are features which are part of the gameplay that don't necessarily contribute to the story itself. Death cutscenes are a feature of most video games, and yet there are still many sites dedicated to covering the story of video games.

Another example of this can be found in the infamous GAME: The Mazes of Time. In this title, if the Doctor is killed he regenerates and then the game resets. However, when you’re playing as Amy Pond, this same thing happens.

Despite this, we don’t typically say “Amy had the power to regenerate (GAME: The Maze of Time)” nor do we treat The Adventure Games or The Mazes of Time as branching storylines. If it doesn’t happen to Amy, it doesn’t happen to the Doctor either, it’s just a feature of the game.

The lesson here is that SOMETIMES, gameplay features are included which shouldn’t necessarily be treated as part of the coverage.

This leads us to the recently validated, GAME: Legacy. This game features a set, pre-scripted series of storylines and cutscenes that one has to earn through typical phone-game-shenanigans. You have the ability to customize your "team" to beat the puzzles and such, but this does not effect the story.

For instance, an in-game narrative might feature the First Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, and Martha Jones. Then, during the gameplay segments, you might possibly change this team to other characters you've unlocked... But this doesn't effect the plot of the game, nor the cutscenes. The story is not effected by whatever gameplay choices you make.

Again, the lesson here is that branching gameplay mechanics do not insinuate branching storylines in-game.

The same can be said for GAME: Dalek Attack, which despite the controversy in 2010 we currently cover as a valid story. Because the cutscenes clearly depict the Seventh Doctor, we essentially deem that this is the plot to the game, in spite of other Doctors also being optional choices.

The final precedent I want to discuss comes from non-video game sources.

In 1976, as their license for Doctor Who was about to slip away, TV Comic began reprinting old Doctor Who stories, but with the Fourth Doctor's likeness (barely) drawn over them. An example of this can be found on the page COMIC: Doomcloud.

As I'll mention below, we have staked quite a long-running precedent on covering both versions of these comics. Thus, we have made a precedent of how to cover a piece of media when it has more than one "potential telling." I'll mention this again in just a moment.

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 before the species finally made a triumphant cameo in TV: The End of Time.

This is an excellent game to begin our study of branching stories, because it is perhaps the most simple "branching story" in the entire DW franchise. In total, there are really only two endings:


 * Ending 1 (the good ending): The human reverses 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)

Indeed, covering the two main "paths" of this story would be no more difficult than covering Revenge of the Cybermen and Return of the Cybermen concurrently, which we currently do without controversy.

The only minor hiccup I have with Attack of the Graske is that I prefer to be able to actually cite what variation I'm pulling information from when there's branching paths like this. So, if this were a novel, I'd want to cite something like (GAME: Attack of the Graske: Page 20). Here, however, I'm not sure that (GAME: Attack of the Graske: Good ending) or (GAME: Attack of the Graske: Ending 1) is nearly as objective. But if this is the only issue stopping us, I think some community consensus could find a solution.

Before we move on, I should also say that another reason this story was constantly discounted was due to "You" being the main character. At one point in this wiki's history, breaking the fourth wall or involving the audience in any way was seen as extremely controversial. However, my hope is that by the time this debate goes live, the Speed Round will have codified in T:VS that we no longer see this as an issue.

Also, if anyone wants to question the "rule-4-ness" of this source, when the Graske make their first "valid" appearance in TV: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?, Sarah Jane Smith comments:

"That alien, he's called a Graske. There was some Graske activity on Earth a couple of years back, but no, this isn't their style at all."

- Sarah Jane Smith, discussing the Graske.

I'm sure that in-universe, there's now several examples of "Graske activity" this could be referencing, but in the context of intent this is clearly a televised reference to the game. I'm not even making a case of "rule 4 by proxy" here, it's just a fact that the Doctor Who creative team in the RTD1 era thought Attack of the Graske "counted" in-universe. REF: Companions and Allies even includes "You" in a catalogue of the Tenth Doctor's companions. I don't think there's a case to be made for Graske failing Rule 4 in the slightest. Historically, the game was green-lit at the exact same point as the Tardisode series, and was basically an interactive promotional episode.

