Questing on the Web

In this post, I sic my urge to classify things on a particular genre of frequently multimodal literature, a form of interactive fiction born out of the Internet: the web quest.

My journey

One day in August 2022 while idly scrolling, I came across an extremely pretty pixel art of Moondancer (the character from My Little Pony). To my surprise, there was an entire story in the description, and as I visited the source (d20 Pony), the premise immediately became clear: it was a roleplaying game where players post what they want the collective player character to do, and from this the gamemaster decides what action is taken in the next update. As a My Little Pony (MLP) fanfiction enthusiast, I was immediately hooked and spent the next three days binging the 800 or so updates that had accumulated from 2015 through 2022. When I had caught up, I began participating myself, posting my own suggestions for what “we” should do.^[1]

Later, I stumbled across a Discord server dedicated to such stories specifically in the My Little Pony fandom, and then to questden.org and the now defunct anonpone.com, which made me realize there was a whole world out there for such stories. In some circles, they are referred to as quests, with the “gamemaster” (GM) being referred to as the “questmaster” (QM); I will also call them “web quests” to be more specific.

Features

Let’s describe the genre more precisely. I would consider the following features to be essential.

• The story branches are not preset (as in a typical videogame story or Choose Your Own Adventure novel), but generated by the questmaster as needed.
• Actions are decided on (and often, though not necessarily submitted or suggested) by players.

I would consider the following features to not be strictly essential, but they hold for almost all works in the genre.

• In addition to the core principle that players decide what action is taken, there are some commonalities in how collective decision-making works.
  • Either freeform choices (commonly known as “commands”^[2] from the “commands” in interactive fiction/text adventure games), or choices suggested by the QM (whose flexibility or openness to other options can vary).
  • Commands are submitted asynchronously. A QM posts and waits a certain time for commands. Players don’t have to all be online in chat, in a conference call, or at a physical table at the same time.
  • Necessarily, there is some method of deciding what command occurs. If one command is to be chosen, common methods are random selection, “clustering” (the QM groups commands together, and chooses the group with the largest number of commands), or voting (when a QM provides preset options and tallies the votes for each option). A QM may even choose their favorite command, regardless of popularity.
  • Instead of choosing one command, a QM may choose to include suggestions from other commands besides the one chosen, or execute multiple commands that aren’t incompatible. Nevertheless, there still needs to be a way to decide between incompatible actions.
  • Other players’ suggestions are usually visible to all so that players can build on each others ideas, with the notable exception of games run via asks on Tumblr.
  • Acting as the “author”, final interpretation of the command/action taken (and of course, the events that transpire) is up to the QM when writing the next update. (This is unlike some other similar concepts where players directly write parts of the story.)
• One main, shared storyline instead of separate texts generated individually for each player based on their own inputs (as in a text adventure). A quest with branching storylines may be possible, but I haven’t seen any extensive branching/alternate timelines besides the short “bad end” branches in Moonstuck (example) as that would be a lot of work, and there aren’t good tools for this.
• Story conveyed primarily through text (or text in an image). Most have artwork, but it’s not strictly required. As with other forms of web fiction, it is possible to include multimedia experiences such as linking music to listen to while reading or embedding simple games in Adobe Flash or more modern web technologies.
• Relatively lightweight (rules-lite) systems or mechanics, if any. Because of the asynchronous nature of games, a system designed for tabletop roleplay like DnD or Fate would not be suitable due to the frequent need for live feedback from players. Since games are enjoyed more as literature (in the theater of the mind) than as a game with mechanics, they are not really required. d20 Pony has a written, lightweight system, but many quests don’t have any at all.
• Usually the players and the audience are equivalent. In other words, anyone who can access the text can also suggest actions. This isn’t strictly required; one could host a private game with most of these features, or have a few handpicked players while everyone else watches, though I’m not aware of any examples.
• The content/game logs are public. My impression is that this is usually the case, but naturally, due to selection bias, I have no knowledge of how frequently people play games that fit this definition privately in Discord or Google Docs.
• There is usually one player character period, or at least one player character at a time. There may be companions of this character (a “party” in the TTRPG sense) that are loyal and can be asked to do things, but the POV is usually on this one player character. However, this isn’t a hard requirement. Problem Sleuth and other MS Paint Adventures by Andrew Hussie (who also authored Homestuck) contain multiple player characters, with perspective switching between them, and occasionally acting simultaneously.

