Models of interactive storytelling

In this post I want to look at the various models of interactive storytelling. This isn’t necessarily an exhaustive list, and indeed many examples blend multiple models in order to tell their story. Without further ado:

Non-linear progression

Here the overall story arc is fixed in place. The reader may explore story elements in the order they choose, but ultimately all roads lead to Rome. Imagine a detective story, where the reader may experience the questioning of suspects in any order, but ultimately the murderer remains the same as in the story’s outset. Better still, don’t imagine it: Go play Deadline by Marc Blank. Non-linear progression gives the reader the story fragments out of order, but in a controlled way that a) makes sense, and b) keeps them on a controlled path so that while smaller elements of the story are experienced in any order, larger plot points (and thus the direction of the story) are always kept in sequence.

Traditional parser-based interactive fiction (from the earliest days of Infocom to modern works like Photopia and The Space Under The Window) offer a very pure form of non-linear progression, although IF is not necessarily interactive in the truest sense. Often, the elements of the story world are set in place at the outset of the game, and through exploration the player merely exposes those elements (either through spatial exploration or LOOK and EXAMINE commands). Of course, the puzzle elements of IF (which may require the player to pull levers or combine objects) give the player a feeling of agency, and really do alter the state of the story world, but usually such puzzles are presented as obstacles to story progression rather than altering the course of the story itself.

Branching plot

Probably the most common preconception of interactive storytelling is that the story may branch in a number of directions. In modern culture, this model was popularised in the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy series of books, where readers were asked to flip to specific pages based on story choices they were offered. More recently, branching plot has become a standard convention in computer role-playing games.

In Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic, the player’s actions shape their character toward good or evil, which consequently change the story they experience, giving them a unique blend of plot elements. However, such works have finite limitations, so not only is the number of branches limited, but often the branches (experienced during the ‘muddle’ of the story) eventually coalesce back to a single resolution.

Therefore the reader again really travels a single story arc, albeit one with choices along the way. Multiple endings are possible of course (as is the case with KotOR), but frequently these are a matter of life and death. Taking the ‘wrong’ choice means the player ends the story abruptly, and the game ends. Rarely do these feel like a satisfying conclusion to the story; usually the player is aware of their failure to reach the author’s intended ending, and thus is compelled to try again.

Story as unlockables

Indeed, most modern video games are imbued with a strong sense of story, even those of a genre where it could be said to be superfluous (such as the first-person shooter or platform game). Here the story is loosely overlaid on the player’s actions, with narrative acting as a supporting incentive for progression through the game’s levels. The player’s action may be to make it through the maze-like level, killing enemies and perhaps completing a quest, and they are rewarded with a cut-scene that segues between missions. The effect is that the player must succeed to unlock the next chapter of narrative, but beyond basic success or failure, their interactions are not really influencing the story itself.

However, as such games become more sophisticated, they are getting better at infusing story into the gameplay itself. Bioshock (ostensibly an FPS) was lauded for its story. Its innovative use of ‘audiologs’ to telegraph backstory and plot elements ensured the story was progressed during all the fighty bits, not just in-between. And by borrowing morality choice and trust conventions from RPGs, the player had real agency in affecting the story outcome, placing it more in the ‘branching plot’ model of interaction.

Alternate-reality games take non-linear progression out of a controlled environment and into the real-world. Players are required to piece together clues scattered across the web, ambient media, text messages and other communication forms. Solving these clues rewards this player with a story fragment that leads to the next clue. ARGs are cleverly-written to allow non-linear progression, but essentially the entire story is planned in advance, with plot development a reward for the successful solving of a clue.

The developing story

I suppose another kind of interactivity is one where the story is not pre-conceived at all, but instead is written through interaction. This would be difficult to achieve through game mechanics since it could not rely on existing story fragments, and is arguably only storytelling from the perspective of a non-participant. For the interactor, it’s really story writing. I struggle to think of popular examples of this, save for the old parlour game where each player must invent a new sentence to follow the previous one and thus collectively build a narrative. But perhaps the real-time, multi-user aspects of the web offer an opportunity for this to be a valid mechanic of interactive storytelling?

When I set out writing this brief audit (of sorts) I was unsure which examples of interactive storytelling would spring to mind. Curiously, most of them are games. This begs the question of whether there’s something about the mechanics of games that is required to tell a story interactively. More specifically, without the overcoming of obstacles inherent in gameplay, what is the incentive to experience a story interactively? Authors would probably suggest it is in the value of the prose itself; that interest in the story keeps the player/reader progressing. That’s certainly true of books and movies, but then linear media is passive. Once you ask your reader to work for their story, I’d argue their motivation must be much higher. The satisfaction of overcoming a game obstacle evidently supplies that, but can the workload of interactivity be justified by story alone?