Doctor Who: Infinity
So it might seem that I'm front-loading this post with video games and saving all of the PROSE branching narratives for later. This is not by design, but simply a consequence of the fact that Doctor Who video games have historically been very... Simple. Rarely doing anything outrageous or impossible to wiki-fy. Instead, what I would call very simple mechanics have often been read as "branching details" by people who don't quite understand the medium. Infinity is just one example of this.

to be added

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.

Why you would want to cover a detail so specific, I have no idea. But I'm just trying to prove it is possible, as historically we have invalidated stories for branching options this ridiculously minor.

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, after a debate, it was decided that not only would the game be considered invalid on this website, we would also effectively ban users from adding information about the game to our own page about it. At the time, there was an official BBC Wiki site for WiT, 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, one which was not in-universe... And that wiki no longer exists. Wayback archives of the website are also frustratingly incomplete, meaning information once stored there which is gone for good. Most of what does remains pertains to mechanics but not content.

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 been organically on this website. So I hope I'm not over-stepping my boundaries when I say that the treatment of World's in Time is the biggest mistake ever made by Tardis Wiki.

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. The planets included Earth, New Earth, Mars, Alfava Metraxis, Ember, Messaline, Skaro and the Starship UK.

Each planet had a series of Interventions/Adventures, which were akin to serials. Each "serial" had several episodes or levels. So if you beat around four or five levels, you had a completed serial of the game. You could also type your own "dialogue" into the game's chat window, but this didn't effect the pre-scripted dialogue going on around you, and was really just a way for people in a server to talk to each other (indeed, the chat window and the dialogue window were separate tabs). Each "episode" played out the same way every time, with the only differences I can find online between play throughs having to do with patches and some people playing the original BETA release.

But the original debate from a decade ago decided that the game was a multipath story. Why was that? Well, you could play the various episodes and planets in any order you wanted to. I remember finishing all the Earth levels first, then moving on to Ember and Messaline. But, it was entirely possible to play a few Earth levels then switch to Mars for a level, then switch to Ember and so-on. So it was decided that because the game had no single "track", and it allowed you to customize your character, it was akin to the Find Your Fate novels.

I have always thought this made no sense what-so-ever, and was furthermore an ongoing example of this website's refusal to understand fundamental video game mechanics.

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 and constantly contradicted placement 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.

If we accept all of what is said above as true, the only thing making covering this game difficult is the whole "lost media" angle. Out of the 33 "levels" in this game, I'd say about 9 or 10 you can find recordings of, which is a pretty major loss when it comes to archiving Who media. But I don't think something being currently lost has ever been used to rule against something on this wiki, and I feel with some confidence that more material from this title is likely to be found in the next few years.

Find Your Fate: Search for the Doctor
Okay, so here's where we start to get back to stories with multiple paths and indeed multiple endings. It's interesting to note how this is supposedly the definition of this "genre" of fiction, yet so many examples so far haven't really matched that energy. On this website, simply having dialogue options has been enough to consider something a branching narrative.

In this segment we are now going to be discussion one of the "origin" topics which kickstarted the entire kerfuffle about branching narratives waaaaay back in the day. Specifically, I am going to be analyzing the 1986 Find Your Fate novel Search for the Doctor.

Before we start this, I have two things I'd like to discuss. Firstly, you'll note that throughout this thread I've been using the American title for this series, Find Your Fate, instead of the original British title, Make Your Own Adventure with Doctor Who. This is for three primary reasons. Firstly, I am American, and thus feel I have some oath to use the American title. Secondly, Make Your Own Adventure with Doctor Who is a horrible title to have to type out a bunch of times. And thirdly, Find Your Fate has historically been the title used when addressing these books in the forums.

Next, some of you might wonder why this segment is about Search for the Doctor instead of the FYF in-general. Well, here's why.