The following features are common points of differentiation.

• Roleplaying may or may not be encouraged/required. The strictness of this requirement depends on the game and the QM. For example, d20 Pony’s rules ask players not to metagame.^[3] However, sometimes, as in Tumblr ask blogs, players are talking to the character rather than submitting actions as the character.
• There may or may not be an in-universe justification for the source of the commands.
  • Some examples of in-universe justifications are that the player character has “multiple personality disorder” or was injected with an idea-generating AI, etc.)
  • It can simply be taken as part of suspension of disbelief or the conventions of the genre. If so, commands are often rationalized post hoc as based on the character’s own motivations. In d20 Pony, the player character’s personality (and instinctive/uncommanded actions decided by the QM) are decided by these justifications. For example, if the players have the character flirt a lot, the QM will start writing them as a flirt.
• Varying update length and frequency. There is a tradeoff: with short commands, players are incentivized to submit more granular actions and receive more granular updates at the cost of more work for the QM, while with long commands, players are incentivized to submit more detailed updates and may feel less inclined to “waste” a week trying something out. Quests hosted on 4chan frequently update multiple times a day in bursts while the questmaster is online. d20 Pony, initially hosted on Tumblr before transitioning to a self-hosted website, had short (25-200 word), daily updates, but then transitioned to longer (400-500 word) weekly updates, resulting in a somewhat different pacing/feel.
• Varying frequency of consultation. Varying amounts of in-universe time pass between prompting the player for actions, and the players’ character enjoys a varying degree of autonomy. This naturally happens in the case of long, infrequent updates. For example, quests that lean more literary may only consult players at key moments in the story (for example, see The Equestrian Equation), with the “player” character actually being fairly autonomous, and the players aren’t really asked to roleplay as the character.

History

According to the interactive comics TVTropes page, Ruby Quest and other quests on /tg/ on 4chan, then MS Paint Adventures, are the examples that popularized and defined the genre genre. Ruby Quest is likely where the term “quest” originated. There is a very good article on the history of questing here, specifically on how it initially took inspiration from text adventures.

Naming

The genre doesn’t seem to have a commonly accepted and universally used name. Here are some potential names I’ve seen or thought of.

Quests

The term “quest”, while rather generic, is used by 4chan and 4chan clones like Questden. I’ve come up with the term “web quest” for this article to be more specific. Alternatively, “audience-participation quests” could be equally descriptive, in cases where there isn’t a distinction between the players and the audience.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The term “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) is a natural one that was used by anonpone and the aforementioned Discord server. However, the term isn’t really suitable for a couple reasons: (1) it’s heavily overloaded to describe various similar-but-not-the-same things, and (2) there are legal issues with using it.

I have observed the term CYOA used to describe the following forms of interactive fiction.

• Novels/books in print form with preset, prewritten choices and outcomes. Wikipedia says the generic term is “gamebook”.
• Text adventures/interactive fiction in game form, like Zork, also with preset choices and outcomes, but even more varied output than a book.
• Visual novels, again with preset choices and outcomes.
• Food-for-thought would-you-rather posts that imitate a videogame or RPG setup process, mainly on /r/makeyourchoice.
• The genre described in this article.

As for legal issues with its use, the term is a trademark owned by Chooseco LLC, which has taken legal action to defend it. For example, some game devs on itch.io had their games suspended after the company issues takedown notices,^[4][5] and it sued Netflix for using the term.^[6] A questmaster using it to describe or advertise their work risks such adverse outcomes.

