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.

Introduction

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

And I think this is why this topic remains one of the most contentious on the website, because at the end of the day we can't REALLY say that these stories fail any of our our four little rules. Are they fiction? Yes. Are they commercially licensed? Yes. Have they been officially released? Yes. Were they intended to be set in the Doctor Who Universe? Yes.

There have been many reasons given over the years as per why we don't cover multipath story structures. Some say they don't pass Rule 1, others say they fail Rule 4. But from my experience of talking to site admins over the years, there real reason is often unspoken because it sounds too silly to write down on paper. That being... That many years ago, we decided as a website that multi-path stories are fundamentally annoying to wiki-fy, and thus we should disclude them with prejudice.

This was especially true for the most complex examples. So it was decided to group all of these together in one category, and invalidate every single one to save us the trouble.

So I think that properly evaluating this topic has been widely earned as of today.

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 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.

Addressing history and precedent

 * please note, this segment is currently me just jotting down thoughts. I understand it leaves out some important historical beats and such.

The basic reasoning behind making “divergent narrative stories” invalid was these three ideas:


 * 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
 * 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.

Sometimes one of these would be brought up, sometimes two at a time, but the third thing was very constant was the REAL reason.


 * this section will include quotes from debates. I intend to cover the "origin point" of when this rule started, and also discuss our wiki's sudden shift from "What is canon?" to "What is valid?" and the inherit ideological contradictions caused by this.

A very important moment in this story took place in November 2015 with Thread:180396.

In said post, I proposed a change to the terminology we use for stories we do not consider valid sources. At this point, we were using “NOTDWU”, short for “Not Doctor Who Universe”. I felt, as I do now, that this was a contradiction of T:CANON. Saying something “is not set in THE Docotor Who Universe” is essentially the same as saying “this is not set in THE Doctor Who canon.” It’s just extra steps. Furthermore, not all NOTVALID stories are there for failing Rule 4, and some valid stories are not set in the Doctor's universe at all.

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 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.

These are just a few of the reasons that I believe revisiting this topic is a valid option for the forums.

Precedent in Valid stories
When it comes to the history of "branching narratives" and their coverage on TARDIS Wiki, it's important to first discuss the connection this topic has with video games.

At one point, video games in the DWU was the most contentious topic on this website, and it all began in June 2010, with City of the Daleks, the first game in The Adventure Games.

So what was once contentious about these games? Well, in the games, you can lose. You can actually die, or worse, cease to exist. The feeling among some admins 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 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.

Doctor Who: Infinity
We’re going to begin this post properly with the NOTVALID story most similar to content we already cover -- GAME: Infinity.

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)

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.

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.

The Lonely Assassins
to be added

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 levels, you had a completed episode of the game. You could also type your own responses 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. 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 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.

Sixth Doctor Find Your Fate
Okay, so here's where we start to get back to stories with 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.

this section is not remotely completed or even started, I just have some notes

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. For instance:


 * While one telling of this source indicated that Omega was victorious, destroyed Earth, and conquered Gallifrey (PROSE: ) most other tellings indicated that the Dcotor was successful in defeating Omega. (PROSE: )

Other than the error message caused by the test template not liking the story's infobox, you can see here that this allows us to cover the various "endings" of the novel as co-existing sources. I figured we could either cite the page numbers, or if we had a complicated plot description we could cite the endings. The first ending physically in the book could be "Ending 1", and so on.

But a big question worth asking is: if we don’t count death cutscenes as part of the coverage, should we not count these short, automatic bad endings only meant to cause you to flip to the previous “checkpoint” in the book? And especially, what if that ending implicitly features the Doctor’s regeneration or death?

My take is that we should still cover “bad endings” in these books as one potential telling of the source, but certainly one of the lesser ones. For instance, here’s a possible passage based on War of the Robots:


 * ’’One possibility was that the Tenth Doctor was killed during this adventure (PROSE: War of the Robots, page #?) However, most other sources indicated that this Doctor survived to later regenerate due to radiation poisoning in 2010. (TV: The End of Time, et. al) Indeed, other tellings in the source indicated that the Doctor triumphed. (PROSE: Book name, page #?)’’

I think covering "bad endings" that could be read as part of a completed narrative is different from discarding death animations and the like. Furthermore, as many illustrations in these novels depict bad endings, I think covering this is really a must.

to be finished

The Time Crocodile
to be added

Strangely, it seems to me that this story should already be valid based on the definition given at 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

This seems to imply that when the branching narrative is justified in-universe, the story should be valid. Am I incorrect in this reading?

FAFSA Role Playing Games
to be added

Battle For the Universe
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Discussion
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