When You Have A Choice In Your Story: Choices ‘Slow Burn’
Having a choice in your story
I have been examining my relationships with stories – what I gravitate to, where I see myself and how I consume them. Having a choice in this, is a very new experience for me. LizzyBeth reminded me of an app called Choices with interactive books. I was more familiar with Episode, which was fun in a novel social media way. Or maybe that’s just because I browsed that way back when it launched and the landing page book was a classic teenage school romance full of decisions about what to wear and who to crush on. Choices, in comparison felt a little staid and slow-moving. Back then.
Perhaps I’m just older. And it’s been hard to consume stories. Anxiety has made it very hard to focus on my primary love – books. I tried everything from re-reading old favorites to exploring unfamiliar genres (LGBTQ+? Thrillers? 20th century classics? Dark Academia?). Nothing stuck. The film medium has never been my favorite and now it comes loaded with deliberate triggers-for-engagement, clickbaitey plotlines, PR-based noise and the ever increasing assault on our attention spans, sleep cycles and mental wellbeing’s. Choices books sit somewhere comfortably in between.
App-based interactive books
It’s a bit closer to reading a comic than watching a show. And then again, it’s a bit like one panel at a time combined with a which-way book. I remember owning one of the latter when I was a kid. ‘Choose your own story!’ promised the cover and yielded over dozens of combinations of plot twists through the adventures of the Justice League of America. That was my first introduction to multiverse storylines and crossovers.
On the other hand, Choices is different from a traditional book in that you can’t go back to a page you like so much or linger on a turn of phrase. There are only dialogues and an occasional screen transition text. You could choose to repeat a chapter but it’s more akin to having another go on the amusement park ride. This format is not for ruminating over the experience as you go through it.
And finally, Goodreads doesn’t include Choices Books. So the afterglow of a book lover’s passionate review isn’t available. I believe there are fandoms for different books and characters. But fandoms have their own entry barriers and ticket price (even if only in social interactions rather than money). I wouldn’t rule it out. As it were, I’ve only recently began embracing fandom culture, with my Mad Men posts and following Anu’s blog and her fantics about some of the major Choices Books.
Who are you in the Choices story?
All Choices Books allow you to customise (in different degrees), your MC (Main Character). So far I’ve chosen close to my real life being in terms of gender, hair, eye and skin colour. Some books also allow a degree of customisation of these features in the main LI (Love Interest). I haven’t yet come across one that lets you customise the LI’s gender but most of the plotlines allow for alternate LIs of different genders.
That said it feels fairly obvious in the books I’ve read so far, which LI is the preferred one by the authors. The preferred LI usually gets many more redemption opportunities, has significantly many more interactions with the MC and the universe around (plot, other characters) seems to support them disproportionately over the alternates. Still, it has been fun to play with the sexuality of my MC just for the hell of it. If I ever get around to re-reading a book, I will probably try it with a gender-switched MC.
I wasn’t really as aware of the impact these made on me as a consumer/reader of books till recently. In retrospect, of course. These books are about having the agency to play out storylines as you like. But when you and your realities are not represented adequately or are even misrepresented, how appealing is that going to be?
This is what it feels like to be a woman in a world that focuses solely on the stories of privileged cis men. Or a queer person when all stories (romance, erotica, porn, teen fiction) center hetero relations. Or a brown person in a formerly colonised country when all popular narratives take a white, coloniser viewpoint. You don’t notice that it’s a problem because you’re so used to being established as the exception, the other. It only clicks the first time you see something closer to a world you recognise. And that’s what this book did for me.
Colourful, tasty ‘Slow Burn’
I’ve read a few Choices Books so far and only just completed the one that I liked so much that I had to talk about it. I haven’t been drawn as much to the big popular series like The Royal Romance and others about which the fanverse has much to say. TBH, it’s intimidating. Opinions are our identities in online fandoms. I feel like I’m still in infancy among giants who don’t have the patience or compassion to let others grow into their own impressions. But ‘Slow Burn’ seems like it flew under the radar for a lot of Choices folks.