Interactive comics

The closest page for the genre on TVTropes is “Interactive Comic”. I don’t think this is the best term, because I’ve seen the term “quest” used far more often, and because “comic” isn’t an accurate descriptor for most quests. There are quests that don’t have very much emphasis on the art, and most of the time, the text, and even all or part of the dialogue, is not drawn into the art like a comic.

Play by post

Another term is “play by post”. However, this is also an umbrella term and can refer to other phenomena.

• Play-by-chat, like when a GM organizes a conventional game of DnD but over Discord, or multi-user dungeons, or if one individual plays one character and another individual plays another, without there really being a gamemaster.
• Play-by-email, where the gamemaster individually and privately emails all players potentially distinct updates.

Other names

I considered other terms as well, but they are not nearly as popular as the term “quest”.

• “Thread games” after /r/ThreadGames (example).
• “Gamefiction”, which I made up, derived from the term “gamebook”.

Platforms

There are various platforms that a quest can be hosted on. A common thread is that either the platform isn’t dedicated to questing, or the software powering the website is repurposed.

4chan and 4chan clones

In addition to entire works of fiction, quests can appear on 4chan itself, for example on the /tg/ (tabletop gaming) board before they were banned; I have also seen quests appear on the /mlp/ board. There are also 4chan clones such as Questden and anonpone dedicated to quests.

On 4chan, every comment in a thread boosts the thread to the top of the board, perhaps resulting in the format being artificially more popular than other types of threads.

Tumblr

Tumblr has a long-running, related tradition of so-called “ask blogs” in which the “ask box” is used to send “asks” that can then be replied to by the blog owner, who can play a character (for example, askthecmcs and twi-replies). This is different from a typical conception of a “quest” as commenters aren’t roleplaying as the character/persona in the blog, but instead talking to the character. If there ends up being a real story, and commenters offer suggestions that the character follows, then it could be considered a sort of quest. There is at least one example of a more traditional roleplay quest in d20 Pony, before it migrated to its own site.

AO3 and other fanfiction websites

It’s possible to host a quest on a platform dedicated to fanfiction, or at least archive it to one. I haven’t heard of quests on AO3, but Fimfiction (a site for My Little Pony fanfiction) has hosted two excellent MLP/Mass Effect crossovers with audience participation: The Equestrian Equation and Shades of Twilight.

Sufficient Velocity

There is a subforum “Quests” on the Sufficient Velocity forum site dedicated to quests. The software (xenForo) is repurposed forum software, but it includes procedures/tools for vote tallying and dice rolling.

Self-hosted

If the features available on other platforms are insufficient for the questmaster, they may choose to create their own site for maximal flexibility. d20 Pony has a custom website with custom pages such as an inventory, map, and ability/trait page reminiscent of a videogame.

Examples

To conclude, here’s a list of examples of the genre that I mentioned in this article.

• d20 Pony (TVTropes)
• The Equestrian Equation (TVTropes) and Shades of Twilight
• The Last Trace
• Moonstuck (TVTropes)
• Problem Sleuth (TVTropes) (and other MS Paint Adventures)

The TVTropes page for Questden has a list of Questden adventures famous enough to get a TVTropes page.

Negative examples

While language is malleable, in my conception of what a web quest is, I would consider the following to not be examples.

• Zork and other text adventures, for example, ones created with Twine
• Mass Effect videogames, or other videogames with preset choices
• DnD or Fate played over Discord
• West Marches I am on the fence about, depending on how the after-action reports are presented

Glossary

Here I create a small glossary of terms I’ve seen relating to this genre.

• A web quest or simply a quest is a work of fiction in which players decide the actions of one or more characters through successive rounds of commenting.
• A player is a reader and participant.
• The questmaster or QM is the author of a quest, and the one who gets the final say in deciding what happens.
• A command is an action suggested by a player. Sometimes there is a distinction between comments that are simply commenting on the story and commands, which are intended to be acted on, as in d20 Pony, or sometimes there is none besides the QM’s reading of a player’s intentions.
• A update or a post is a new portion of the quest created by the QM and open for commands.