Since this topic has been historically staked in the idea that covering these sources is not just ill-advised but impossible, I think simply discussing the existence of this series isn't enough. So, in as many cases where I have time, I actually want to go out and make infrastructure and pages in the NOTVALID subspace. This way it's not simply me saying "We should let people cover these however they want to," but rather me saying "This is how I want us to cover these, and this is the sort of page I want to be on the mainspace."

So let's talk about Search for the Doctor.

One of the first shocking things I discovered about this book, or at least the American edition which I purchased off eBay, is that there are actually two kinds of numbers marking various page. One type denotes the chapter (as any regular novel might), and the others denote the "turn to x" markers. The latter is not the page number, as this novel doesn't have "page numbers." In some cases, you'll have 19 listed at the top of several pages. In other cases, several segments are on one page (see image).

I decided to call these "Marker X" pretty much universally. While it is terminology I made up, I find saying "Marker 3," "Marker 5," "Marker 15," etc makes it very clear what I am talking about. This is only appropriate for the FYF novels, where "Turn to 3" does not refer to the actual page number itself.

The first thing you need to accept when reading these books is that they are written in the second person, past-tense. Whereas the first person (I did this) and the third person (The human did this) are generally pretty common in DWU fiction, the second person (You do this) is a little irregular. Second person past-tense (You did this) is downright surreal.

But if you being the protagonist is a major turn-off for any of you, you'll be quite happy with the Find Your Fate series. Instead of writing the novel as if you are the protagonist and have wandered into the story, the novel it creates a very specific OC who is distinctly unique. You are a teenage girl named Dinah, you live in 2056, and you're descended from someone who knew Sarah Jane Smith. At the start of the story, you collect a crate, which has been in storage for 50 years, with a marker that the contents belong to Smith.

After this point, you meet Drax, who is interested in buying the crate before you've even opened it. He offers to sell it to you for upwards of €25,000. You then have the option of accepting his offer (Marker Five) or turning him down (Marker Two). If you accept his offer, two splintering endings become possible: in one, you are robbed and lose the money, and in the other, you outwit the robbers and deposit the full wealth. In both cases, you spend the rest of your live wondering what adventure you missed out on by choosing the money.

Turning down the money (Marker Two) causes Drax to eventually reveal that the crate contains none-other than K9 Mark III, who Sarah Jane put into storage for you to find in the future.


 * (Yes, this does set up a pretty obvious and infamous contradiction with TV: School Reunion, at least as we cover it. In the story, K9 Mark III is blown up in 2007, and replaced by K9 Mark IV. However, there's actually a great discrepancy over if K9 Mark IV is actually K9 Mark IIIb, as he's called on some merchandise. So at the end of the day, there's about three different possible places we could put this information if this was all valid, either before SR, after SR on K9 III's page, or after SR on K9 MIV's page...)

So right off the bat, before any of the central plot has happened, we have already come across two potential endings to the novel. So the question is, in a story where there are multiple paths to multiple endings, how do we cover the story?

One theory I have is that citing stories like this could be greatly improved by, which is an experimental citation template being created by User:Bongo50. If you haven't seen it in action before, it allows you to add more information to a collapsable box. This is merely experimental, so we could not use this on pages until it is officially launched. BUT I want to show a few examples of how improving technology like this could make covering these stories easier.

One theory here is that if we could just customize our story citation, covering these stories as a set number of tellings is much easier in practice. Typing PROSE: creates PROSE:. So in action, the analysis could someday look like this:


 * Two potential tellings of this source indicated that the Dinah accepted the money. After being paid by Drax, she was either robbed by a pair of thieves (PROSE: ') or outmaneuvered the thieves, depositing the gold bars in the National Bank, living a life which was safe but filled with regret at never knowing what was in the crate. (PROSE: ') However, the plurality of tellings indicated that Dinah did not accept Drax's offer, instead asking first to see what was in the crate. Drax helped Dinah open the crate, revealing K9 Mark III inside. (PROSE: )

You can see here that this allows us to cover the various "endings" and "paths" of the novel as co-existing sources. The hardest part about consistently using this will be finding terminology which applies to every source. In this case, the "Marker" system works pretty well for this book, but for things like video games and the like, we'd need other terms, and specifically terms that could be cited with consistency (Ending 1, Ending 2, etc).

