In indie games, those types of questions are usually called "Leading Questions" and it's up to you whether you like them. In solo journaling games, players tend to prefer strong hooks in the prompts, where a fact of the fiction is "forcibly" established in the premise of the question. In other words, most people find "how did this make you feel?" far less interesting than "how did this break your heart?". "How did you achieve this?", in the same vein, is often a less interesting question than "Who did you betray to achieve this?" - leading questions help to establish tone, to drive home themes and to help kickstart the player's creative juices but like I said - it's your choice whether to include them or to be more open ended!
Thanks, Misha.
I guess I’m not a typical solo journaler, since very specific questions tend to turn me off more than keep me engaged. I’m also fairly new to solo journaling - it’s one of the hobbies I picked up during COVID.
I prefer open-ended prompts so I can tell a story I feel comfortable telling. “Did you betray someone or did someone betray you?” therefore works much better for me personally than “Who did you betray?”, since my response will probably be “I didn’t betray anyone and have no idea where to go from here.” (My aversion to leading questions may be related to my training as a survey developer; in surveys you want to avoid them.)
I’ve asked a few friends to test it for me and will ask them if they would have liked more leading questions, but they tend to like very specific prompts even less than I do.