Exercise: Choosing Character instead of Story

Published: 2026-07-20
Applies to: Crème de la Crème
Teaching focus:
- narrative-structure
- branching-structure

Character and story have always been in a bind. Story can't exist without characters, and characters without story aren't doing anything. Often in interactive fiction we frame the interactivity as "these are the plot points you will move through" and character is anything that happens along the way.

I believe this month's game takes the opposite approach: you play out a character and the story coalesces around you. Our game is Crème de la Crème, a ChoiceScript game and one of the most highly regarded games published under Choice of Games. It's an enormous game -- 440,000 words -- although you won't see most of it in a playthrough.

Notes on playing

Crème de la Crème is the first game in the Crème de la Crème series. We'll only look at that game. It's quite long by itself, so there is no expectations of playing the game through in full any number of times.

Crème de la Crème is a a paid game. The official Choice of Games page shows how to buy it from CoG. You can get it on Steam, in the Apple App store, the Android App store, or via Amazon.

You don't need to buy the full game. There is a free introductory demo of the first three chapters at the bottom of the main page. This will be sufficient for a play through.

Exercise Objectives

Slow play the game with a notebook beside you. Note when given a choice whether you think this is a plot choice or a character choice. Or perhaps both!

Play tasks

Near the start of the game choose for yourself a particular character (like an earnest, academically serious student). Write that character archetype down so you don't forget it. Play exactly to those character notes.
Repeat the first task with a new playthrough but with a radically different character in mind (like a socially ambitious and scandalous student).

Post-play tasks

In a separate session or more, explore the following related tasks.

Writing exercise

Write an 800-1200-word interactive social scene like a first date, a job interview, or filing a complaint in a bureaucracy.

Throughout the scene there should be at least two important choices to make, corresponding to, say, four distinct social qualities. For example:

Sincerity
Composure
Manipulation
Audacity

Each of these options should express a recognisably different protagonist, be plausible reactions given the situation, reveal character on both sides of the table, and then immediately return to the same plot destination. You're not making 4 (or 16!) separate narratives, but providing context to a single one via character.

Design exercise

Plan out a larger set of scenes that specifically deals with failure. Choose a different social scene. We are going to plot out story points as a flowchart without writing the actual text.

Assume the PC has three social attributes (eg cleverness, charm, coolness; but you can pick your own) and there are a few NPCs aligned in different ways to those social attributes.

The story should have, say, five scenes. For each social attribute, design:

a success outcome for having a high value
a failure outcome for having a low value

Failures do not have to have immediate, visceral consequence -- it might be resolved later.

In your map note:

Where choices change world state
Where we might have a conditional variant of a scene (or just the text) because of state changes
Where we can merge paths
When consequences fire (immediate vs delayed) and their frequency

Implementation exercise

Implement one or both of the above in an appropriate framework like ChoiceScript or Twine.

Try to avoid implementing premature endings as a way to curtail an explosion of detail. Deal with the complexity in this small but dynamic space.