Sadly, as this template is not currently live, I'm going to have to recommend a temporary solution whilst we wait. So it is currently my prerogative that we instead cite these markers as if they were episode titles in a larger serial. So typing PROSE: Marker 2 creates PROSE: Marker 2.

A heated debate back in the day was that it was ambiguous which "path" or "ending" takes place in the novel for-real. Having read through every branch, I actually disagree. The novel constantly pushes you to do back and try another path if you end up at a dead end, and very few of the "alternate endings" do not feature some extremist situation (i.e. the Doctor dies, Earth is destroyed, you're shot in the face, Gallifrey is conquered). Two quotes stand out to me:

"As Omega blasted you into non-existance, you realised the mistake you had made. Although all futures are possible, only one, out of the millions that can happen, will actually take place."

- 'Search for the Doctor narration, Marker 28''

"Bring yourself back to life, learn from your mistakes, and go back to the end of 26 for another attempt."

- 'Search for the Doctor narration, Marker 31''

Now, I ask. Does that not sound timey-wimey? Does it not sound like something out of Undertale?

It's very explicit, at least to me, that the longest chain is considered the "true path" that is solidified in-universe.

Now, we can't exactly use the "Bring yourself back to life" quote in article, in my opinion, as it's akin to a "Gameplay mechanic" which is not really part of the fiction. The game has a lot of stuff like this. For instance, you're often asked to roll two dice to decide your fate in certain situations.

But on that note, some could potentially make the case that the "bad endings" in novels like these are actually more akin to death animations in video games. Think Amy regenerates. If that's the case, does this mean that these bad endings are also simple mechanics, and thus shouldn't be covered?

Well, I don't think so. First of all, there's a lot of information we gain through the story which pertains to the lore of 2056, and if we remove these sections there's pretty important info that's missing. The side paths are also often extremely interesting and provide lore and characters you never see if you only focus on "winning."

Secondly, removing entire Markers of this novel is a pretty hefty precedent that would probably end up failing the more novels we look at, particularly potential sources where there is no singular "correct" path forwards. Even in the case of Search, one "alternate ending" in the book is actually later clarified to have happened no-matter-what, as Marker 6 is rewound to in Marker 28.

And thirdly, most of the illustrations in this book are actually from the so-called "bad endings" which are not a part of the longer, mainline path.

Generally, I do think it's fair to notate that the journey most traveled seems to be the variation of the story that has the most weight in-universe.

The point is that these alternate paths should be covered and notated, but with an emphasis on clarifying that "most sources" or "most tellings" did not give general weight to the "bad/boring" endings.

In some cases, we could even cite the continuity of other stories to make our case. As an example:


 * One variation of this source suggested that the Sixth Doctor's body was destroyed while controlled by Omega, creating a Black hole that destroyed the Earth, (PROSE: Search for the Doctor: Marker 29) most other accounts indicated that the Sixth Doctor regained his body (PROSE: Search for the Doctor: Marker 32, Marker 33) and later regenerated into the Seventh Doctor. (TV: Time and the Rani, PROSE: Spiral Scratch, AUDIO: The Brink of Death)

We wouldn't want to do this in the first place, but I think in this case we are indeed emphasizing authorial intent. An ending where Earth is destroyed in a black hole and the Doctor dies was probably not something that was meant to be taken as carrying a heavy weight. Now one thing that might interest you about this story is that it's very explicitly written to be post-TV: The Three Doctors for Omega, but not really post TV: Arc of Infinity. Omega has no understanding of how TARDISes operate, and several exchanges indicate that Omega hasn't encountered the Doctor since TTD.

Ironically, this is the case because the writer of this novel, Dave Martin, wrote The Three Doctors and created Omega, but was apparently not aware of the plot to AoI. I think, given the context, it's pretty easy to "canon weld" that this is set post-TTD and pre-AoI for Omega, and that the Doctor has sensed they are meeting out-of-synch and is playing into this for his advantage.

