About ChoiceBox

I first conceived of and even specified ChoiceBox, under that very name, in the year 2000. Unfortunately, it promised to be many times too large a task, and I was a extremely busy at the time.

I simply had no idea how to see it made. I was brand new to programming, and I designed the whole platform around a relational database CMS that would have held scripts, playthroughs, and everything else. The idea was entirely doable even with that era’s technology, but the libraries were not available. The technical assets would all have required hand-coding from scratch.

ChoiceBox was five platforms in one, actually. It would have supported authoring, hosting, and playing:

Choose-your-own-adventure style story authoring and playing
Test/examination authoring and taking
Quiz-game management and playing (with bells and whistles like lifelines)
Adaptive vote management and balloting (ranked choice, proportional, etc)
Answer-dependent survey mechanics for opinion research

The two biggest obstacles were:

The obvious need for an entire scripting language. I was going to use CFML for it, but that felt overwrought and inelegant. So few templating languges let alone scriptable lightweight markup existed then.
The difficulty of sensibly handling open text. I really wanted free-text input, but interpreting it back then was well beyond my programming capabilities. All such systems depended on users/players knowing the syntax and semantics of the game, which is extremely hard to make user friendly.

So I am taking advantage of this moment to provide a platform and services that might open the world of interactive scenarios and storytelling up for whole new opportunities.

Inkference is the scriptable, lightweight markup language I was looking for, and tiny language models can infer intent from open-text entries. So we are off to see where this leads.