CHAPTER
Six
Defining Interactive and Player-Driven Storytelling
What Makes a Story Interactive?
If you were to ask a room full of writers, game designers, and English professors for the definition of “interactive storytelling,” you’d get quite a lot of different answers. Video games would be a popular one, but I’ve also heard people classify things like pop-up books and novels with upside-down text as interactive. The more you research notable opinions on the subject, the more you’ll realize that there is no official consensus as to what is or is not an interactive story. By some definitions, nothing short of Star Trek’s holodeck would qualify; by others, virtually everything is interactive storytelling as long as you have to turn a page or push a button from time to time.
Is It Interactive?
One of the illusions of the “interactive” age is that great art is not interactive. Okay, so indeed not all art has buttons to click or hyperlinks to follow, but all deep and long-lasting art is participatory in some fashion. Whether it simply evokes an emotion in the viewer or alternatively invites analysis to truly understand the work itself, any art that lasts is multilayered and reveals more upon each repeated examination. To me, this is the very essence of interactivity: the invitation to probe deeper. The technique of the MDQ is not limited to storytelling. Visual arts, such as painting, use the same technique. Is Mona Lisa smiling? What is she smiling about? Who is she? Is Shelley’s poem Ozymandias about Ramses the Great or about the shifting nature of time and power? Or both? We can debate these things at length, and we can each have our own opinion, and that is what makes art participatory. Art evokes reaction in the audience, which is in part what makes gaming a wonderful medium for artists. The invitation to participate is evident and needed for enjoyment of the art. Games are just more up front about the process than most historical forms have been.
—Chris
Finding the true meaning of interactive storytelling among all the arguments and conflicting definitions can be confusing, so let’s think about it logically. First, the terms “interactive storytelling” and “interactive stories” imply that you can in some way interact with the story. That seems obvious enough. But what does it mean to interact with a story? Mark Z. Danielewski’s rather unusual novel House of Leaves, for example, is frequently cited by English professors as an example of interactive storytelling, but is that really the case? House of Leaves features many strange aspects, including its “story within a story” structure; a plethora of footnotes (referencing a variety of real and fictitious sources); coded messages; and text that’s written upside down, sideways, and in twisting spiral patterns. But does reading footnotes and turning the book from side to side mean you’re interacting with the story? Of course not. You’re not interacting with the story – you’re interacting with the book itself. Just like turning the pages in a regular novel or pausing a DVD, your actions have no bearing whatsoever on the story. No matter how you read House of Leaves, you can never have any sort of effect on or interaction with the characters or the setting, so it really can’t be called an interactive story. Pop-up books are the same. Although they offer additional ways for readers to interact with the book itself, the story remains firmly noninteractive.
On the opposite end, to be interactive, a story doesn’t need to give the player complete and total control over how everything plays out. Players just need to be able to directly interact with the story in some way, shape, or form, regardless of whether their interactions have a significant effect on the story. For example, CRISIS CORE – FINAL FANTASY VII (which we discussed in Chapter 5) is an interactive story. On the one hand, no matter what actions the player takes, he or she is unable to change the way the main story plays out. Zack will still meet the same characters, make the same friends and enemies, experience the same triumphs and failures, and suffer the same fate – no matter what the player does. But that doesn’t mean that the story isn’t interactive. Between those important unchangeable scenes, Zack is free to explore the city; talk to other characters to learn more about them, the world, and current events; and engage in a variety of optional missions, many of which contain additional information about the story and the world where it takes place. Furthermore, without the player’s help fighting battles, creating new equipment, and so on, Zack would never be able to complete his adventure. So even though the player can’t significantly alter the story, he or she can still interact with it and its characters in many different ways. It’s this interaction with the world and characters that makes a story interactive, regardless of whether those interactions have any real effect on the main plot.
What Makes a Story Player-Driven?
Player-driven storytelling is a term I coined (though I wouldn’t be surprised if others were using it before me) to differentiate stories that are merely interactive from ones in which the player is given a more significant role in their progression and outcome. To state it simply, if an interactive story is one in which the players can in some way interact with the story, a player-driven story is one in which, through their interactions, players can alter the story in significant ways. By definition, all player-driven stories are interactive, but not all interactive stories are player-driven.