The novel ends with Omega being defeated, but the Doctor saying that he certainly survives. The Doctor says that he did research on Gallifrey, and found that Omega is likely his direct ancestor, meaning that they will always exist as a balance to each-other (have fun with that, Other fans!)

So here's what I've done while reading this book. I've gone ahead and set-up PROSE: Search for the Doctor with a full rundown of the Markers. I might need to go through and clean this up now that I understand the plot better, but now that this infrastructure is in place, it will be very easy for me to make several pages and subpages dedicated to the branching plot.

You'll be able to see the bulk of my work at Dinah (Search for the Doctor), my page on the protagonist of this novel. Here I'll be writing the article on the belief that covering as many paths as possible is the correct choice because this character only appears in this novel. On the opposite end of things, I've also created Omega/Non-valid sources. My goal with this page is to cover the story in as few words as possible, and essentially with as much text as you'd want something like TV: Arc of Infinity to be covered.

I hope this will prove as a strong proof of concept for how we can cover novels like this in the immediate future. Overall, Search is a very odd novel to start off on in the grand scheme of things. It's one of the more simple "branching stories," again with there really being an actual correct path, but when you compare it to other novels in the DYD and FYF line, it's one of the ones that takes itself the most seriously. It is a super fascinating novel with incredible world building and lore which has been swiftly ignored by everyone. Even comparing the font size of this novel to Crisis in Space makes it obvious that Search for the Doctor is much more ambitious.

But, it's my general expectation that the following novel I cover, while less ambitious, will be more of a challenge to cover.

Decide Your Destiny: The Time Crocodile
to be added

Strangely, it seems to me that this story should already be valid based on that tricky 2020 revision to T:VS:

"(This rule should not be considered to apply to the likes of AUDIO: Flip-Flop, where the "choose your own adventure" format is pastiched to depict "timey-wimey" phenomena, and the authorial intent is clearly that all the paths are equally and simultaneously real.)"

- T:VS, on the ban on branching stories

FASA's Solo-Play Adventure Games
We are now very soon going to be discussing FASA's infamous Roleplaying guides, and how they connect to this general topic. But before we do, I think it's important that we first talk about two "gamebooks" which the company put out in December 1986: Doctor Who and the Vortex Crystal and Doctor Who and the Rebel's Gamble

These two books were greatly different from the typical "roleplaying games" associated with FASA. Instead of being simply a guide which supplied a premise for a group, the books gave a single player the full text of their adventure, with the different "paths" spread out across numerous branching options. In most cases, the player would discover which "ending" they would face by rolling dice, meaning that it's fair to say that these novels were simply the Find Your Fate novels but with extra steps.

And when I say extra steps, I mean extra steps.

The difference between these two is that the Find Your Fate novels were clearly written for children, whereas the Solo-Play Adventure Games were meant to appeal to "serious, GAMER adults."

to be finished

At some point, the technical side of this comes down to editing ideology.

Personally, when I am writing articles about classic series stories, I don't think that every single part of the story needs to be on every character page. So for instance, how many times is someone kidnapped during the plot of TV: The War Games? The answer is far too many. Having Jamie McCrimmon's page list, in excruciating detail, every single time he was ever briefly kidnapped in every single story to feature him is not how I think we should cover stories which feature him. And because of that, the idea of an optional "filler" arc does not bother me, because even if it wasn't a branching detail... I wouldn't think it needs to be covered in most cases anyways.

FASA Role Playing Games
So it's quite obvious that the FASA roleplaying games could be defined as an "origin point" for this general topic, as the games have been non-canon/non-valid since we launched T:CANON in 2005. However, the extent of how "banned" they are has been widely defined by the justification given. Originally, they were banned for contradicting the TV series, most infamously by saying that the Monk and the War Chief were actually early incarnations of the Master. So, from 2005 through 2012, nothing from the FASA series was allowed on in-universe sections of the website.

