Interactive drama story has a long history and like most things, it sounds easy in principle but proves difficult in practice. Just trying to define it can prove difficult.
It’s a fairly undefined and unproven thing, which makes it a lot of fun to think about, and attempt to build. Frustrating and humbling, too, of course.
A lot of people refer to interactive drama as interactive story, Andrew included. However for me “story” is too broad of a term and adding “interactive” doesn’t help it too much.
- interactive story
- - A form of real-time storytelling that reacts to input from the player within a rich environment.
Almost any video game would fall under this definition. Space Invaders would be a good example of interactive story. The world is being invaded by aliens and you either save the world or you don’t. While it can be classified as an interactive story, Space Invaders is also clearly a game. The whole reason you engage with it is for the challenge – for the game. So Space Invaders is an example of an interactive story and a game – that is a bit too broad for me. Though imagine if Space Invaders were a movie, you would go see not for the challenge but the drama. We as an audience would want to know the background of the aliens, understand why they’re invading, even want them to have some type of personality. That is what makes drama and that’s what I want to make interactive, hence the term interactive drama.
That is what makes drama and that’s what I want to make interactive, hence the term interactive drama.
Interactive drama a subset of interactive story but what differentiates it is what drives engagement for the player. In Space Invaders it’s the game, you play for the challenge. In Facade it’s the drama. Both can be considered interactive story, but I would hold out that Facade is the only interactive drama.
Another way to look at it is to lay things out on a spectrum. At one end you have Space Invaders and at the other end Facade. Add in Grand Theft Auto and Heavy Rain and it becomes a little more clear.
No one has yet been able to crack it
If we add more names to the spectrum we would quickly see the game end fill up while the right would barely grow. While there is a huge knowledge base on creating games and adding story, there is almost none for how to do the same with drama. No one has yet been able to crack that nut and create an interactive drama that appeals to the masses. One that successfully defines techniques that can be used to create more interactive dramas and create a new medium. I wouldn’t be the first to compare it to the search for the Northwest Passage.
That imagined route came to be known as the Northwest Passage, a myth that would beguile explorers for centuries.
I would lump myself into the explorer category in search of just that – a mass appeal interactive drama. And as any explorer I have some ideas as to where to find water.
It helps to first get our bearings and that starts with the classic narrative story. In his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman explains that the first thing a writer needs to do is find the spine of their story – that is, the impression you want to leave with the audience, or what the story is about besides the bare events. Once you have that you can select the best events and sequence them to maximize dramatic effect – creating the storyline. Character plays an important role but as Robert McKee would yell in his seminar on Story – a character is their actions and actions take place in an event. So for our purposes it’s all about events or scenes.
Now that we have some bearings we can dive into some techniques that may lead us to cracking interactive drama:
- True agency
- Perceived agency
- Story world
- Obstruction
True agency
This is a nod to Chris Crawford who argued in his book that interactive implies more than most think. Anyhow, this technique is where the Player is able to choose the events and/or their sequence albeit from a universe of possibilities constrained by the artist.
Perceived agency
This technique is pretty much what you would expect, you trick the Player into thinking they have true agency, that it’s truly interactive. You might think that is crazy but movies trick us into believing that Superman just might not prevail this time – it’s more emotional but if it works, all the better. An experiment with physically interactive story environments also lends a lot of support behind this method.
Perceived agency is where the Player follows an artists created path or storyline but believes they’re choosing the events and sequence.
Story world
This is the same as sandbox mode in video games. The artist populates a rich environment for the Player to connect events, but it’s ultimately up to the Player to envision the story. This is best exemplified by Grand Theft Auto as described by David Edery and Ethan Mollick in their book Changing the Game.
These games, like a sandbox full of toys, encourage players to experiment with their environment, without being constrained to a specific plotline or course of action. In the case of GTA3 and its sequels, the “sandbox” is an entire virtual city full of realistic-looking buildings, vehicles, and people.
Obstruction
I stole the name for this from Chris Crawford. This is is also the basis behind most video games, where a challenge blocks the Player from progressing to the next story event.
In the end it will all come down to the artist
As with writing a screenplay all the advice and techniques for writing one are just that, techniques. In the end it will take an artist’s craft to guide our emotions, to take us along a narrative journey. You won’t crack this nut unless you get your hands dirty and experiment, it isn’t something you’ll be able to figure out on a chalk board. It was the same for film where the early pioneers didn’t so much invent continuity editing but discovered it through experimentation.
Keep experimenting and we might just crack this nut.