Of course, there are many different types of player-driven stories, all of which offer different levels and types of interaction. In some, the player’s impact on the story may be fairly minimal or limited to a single important decision; in others, the player may be given an enormous amount of control over the story’s progression and outcome. Knowing about the different types of player-driven stories will help you better understand the structure of current game stories and decide which type or types fit best with the stories you want to create.
Interactive Storytelling as a Spectrum
Because there are many types of interactive and player-driven storytelling, it helps to have a way to classify them for easy analysis and discussion. However, every single story can’t be neatly fit into a box. All the styles overlap in many ways, and often a particular story will skirt the line between different styles, making it difficult to classify. To better understand the many types of player-driven storytelling, it’s best not to think of the different styles as separate entities, but rather points on a larger storytelling spectrum.
My storytelling spectrum begins with the most traditional, unchanging, and noninteractive form of storytelling on the left. As we move toward the right, stories become more open and player-driven until we get to the very end, at which point the player is in complete and total control over the story. Along the way, I’ve marked key types of storytelling. All of these except fully traditional storytelling (at the far left end) are used frequently in video games and can be roughly defined as the five main forms of game storytelling. We’ll cover each of these storytelling styles in depth in later chapters, but for now, here’s a brief overview of all of them.
FIGURE 6.1
Storytelling as a spectrum.
A Camel Is a Horse Designed by Committee
The idea that stories can be created by multiple people all at once is a controversial subject. One of the aspects audiences have historically enjoyed the most about stories is surprise. Surprise is also one of the most delicious aspects of game playing. Randomness is a tool that can deliver surprise to a game audience. In fact, our storytelling brain will try and connect disparate events and make “sense” of them. Artful use of this tendency within interactive stories can be a real challenge, as writers often want to be in total control, so as to make the most of the audience’s attention span. If multiple people tell a story, the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts, if each author in turn writes, for example, one chapter in succession after the others. Everyone gets to be author and audience at once. In “open worlds,” even if the players have total control, I believe there has to be some author who has the big picture in mind (remember the way we architected the meta puzzle in Earth & Beyond). Then the players can explore and discover, but at the end of the day there is something to be uncovered that was created by the writer. I do not believe “random” content creation is capable of anything deep and interesting.
—Chris
As the most traditional form of storytelling, fully traditional stories (see Chapter 7) are entirely noninteractive. No matter how many times they’re read or watched, they remain exactly the same without any changes. Though most books and movies make use of fully traditional storytelling, its nature makes it wholly unsuited to video games. There have been some attempts at creating games using fully traditional stories, but it’s debatable whether the results can truly be called games due to their complete lack of interactivity.
Examples include Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Star Wars movies, and the visual novel Higurashi When They Cry.
Interactive Traditional Stories
As the most traditional type of interactive storytelling, interactive traditional stories (see Chapter 7) allow players some degree of freedom to interact with the world and characters. However, no matter how much control the player has over other aspects of the game and story, the main plot can’t be changed in any significant way.
Examples include FINAL FANTASY XIII, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and Lunar Silver Star Harmony.
Multiple-ending stories (see Chapter 8), despite being nearly identical to interactive traditional stories, are the first truly player-driven form of storytelling on the spectrum. What sets them apart is that the player is allowed to choose between two or more different endings. Depending on the game, this choice might be a conscious decision or one made automatically based on the player’s actions.
Examples include CHRONO TRIGGER, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, and Bioshock.
Multiple-ending stories only allow the player to change the main plot in a single (though important) way; branching path stories (see Chapter 9) provide the player with a series of choices to make throughout the course of the story. Some choices may change the story only slightly; others can have an enormous impact, sending the main plot off in entirely different directions.
Examples include Choose Your Own Adventure books, Fate/Stay Night, and Heavy Rain.
Open-ended stories (see Chapter 10) can best be thought of as highly complex branching path stories. They feature far more decision points, and those decision points tend to be much less obvious than in branching path stories, with the story’s direction chosen more by the player’s actions than his or her response to specific prompts.