Slouching toward interactive narrative

My work has taken an unexpected turn into the world of transmedia storytelling and interactive digital narrative, in an attempt to create a model for telling stories online, and more specifically figuring out how best to use the native interactivity of the web as a storytelling medium.

Having not blogged for a bit (or indeed on this blog, ever) I thought I’d add to the discussion and help sort out my own thoughts on what all this stuff is, and where it might go. As usual when I try to write out these thoughts, my mind has shot all over the map, so I’ll do my best to break up my observations into separate posts. This might take a while.

So then, interactive storytelling is an interesting diversion for someone of my generation, who grew up on books like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and interactive fiction games like Zork, Deadline, and perhaps most pertinently The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (of which more in a future post).

These days, in a world of almost constant daily media consumption across the various devices that fill our living rooms and pockets, the time is right to consider how best to tell stories that best fit each medium. While we are happy to read traditional novels or watch movies on our smartphones, is the linear format of these forms an unnecessary constraint on a device that offers inherent interactivity? Or conversely, does interactivity and the potential for influencing an outcome meddle with the rules of storytelling itself? Several people I know are already debating this, notably Kat Sommers and Paul Rissen, and I expect my thoughts will increasingly intersect with theirs.

Over the coming posts, I want to look at what I think both interactive and transmedia storytelling look like. Neither of these are new ideas, and certainly interactive fiction (in its broadest sense) has a lot of past form, from the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books, through the often-risable ‘interactive movies‘ of the CD-ROM era, to modern video games and real-world Alternate Reality Games.

But first I want to explore what I think a story is, since apparently even this is subject to debate. To me, a story is something that relates a sequence of events, usually (but not necessarily) from the perspective of a central protagonist, who is is involved with and influenced by those events, and probably undergoes some personal growth as a result. It has an explicit structure; in the words of Philip Larkin, a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Crucially, a story must be told. It is not open-ended, nor does it occur in the present-tense. It may of course be told in the present-tense (and to great effect, as with Fight Club or The Time Traveler’s Wife) but ultimately it is a complete account of events that have already happened.

In the case of interactive fiction games, where the player experiences the story unfolding in response to their actions, the experience of play may feel open-ended, and indeed the player’s actions may affect the events that subsequently unfold. But even then, the story is the one written after the fact; a record of what the player did do, rather than all the roads not taken. In that sense, computer games could be thought of as a kind of story engine, capable of generating a different story for each player. Yet the story itself, as co-authored by player and creator, remains linear.

Further, and this may be going out on a limb, a story must be eventful. There’s a certain rhetoric floating around my workplace that online user journeys are themselves stories. That for example, a clickstream showing that a Giant Panda lives in a Broadleaf Forest and is herbivorous, is telling a story about the Giant Panda. As a generalism, I don’t buy it. Certainly one can use hyperlinks as a method of story navigation, and as mentioned, an interactive format allows for a story to unfold through a non-linear set of choices. But unless this journey is explicitly eventful, it is no more a story than my walking down the street is a story. If my walking down the street involved me besting a rabid badger with my trusty spork, then certainly it has the makings of a story, but doesn’t become so until told to you as a complete account after the fact.

Finally, I want to touch on another important distinction; that of plot versus narrative. I’m no literary scholar so I may have my terms muddled, but there’s a difference between a sequence of dramatic events (plot) and how those events are voiced to the reader (narrative). One could say that it is plot that drives a story forward, but narrative that makes it interesting. Many novels have used unconventional narrative (such as correspondence – Stoker’s Dracula and Matt Beaumont’s e come to mind), but always these describe a linear plot. Interactive stories too, mostly use a non-linear narrative (i.e. the player’s actions) to further a linear plotline. Occassionally in interactive storytelling, the plotline itself is affected even to the extent of altering the story’s outcome. In my experience however, it is rare that the ‘multiple endings’ approach yields a satisfactory conclusion (though Emily Short’s Galatea and Mateas & Stern’s Façade are frequently cited as examples of this). Most of the time the player is left with the distinct feeling of having either succeeded or failed to reach the author’s intended ending.

Perhaps then stories work best at their most straightforward. The challenge for interactive storytellers is to use their arsenal to enhance the storytelling, rather than obfuscate it. Since our most beloved stories from the past 500 years have required no more interactivity than the turn of a page, it’s no small feat.