With a single standalone book, Slow Burn carries none of the trappings of cliffhanger endings and hook-and-line plots. It’s a nice, sumptuous book about food. The default sprite (character imagery) for the MC presents as a black woman. Neither race nor gender are spelt out. This is the first interactive book I’ve seen where the default does not begin with a white woman (for romance) or man (for adventure).
Slow Burn‘s second MC is announced before they appear and at this point, the reader/player can select their gender and look. The gender choice is a list with ‘A woman’ appearing before ‘A man’. And the skin colour/hair choices start with a dark skinned person with Eurocentric hair, then a dark skin with a more obviously ‘black’ hairstyle before we find a brown-haired white person.
I chose ‘A woman’ as second MC for my replay and delightfully, after circling through the above options, I was also shown the default male character (which I had picked in my first playthrough). That’s a really nice way to not slot gender since like I said, nowhere is the gender labelled. I was hoping that if I picked the male-presenting sprite under ‘A woman’, the story would henceforth refer to them as ‘she’. But a trial run revealed that to not be so. A missed opportunity, there.
The desi tadka in Slow Burn
There are two LIs and the preference while present is decidedly less pronounced. I got to end Slow Burn with a romance meter equally with both and without absolutely having to end up with either one. And they are both persons of colour, albeit with very Western/Christian names. Other characters also have more melanin in their visible skin than the usual. And they have last names like Vyas which is decidely Indian.
I can’t remember the last time an American taught me something about my culture. When I first saw a Slow Burn character in a saree, I did a double take. Nothing about them cued desi, not their name, location or role within the relationships of the story. And that’s how I chanced upon the Indo-Caribbean community. Isn’t it wonderful when a book opens up your mind to something that didn’t exist in your mental landscape before?
The story didn’t make a whole thing of it to prove how well it hit the diversity meter. Instead, like with every chapter, it focussed on the food – such a nuanced way to talk about culture and politics. This cultural realisation also added so much colour (heh!) to the main story.
The food of life
I’ve talked about finding my solace during the pandemic in Food Fiction. Slow Burn was the perfect addition to that list, centering the food rather than having it be a prop. All things food – flavour, feelings, politics and identity. Slow Burn also gives the reader a little gift over and above other Choices books when it presents each recipe in a snackable image and encourages readers to screenshot and try them.
LizzyBeth tells me that she sometimes cooks foods to go with a particular podcast that she is listening to. Slow Burn similarly gives you another dimension to enjoy a story. What a wonderful way to elevate the book experience! These books are helping me experience how food is more than nutrition. They’re gateways into the journeys into culture, history and our own identity.
A Choices book that frames this narrative was just the meal I needed! The Choices app is available to download for free. The books are free to read but paying will get you some additional features (such as endless keys that unlock chapters). Apparently Slow Burn let paid users actually try out those recipes in the kitchen before presenting them. A lovely way of engaging both paid and non-paying readers! I can’t comment on how race-sensitive the other books are but I was glad to see the makers be cognizant of what it means to really give people a choice.
The Choices app is available for download on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. The Choices fandom has a Wiki here. If you check it out, do drop me a comment here telling me about the book you’re playing and what you think of it.
I’m so glad to find another person who loves Slow Burn! I loved the concept and I loved the almost-episodic nature of it. I really also loved how the diamond scenes have the main character plan their own twist to a cultural classic, and that it’s a really good fusion in the way that the main character presents their own version but the main thing is to respect the techniques of the people who taught them how to make that dish.
I recall, back when this book was just getting released, a friend of mine on Tumblr decided to create a food-focused Tumblr blog inspired by it. Unfortunately she tired of the book and didn’t continue (mostly because she wasn’t into episodic books that much) but it was fun to see what this particular book could inspire.
I loved “Choose your own adventure” books when I was kid. 🙂
Choices sounds like a really interesting evolution to that kind of book. They’ve started making new CYOA books, but they’re simply more stories in the same format as the 80’s editions. This is a clever way to look forward and use the technology we’ve created for new kinds of artistic expression.
@Topher: Indeed. I was rather unimpressed by Netflix’s first CYOA story but I haven’t checked out the later ones. Choices definitely is taking an interesting leap forward.