However, in 2012 the ban was recontextualized to actually be about the FASA campaigns not being "internally consistent fiction." This, ironically, eventually lead to more FASA material being made valid. CIA File Extracts is an example of this, as we now cover it as a novel separate from the campaign. This ironically means we do cover the infamous Monk/Master/War Chief discrepancy that the original T:CANON was banning coverage of. I furthermore believe that, if the topic were properly revisited today, there are also likely countless "features" in the FASA material that have valid claim to be on the website.

So today's topic is not about any of these things, but instead just the roleplaying campaigns themselves. I am including these because I have so often seen them cited as the worst case disaster situation. "If we validate Attack of the Graske, next we'll have to validate the FASA Roleyplaying games!" and that sort of thing.

So before we get into this, my point here isn't to argue with conviction that we have to cover these, but merely to establish a potential theory on how that work work, and furthermore how these Roleplaying games are clearly not the same as all other interactive fiction.

to be added

Battle For the Universe
I have decided to end this forum with the 1989 "narrative board game" Battle for the Universe. My reason for this is that, out of all the cases I studied for this analysis, this is the story which has the most variables and the fewest concrete details that can be said for certain.

to be added

Analysis & Conclusions
So at the end of the day, we've now gone through some of the most simple multi-path fiction on the website, through to some of the most complex and headache-inducing. So our goal now, as we've agreed previously, is to come to a conclusion on "where the line is," and if all the stories listed above should be made invalid. So, what are my thoughts?

In my opinion, this is another odd case where this wiki has essentially invented an entire genre out of things that don't really go together. Attack of the Graske, online MMOGs, Find Your Fate, and the FASA Roleplaying strategies are not in the same category of media. And I think it's a little silly for us to stand up and say that because maaaay want to invalidate something very far down the line, we must also invalidate every single piece of fiction to ever feature more than one ending or slightly alternating dialogue.

In reality, I think the stories above can be split into two categories. The first is interactive fiction, and the second is fiction modules. Interactive fiction is things like the Find Your Fate books, or the online Who MMOG. Fiction modules are things like the roleplaying story guides and the board game discussed above.

So now that we’ve identified the proper categories that describe these stories, let’s talk more about the theoretical nature of covering both as valid. Again, these are mutually exclusive, and I’m not trying to argue we have to validate EVERYTHING in this thread. I’m just trying to set boundaries and define a potential guide to how wikifying these things would work if we did cover them.

Fiction modules

 * 1) Any roleplaying games which provide general guides on how to structure your campaign, without just giving you the full text of the adventure itself.
 * 2) Some board games
 * 3) A good number of games which are player vs player

So with fiction modules, the idea is that we would cover that information that is in-universe, but not necessarily the splintering aspects of the story in-action. So with The Lords of Destiny guide above, we would cover the narrative as presented there but wouldn't get into the nitty gritty of how many people were there or all the infinite character bios or anything like that. We just cover the fiction as it's printed.

With Battle For the Universe, we would cover the information in the guide material, the cards, and other fictional details. But we wouldn't cover the “story” of playing the board game with your friends. There is no need to say "This Doctor may have regenerated several times and even died, according to various tellings" because all we are covering is the in-universe material that came in the box.

Interactive fiction

 * 1) Attack of the Graske
 * 2) Doctor Who and the micro:bit
 * 3) Infinity
 * 4) Find Your Fate Novels
 * 5) Decide Your Destiny Novels
 * 6) Doctor Who and the Rebel's Gamble
 * 7) Doctor Who and the Vortex Crystal
 * 8) Worlds in Time
 * 9) The Saviour of Time
 * 10) The Lonely Assassins
 * 11) Most games which are player vs environment

When it comes to interactive fiction, which is nearly everything else on this list, we can use some of the editing concepts which have been introduced throughout this forum.

Firstly, specific phrases ("According to one telling of this account", "In one path for this adventure", "One possibility was", etc) can make it clear what is happening without breaking our aesthetic style choice of the wiki being in-universe. This automatically covers most diverging paths, alternate dialogue options, and the like.

In the immediate future, it is likely that our story citation system will eventually allow us to cite specific page numbers, endings, and markers with ease.

