As We Have Watched: what now arises from a reconsideration of the concept of interactive digital narrative.

We now live in a post-Bandersnatch age for interactive digital narrative (IDN), by which I mean, if we take the release of Bandersnatch (Slade, 2018) on Netflix as a watershed moment. You could almost possibly conceive of a Before Bandersnatch (BB) and After Bandersnatch (AB) periodisation for interactive digital narrative (IDN). There was a sense of a triumphal moment, a great future for IDN was proposed and we were told that everything was going to be different now. But what happened next?  

Well to be sure we have heard all of this before (for example 3D Cinema makes its triumphal comeback every 10 years or so) and in fact what happened was not a lot, not anything really significant. It’s a complex and expansive mode of production and hasn’t really generated that much interest form audiences or other producers, at least not on that scale. But there is still a lot of interactive digital narrative being created, take a look on Youtube you can see it’s a very active area of production. There is a desire to create this kind of media and there is clearly an interest among audiences. The question though, in my mind, as someone new to creating media in this form, and as someone who wants to ask a deeper question about the nature of IDN. What is it?

Miller (2019, 73) frames this desire for understanding nicely with a simple set of questions asking:

• How does the use of interactivity radically change the way an audience experiences a narrative?
• How does the use of interactivity radically change the narrative material itself?
• What are the pros and cons of giving the audience some control over story?
• What techniques can be used to help create cohesion in works of digital storytelling?

So, what is it then?

Usefully, Abba in his 2008 paper does a very good job of situating the development of the form within a historical context up until the point that he is writing some 14 years ago now. He offers a number of pertinent insights into the nature of interactive storytelling though concludes that “thus far, the degree to which directors have been willing, or able, to engage with that experimentation has been limited” (Abba 2008, 25). Whereas now, 3 years AB (After-Bandersnatch), the opportunity to experiment has been granted as the technology now exists to enable us to do so. A number of platforms are in currently in development which offer the capability to easily and efficiently create IDN content including the BBC’s Storyformer.

An alternative to the BBC platform, Stornaway.io have launched their own independent story mapping editor that enables creators to quickly layout story islands, link them and playtest them live as part of the design process. Having played with the tool myself I can say it is easy to use, extremely intuitive and you can see below an example of a short IDN I created in a few hours one Sunday afternoon. Having been introduced to the Stornaway.io founder’s Ru Howe and Kate Dimbleby there arose a partnership opportunity inviting students from Solent University to play with their platform and create their own IDN content. After a bit of a kerfuffle around GDPR we finally signed a ‘memo of agreement’ and turned the level 5 video production module I was scheduled to teach in semester two of the academic year. Into an interactive digital narrative production (IDN) project with Ru Howe and Kate Dimbleby taking an active role in supporting students use of their platform (you can see an example of my own experimentation with the platform in the video below).

An exciting prospect but, as stated above, I had at that point in time no experience of working in this medium and not a lot of knowledge about how teaching IDN would be different from that of more traditional screenwriting for narrative fiction video. An early insight that I found extremely valuable came in the form of a comment by Story Director Cassie Phillipps who said, on a panel at the GDC2019 conference – get the story down first without any interactive content and then add the decision points later. Phillipps described the experience of developing IDN in a ‘writers room’ and unsurprisingly, it is often the case that arguments break out about how to shape the overall story arc. Over time what she has noticed is that when they go back over the story to try and add in interactive options, it is most often these same points that generated the most argument which are best suited to the addition of a decision point. On reflection, this makes sense as it is at those points in the story where there is the most dramatic conflict that you would surely want to situate your decision points.

Watching the students create their IDN during the course of the module was interesting because, despite sharing this wisdom repeatedly they immediately went for the interactivity, what they could do with the narrative, how they could explore multiple versions and so on. There was definite sense that initially the focus was on decision points that effected the plot rather than the story. It is quite common that early drafts of scripts for this particular module are very plot driven and a key learning outcome is that of understanding the difference between story and plot. After a couple of weeks of struggling with how you map out IDN ideas we took the opportunity to step back and we concentrated on getting one story arc down tight in a series of intensive group tutorials using a story arc worksheet I have devised (LINK). This turned out to be a really valuable experience as once we had the story arc in pretty much all cases the question as to how the decision points would link to the dramatic conflict in their story’s. Students came out of the workshops with a strong, simplified story, clear exterior goals for their protagonists, character arcs leading to change, and an underlying interior journey expressed through meta textuality (i.e. symbolism, metaphor, behaviour, mise en scene etc…).

Once we had been through this process the students themselves could see how their decision points could be keyed into the story in a way that drew the audience into the story world. The aim being for the agency offered to the audience by the interactive potential of IDN to be emotionally engaging. Thereby offering an “emergent experience” (Abba 2008, 20) that balances the authors intentions with the emergent narrative brought to the story by the audience through the possibility for interaction. In his article on invisible agency in IDN Şengün argues that the ability of the audience to “affect, choose or change the plot” (Şengün 2013,180) is a defining characteristic. Quoting Murry (1997, 126) he tells us that agency in IDN is “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Şengün 2013,180). We can take a couple of things from this, the idea of ‘satisfaction’ coupled with the notion of ‘meaningful action’ are good starting points for thinking about the actual audience experience and how we as authors, might want to conceptualise the way in which we deploy decision points in our narratives. Well positioned decision points that are linked into the character arc of the story world encourage the audience become emotionally entangled with the characters in the story, complicit in their decision making, considering ethical and moral choices and the consequences these bring for the characters in the story.

