by quuxplusone | 2025-09-23 01:09:17+00:00
Back in the mid-to-late-1990s, when Lynx was the browser of choice, I encountered a collaborative online CYOA just like this. I have always thought it was called "The Neverending Story," although of course that's also the name of a movie. ...This person [3] also thinks it was called "Never Ending Story," and that it was still online as late as 2011(!).

You start at the "entrance" paragraph, where there are four or five choices — or, if you don't like any of those, you can just type in your own choice. The game then prompts you for what happens when someone selects that choice; and choice and consequence both go into some database on the server end, ready to be served to the next player. Anyway, you can follow the existing paths until you get to a dead end, at which point the game tells you to create at least two more choices and responses, so the next player will get to play a little longer.

As Gwern writes:

> So [any] player can ‘author’ an adventure by carefully curating a premise and then choosing actions and backing up and editing, creating a full-fledged scenario [...]

And that's exactly how it felt: By going down different paths at the start, you could navigate into a "Lovecraftian horror" subtree, an "alien abduction" subtree, a "romance" subtree, etc.

The technology at play here is just a minor extrapolation of the BASIC era's "Guess An Animal" game [1].

Plugging an LLM into the thing seems... well, frankly, it seems unnecessary. The core engine/database doesn't need an LLM for anything; the only thing the LLM would help with is coming up with new choices and new response paragraphs "less tediously" than we could do it in the 1990s. But the uncharitable way to describe that is: you could use an LLM to fill your CYOA game with AI slop, instead of hand-crafted texts that are meaningful to some real person in the world. ...Well, OK, maybe an LLM could provide a first rough pass on content moderation; or power a diagnostic like "Your new choice seems similar to this existing choice: [X] Are you sure you want to add this branch?". So there's places for LLMs in this. But I wouldn't use an LLM for content.

Several years ago I finally decided to try reimplementing the-thing-I-recall-being-named-"The-Neverending-Story" myself [2]; but I didn't get far, because (A) I've been too lazy to do anything requiring server-side hosting since Heroku went belly-up, and (B) opening such a thing up to the public means you're getting into the content-moderation business (Gwern also alludes to this) and ain't nobody got time for that. (See also "Why do you require an email address?" in [1].)

The guy in [3] doesn't think that [4] is the same website; but that's exactly the sort of locked-down, account-required, highly walled interface I'd have expected it to evolve into over the past 20 years. (However, it seems to have been essentially walled since <=2004, according to the Wayback Machine: [5].)

[1] - https://www.animalgame.com/play/faq.php

[2] - https://github.com/Quuxplusone/NeverendingStory

[3] - https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/ezx6kh/tomtw...

[4] - https://infinite-story.com/

[5] - http://web.archive.org/web/20040318190551/http://www.choose-...