The Interactive Story

THE INTERACTIVE STORY

Choice as influence

Here is a simple interactive story, to be played digitally or within a traditional choose-your-own-adventure type of book.The game designer is clearly one of the artists, but the dramatics get changed so much by the player, that the story has to be considered a cooperative work between the person giving the options and the one choosing between them.

In life, we choose our path all the time, all the while considering ourselves masters of our destiny, instead of the people offering options. Whether you believe in determinism or not, it would be hypocrisy to think any differently when regarding a game.

The story almost does not matter, but one important aspect remains: the designer needs to take over the part of making the reader bring up emotion to flow into the work – that way the cycle of evoking and absorbing emotions is technically already closed within the process of game making and playing, the artwork therefore losing its further purpose of being displayed and letting go of the need for another, purely consuming audience.

In addition to the obviously interactive nature of the story that refers to the interaction between game and player, this experiment adds the layers that result from the different ways in which all the authors do or do not communicate.

One could therefore say that the stories come together in a place where the authors don't.

The three layers of interaction in this experiment are:

- interactive story for the player

- interaction between authors

- intertwined storylines (the authors pass on ideas through the medium of the story; you could say that thereby the pieces of story interact with each other as they develop based differently on various paths, based on the next writer's interpretation and new input)

#theinteractivestory #games #theory