Reflecting on this experience I started to consider the etymology of the words affect and effect with the intention of trying to find a clear way to model the difference between decision points that impact only on plot and those that impact on the story. There is a value to being able to outline a model that might guide creators in their own work, and in this context, being able to teach this to students working on their own IDN projects. But there is also a need theoretically to be able to distinguish between IDN and other forms of interactive experience, games or transmedia experiences for example. An exploration of the etymology of affect and effect might be just a thought game, a playful way of thinking through a problem to arrive at a model that could be used to describe the problem rather than answer the problem. It’s just an idea, and writing it down here is just another way of thinking it through. So why not give it a go – please comment below if you have any thoughts on its efficacy.

Effect is a noun that describes the result of a change or as a verb to mean something that causes a change. Either way, effect changes what happens, in narrative terms we are talking plot here. Whereas affect is a verb that refers to the cause of the change while also functioning as a noun which refers to feelings, emotions and the psychological state of mind. In other words, affect refers to that which brings about change, the how it happens of the story. Arguably what makes choice meaningful is the affect, not the effect on the story (Şengün 2013,180) since affect impacts on the interior, emotional goals of the characters (story arc). While effect just changes what happens, it impacts only on the exterior goals and thus doesn’t drive the emotional or psychological change that must take place for there to be a satisfying and meaningful experience for the audience. In simple terms the model could be thought of as one in which; affect and effect sit in an inverse relationship with each other in a similar way to that of wants and needs. In that, in its simplest sense, a story starts with wants over needs but concludes with needs over wants (thus the reverse at the conclusion to act three). Or in plain English, what drives the protagonist at the start of a story is their exterior goals, their wants. But at the end of the story, they often don’t get what they want, but they get what they need.

Reading further into this, there is a sense that agency as commonly found in most interactive experiences might be thought of as effect. It impacts on what happens, you run about, change your hat, bash things, earn points and level up. Ok, that is very simplistic but it kind of captures a sense of what is involved in most, if not all interactive games. Importantly, the ability to impact on the story is extremely limited, there is agency, but it is constrained to choices that impact or change the things that happen (the plot). If we want to define a difference between games and IDN then surely it is that as creators, we are seeking to affect the story, we want to be entangled with the moral and ethical agency of the characters not just bash things and run around. For a truly satisfying and meaningful IDN experience, there needs to be some kind of catharsis for the audience that can only come about if our decision points affect the story. This differentiation between effect and affect appears to mirror the difference between agency and dramatic agency (Şengün 2013, 180) that we find in Murry’s writing on interactivity (2018). She talks about an aesthetic of dramatic agency in which interaction aligns with a dramatic payoff, which is not the same, she says, as winning. Is not the same as changing what happens but is linked into the moral physics of the story world.

Unfortunately, I have yet to access the books and articles Murry has published on the topic and there is still some reading to be done. The one slide deck I have so far been able to access is a delightful taster but clearly, I need to go deeper to be able to develop my own understanding of the nature of the IDN experience. But what we have here is enough of a sketch of a theory to be able to outline a few key insights that have so far emerged from the experience:

1. Write the story first then add the interactive elements later, look for the points of dramatic conflict and add your decision points there,
2. Decision points should be “moment of decision and consequence” (Abba 2008, 21) for your characters, they should affect story arc – avoid decisions that just effect on exterior goals,
3. Your story world should be more than a physical universe, it needs a moral and/or ethical physics within which your characters and hopefully your audience are immersed.

Of course, there is more to say on all of this. In particular I am keen to look at the way in which decision points might be embedded within an IDN as part of the logic of the story world. In such a way that avoids the distancing that occurs every time a series of question buttons pop up and instead deepens the immersion and suspension of disbelief. There are also questions about how to onboard or induct the audience into the experience and here I feel there is much to learn from the techniques adopted by immersive theatre practitioners such as Punch Drunk and others. Currently we are about halfway through the student projects and having presented their ideas to Kate and Ru at Stornaway.io they are now about to go into production. I feel sure that further insights will emerge when we get to play their IDN’s for real at the conclusion of the semester.

Refernces

Abba, T. (2008). As we might watch: What might arise from reconsidering the concept of interactive film? Journal of Media Practice, 9(1), 19-27. doi:10.1386/jmpr.9.1.19_1

All Choice No Consequence: Efficiently Branching Narrative. (2019-12-12) [Video/DVD] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEa9aSDHawA

Miller, C. H. (2020). Digital Storytelling: A creator’s guide to interactive entertainment (4th ed.) CRC Press.

Murray, J. (2017). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Murray, J. (2018). Research into Interactive Digital Narrative: A Kaleidoscopic View. Paper presented at the International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling,

S̨engün, S. (2013). Silent Hill 2 and the Curious Case of Invisible Agency. Paper presented at the Interactive, 180-185.