I think what Gwern is proposing is perhaps better seen by you as an optimization for the current AID rather than a "true" CYOA novel implementation. Because mos

I think what Gwern is proposing is perhaps better seen by you as an optimization for the current AID rather than a "true" CYOA novel implementation. Because most of what you said applies to AID as well. I toyed with it a bit, but even short snippets of text are often incoherent and I have to give it a lot of grace to operate. In particular, while I don't necessarily mind the way it'll just introduce a new character, I don't like the way they disappear equally quickly and without fanfare. While AID's nominal attraction is the ability to react to anything, I think based on the evidence only a small percentage of the users end up using it that way. (It's possible they're all the long term users, in which case they are important, but I still think it's a small proportion of the users.) The vast majority of the users the vast majority of the time will be selecting from a small handful of options that would constitute the vast majority of responses. To the extent you'd find the resulting CYOA rather unappealing, I'd say the current AID is pretty much unappealing in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons, and given that AID hasn't exactly taken the world by storm I imagine this is the majority view. (Though it may have the sort of inner core rabid fanbase that you can still build on as a business.)