When a character can have their name customized, we can use the most basic shared element to make a page anyways. If the Twelfth Doctor calls the player a human, we can make Human (media name). If the Eleventh Doctor calls you a companion, we can make Companion (media name).

And in general, part of the original policy created by User:Tangerineduel in Forum:We need a policy on videogames still stands. We are covering the content of the fiction, but not the gameplay itself.

When a game allows you to customize your team but ignores this in the cutscenes, we will use the cutscenes to inform how we recap the story, as we do now with GAME: Legacy. There is no need to cite “dice rolls” as in-universe, nor “coming back to life” unless it’s explicit in the text. And, to use an example from an already-valid piece of fiction, there's no need for River Song's page to describe her collecting easter eggs in GAME: The Eternity Clock.

In cases where a character appears only in a single branching story, thorough coverage should be encouraged on their page. In cases where a character appears in a plethora of other fiction, we should instead encourage editors to generalize and group endings. The Tenth Doctor’s page does not need to list every potential origin of the Time Crocodile, nor should the Fourth Doctor’s page list every potential time he might have ever regenerated into himself or died in Doctor Who and the Vortex Crystal. "Omega might have won (PROSE: list out all the bad endings) but one source suggested the Doctor and Dinah were able to defeat him. (PROSE: THE REAL ENDING)" No need to be over-zealous.

Regardless of if these stories are validated, I furthermore would like to argue (perhaps controversially) for the creation of two specific resources: Template:You and You (disambiguation). The former would be a general template to be placed on the bottom of pages like Dinah (Search for the Doctor) and Human (Attack of the Graske), and the latter would be a general directional documentation of all “self-insert” characters.

I would also recommend that, if these stories are validated, we find some specific split segment in the Companion templates for “interactive fiction” stories. That way, video games and PROSE subsections are not flooded with Human 1, Human 2, Human 3, etc. It should also be noted that some interactive fiction does not really feature branching elements, such as TV: bit; which is interactive but doesn't come packaged with "bad endings" or the like.

With the basic theory of coverage now laid out in full, let's wrap things up.

What is left to ask?
Now that the intro post is finally wrapping up, each of you now have four questions you need to answer in the discussion below.


 * 1) Do you think everything listed in this post should remain invalid on TARDIS Data Core?
 * 2) If you think the earlier “simple” stories should be valid, but the latter “complex” ones shouldn't, where is the exact line where stories are too complex for the wiki?
 * 3) Do you support fiction modules being valid on the wiki for coverage?
 * 4) Do you support interactive fiction being valid on the wiki?

Personally, I fully believe that interactive fiction has every right to be valid on the website. However, fiction modules are a little bit of a grey area for me. My main worry is if they pass Rule 1 (AKA, are fiction modules themselves fiction? Or, as tools meant to create fiction, are they a little less than fiction?) and if all examples pass Rule 4. I think it's one thing to validate a module which is presented fully in-universe... But when it comes to those modules which are explicitly out-of-universe instructions, it's a big grey area to just wikify them as-if they were in-universe. However, I think doing it is technically possible, the question is if it stands up to our rules of inclusion.

A quick note is that there's a lot of stories which are "multipath stories" which I have not included in this OP because I think they would need a separate discussion, such as stage plays, LEGO Dimensions, and escape games. With that, please tell me what you think, and thank you for reading! OS25🤙☎️ 22:30, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Discussion
to be added

Writing stuff down
To quickly clarify, this post will not cover every story I seek to validate through this suggested change. Instead it covers a strong selection of stories to identify the "line" where wikifying these concepts becomes impossible, as it's always been said.

I am creating this section to write down other stories I might add to my analysis above:


 * Doctor Who and the micro:bit (TV story)

This is sadly a case where this rule has actively effected a lot of fiction which is now defunct or lost.

Segments which are not finished

 * Infinity
 * Decide Your Destiny: The Time Crocodile
 * FASA's Solo-Play Adventure Games
 * FASA Role Playing Games
 * Battle For the Universe