Examples include Fable II, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Fallout 3.
Set on the far right of the spectrum, fully player-driven stories (see Chapter 11) offer the players total or near total control of their actions. They are allowed, for the most part, to do whatever they want whenever they want. Because of this, there is usually only a very basic main plot, if any. Instead, the player is provided with a setting and his or her actions within that setting form a story of their own.
Examples include The Sims, Animal Crossing, and tabletop RPGs (such as Dungeons & Dragons).
These storytelling styles are all used in games, some far more frequently than others. We’ll discuss the specific reasons behind why some styles are used much more or less than others in future chapters; for now, just keep in mind that interactive traditional stories are the most common by far, with multiple-ending stories second, then branching path stories, and fully player-driven stories and open-ended stories occupying the next two slots (though it’s rather hard to say which is the more common of the two). Finally, fully traditional stories are extremely rare (almost nonexistent) in games due to their noninter-active nature.
As you can probably see from the previous descriptions, I classify games based primarily on how much the player can affect the main plot. But because storytelling is a spectrum, some games naturally sit between the more clearly defined points, making them hard to categorize definitively as a specific storytelling style. Grand Theft Auto IV, for example, has many of the characteristics of an open-ended story, with its wide open city and plethora of optional mission chains, activities, and characters to try and befriend. However, in other ways it’s closer to a branching path or even multiple-ending story, with only a handful of points where the main plot can be changed – especially because all of those changes except the last (which determines the ending) are fairly minor with few (if any) lasting effects. Similarly, games such as Heavy Rain and Mass Effect seem to offer the player a large amount of freedom and a variety of ways to change the story, making them look like open-ended stories. But upon further examination, it becomes apparent that most of the choices given to the player are far less important than they initially appear and have little to no real effect on the main plot, making the stories far less player-driven than it would first appear.
Classifying player-driven stories is far from an exact science; there were a few games that could have easily ended up in either of two categories. But I’ve done my best to study each game mentioned in this book and place them in the proper storytelling categories.
Games that lack stories entirely are far less common today than they were in the early days of arcade machines and the Atari 2600, but there are still many modern games – some of which are extremely popular – that don’t have stories. Sports games, for example, rarely have stories, and neither do puzzle, music, fitness, and brain-training games. It could be argued that the addition of stories would improve these games, and in fact several very successful story-based games have been released in each of those genres. However, history has shown quite clearly that some types of games simply don’t need stories in order to appeal to their fans. We’ll probably continue to see more story-based games released in these genres over time, but it’s unlikely that stories will ever become a key feature the way they have in other genres.
There’s a lot of debate in the professional world about what makes a story interactive. However, it’s necessary to differentiate between actually interacting with the story (the world, characters, etc.) and merely interacting with the medium (reading upside-down text in a book, skipping chapters on a DVD, etc.). Also, just because a story is interactive doesn’t mean that it’s truly player-driven. A story is player-driven only if the player is given some degree of control over the story itself. The amount and type of influence the player has on the main plot determine just how player-driven a story really is.
The best way to think of interactive and player-driven storytelling is as a spectrum containing six primary types of storytelling: fully traditional storytelling, interactive traditional storytelling, multiple-ending storytelling, branching path storytelling, open-ended storytelling, and fully player-driven storytelling. However, because storytelling is a spectrum, some stories don’t fit perfectly within any single style.
Finally, it’s important to remember that as much as a good story can add to a game of any type, many games – particularly those in certain genres – are fully capable of providing a fun and entertaining experience without any story at all.
1. Other than video games, what are some things that you consider to be interactive stories?
2. List one game you’ve played (other than the examples listed in this chapter) for every major type of storytelling on the spectrum. (It’s okay if you can’t think of any games with a fully traditional story.)
3. Why do you think some types of storytelling are used much more often than others? Make a note of your answer and see how it compares with the reasons discussed later in this book.
4. List several games you’ve played that don’t have any stories. Do you think the addition of stories would significantly improve them? Why or why not?