Choose your own adventure

Branching stories are occasionally chided for being unrealistic becase of the limited choices available to the player, versus the number of real posibilities. Why can't I use the sledgehammer I'm carrying around on the locked door? What am I really supposed to be doing?

In my game at work, email conversations are essentially choose your own adventures. You're presented with a problem and a number of solutions (typically two) and proceed. The conversation is recorded as it happens, and at the end you've either successfully accomplished your goal based on your responses, or you haven't. It's one of the few situations that I feel branching stories actually work well.

When you're at work, you typically only have a small number of actions, like do the work yourself or delegate the task to someone else - so having only the options "Tell her to go ahead" and "Tell her to meet with the team first" is actually plausable. You don't have to worry about many different plausable options, because you're not doing estranged problem solving, you're balancing efficenty of what you think is happening against efficency of what you're asking to be done.

Plausability is a very important thing in games, beacuse of the all-important suspension of disbeleif. Once something starts happening that forces the player to step away with a "huh", they lose the world you're trying to immerse them in. When you fail to present an option that a player would think is plausable, they stop reading, playing and having fun. That's catastrophic.