Player Comments on Digital Consciousness

General Recommendation: A poorly written story in terms of language, albeit one with some interesting concepts.
Preview: Can you solve the mystery of what happened to your parents and explain your origins?

=SPOILERS BELOW=

General notes:
Hmm. Yeah. Not a big fan of this one.
Honestly, this story’s biggest problem is just that the poor sentence structure makes it difficult to understand what is going on. There are plenty of things that seem like poor plotting, but it’s difficult to tell how much is just due to the unclear language. The language makes this story unpleasant to read, difficult to follow, and prevents the reader from growing attached to any of the characters or mysteries.
The bones of a plot are perceivable, with the backstory surrounding the narrator’s parents, and the clear changes to society and technology 100 years in the future. But it’s difficult to develop any attachment to the characters, many of whom are never even given names. The story is too short for any of the numerous concepts dropped to be explored in detail.
I could critique any number of this story’s plot elements—such as wooden characters, melodramatic reflections, unclear plotting, etc.—but I suspect many of these problems will solve themselves once the language issue is taken care of. So I’ll hold off with more general plot-based feedback and recommend just focusing on the mechanics of the writing.
That said: I don’t want to be discouraging. I’m tearing into the language here because it really creates a huge barrier between you and the reader. But the language is by no means impossible to fix. A heavy edit would go a very long way to improving this story. As for future stories, sentence structuring is an inherently improvable skill. As long as you keep trying to improve it and taking feedback, this is something you will get exponentially better at.

Specific notes:
-The story’s title is digital consciousness, whereas the title of page one has digital conscience.
-Going off this story’s title, I was guessing we’d have something like brain uploading going on, which seems to be correct.
-I don’t think the intermittent poetic phrasing of the narrator’s thoughts is helping this story. It just comes across as needlessly angsty.
-Lol. The kids cracking up over the pop culture joke is amusing.
-Uh, how exactly are these kids the narrator’s only family? He doesn’t even know their names.
-Michael is the usual spelling. For some reason I thought the narrator was a girl.
-“Ending. #4 or 5 I don’t remember.” You know what, this is funny.
-Lol, he’s now going on talk shows.

Grammar:
No misspellings. But many of the sentences are very poorly structured, and there are many grammatical errors. Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks.
Mastery of Language:
Not good, unfortunately. What’s good is I can often tell what effects you were going for, but the execution is clumsy.
You have lots of phrasings that just don’t make much sense. Here’s a few examples:
“The fate of yourself might depend on it…” I’m not even sure if this is grammatically wrong, but it sounds very weird. “Your fate might depend on it…” is much neater.
“I ignored my parents’ last attempt of love whispered from above my left shoulder.” It’s clear this is meant to refer to a parting message, but “attempt” doesn’t make sense in that context.
“I ignored my consciousness and my soul I ached” might just be poor comma use? Either way it doesn’t make sense.
“But I heard a few noises, ones that I was not ready for as if they broke the band of heart monitors and acoustiv shouting voices.” This is just confusing. The first half is odd, the second half just doesn’t make any grammatical sense.
These examples are all from the first paragraph alone, and they continue at a similar rate throughout the game. Each time something like this is encountered, it forces the reader to stop, and re-read. Each time they do they lose a little more patience.
This story needs a very thorough edit for clarity. Currently it’s understandable only with a lot of work on the part of the reader.
Since you do clearly have a specific effect in mind, the best cure for this is practice, feedback, and practice implementing that feedback. You’re doing exactly that by publishing a storygame. So, keep up the good work.
This story also has a problem with wordiness, but that’s secondary to your sentence structuring issue, so I’d focus on that first.

Branching:
Decent. There’s a couple different endings you can get, with some rebranching. The “secret” ending mechanics works reasonably well.

Player options/Fair choice:
Pretty good.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:
Got to ending #3 first, 4/5.

WRITING ADVICE:
You really need to work on your language skills. Some suggestions:
-Try getting someone to do a thorough sentence-by-sentence edit of a short piece, and seeing what they recommend.
-Read your work out loud to yourself after you’ve finished. Fix any phrasings you trip over.
-Read each sentence to make sure you’re staying on the same subject and not switching tense or focus.
In the “extras” section, you say you wanted your story to be more realistic, so you avoided the fantasy genre. Honestly, if realism is your goal, I’d recommend the opposite. In fantasy you can make up your own rules, so you’re at less risk of accidentally breaking them. In science fiction, you need to have a strong understanding of science and do lots of research in order to make your story realistic. As it is, this story comes across as extremely unrealistic, with many scientific principles being disregarded. That said, it’s totally okay not to have realism as a goal.
In sum: practice makes perfect!

CONCLUSION: I guess… 3/8. Close to 2/8, but I generally save that for genuinely bad concepts, and there’s nothing wrong with this one.

It's a nice story, although confusing.

I like it! Confusing, but I like it! 😁

I worked so hard for this point.

I’m really not sure I entirely understand what was going on in this story. Something about the sentence structure makes it incredibly difficult for me to understand. There are quite a few structural issues, and it altogether feels a little immature. That said, the title fits, and the concept is good, so I’m sure the author could easily make this into something good with a couple more work throughs