How Interactive Should My Game Story Be?

[Music] uh my name is Richard Rouse I'm Studio creative director at Farbridge uh we're working on a bunch of games not announced um and my talk today is how interactive should my game story be so I've actually been working on games for a while and specifically a lot of games that have sort of interactive narrative components uh the very first game I ever worked on Odyssey was sort of a Ultima four style RPG that at least one person in the room uh may remember uh and then uh later on I worked on the suffering uh action horror game set in a prison it had sort of an interactive narrative morality system thing that led to branching endings uh later at Microsoft I worked with the good people at Undead Labs on State of Decay that was a game where you're sort of trying to survive in the the zombie apocalypse sort of a light Survival game um where you know the characters you had that you were getting to control were semi-predictable

who go all the way back to like the last star fighter uh where the kid gets really good at the arcade game and then it turns out it's training for an Intergalactic War he needs to go fight in uh favorite of mine from the 60s is Fahrenheit 451 had this weird interactive TV thing in the middle of it I recommend checking that out um another more recent one uh Serenity kind of not a movie I can actually recommend but has a weird video game twist in it uh if you're into into finding out what that is you could seek it out but I did warn you it's maybe not a Perfect movie um

but the one of the you know one of the ones people always think about when they think about this sort of thing is like the Matrix right 1999 classic you know Neo doesn't really know he's playing a video game at first and then you know it turns out he's in this simulated reality and as he uh you know as he finally realizes where he is he gains these superpowers and sort of lives out this video game Power fantasy as he's going um but that's not my favorite movie from 1999 about video games my favorite movie from 1999 about video games is called existen I don't know how many people have seen existen many people wow well it's sorry you can all go my talk is spoiled no so uh for those who haven't seen it ex incense a David Cronenberg movie uh where uh the video games of the future they're not consoles in the plastic box scent but they're sort of these fleshy organisms that live and you jack into them with these umbilical cords that go into the base of your spine um and these games are sort of these you know uh things that in the movie is about uh

this game designer called algra Geller who has designed this amazing game it's very it's about to come out and it's highly anticipated but she's on the run from the realists the realists think people are playing video games too much you know this is this is bad for us we need to kill Allegra Geller we need to destroy existen so she goes on the run with this the guy called Ted pel uh here and he's never played a game before actually but he's trying to save her life so they end up and she's like well actually in that last attack the uh the existen was damaged it's wounded and I have to play it to find out if I cure it or not and to do that I need to play it with a friend we need to get you a bioport so they get him a bioport and he finally plays one of these games for the first time and then uh you know as he jacks in he realizes it's this perfect you know visual simulation of reality looks perfect in every way and he sort of like reaches out and touches things and he's like oh my God this is amazing um and but then he finds out that not everything is exactly like reality as we'll see in this clip I have

what you're looking for who s you it's none of your business who sent us we're here that's all that matters god what happened I I didn't mean to say that it's your character who said it it's kind of a SK phrenic feeling isn't it you'll get used to it there are things that have to be said to advance the plot and establish the characters and those things get said whether you want to say them or not don't fight it just go with it but should you be saying this in front of him look at him what's he doing he's gone into a

game Loop he won't come out of it until you give him the proper line of game dialogue uh this is tricky start by repeating your last line include his name so he knows you're talking to him we're here Darcy nater and that's all that matters yes you're right that is all that matters now you said you have what we want we were waiting so when I saw this I was like wow this is amazing they've completed this this totally perfect simulation of reality that's sort of indistinguishable except for one thing the narrative's still on a rail like like how did this happen like all this Tech technology

they spent the entire Budget on the graphics nothing on the interactive narrative this is a travesty and I was very stridden about this back then I really felt like all games should really have interactive narrative in some way and this was super important uh and here I am seeing uh this nightmare uh but you know I I over time I have calmed down a little bit about this I've gone on to work on many other games I've worked with many different teams and different uh met different developers and met other players and they all play games for different reasons so it doesn't I've become a little less strident in this belief that everything should be an interactive narrative you know to the nth degree and you kind of have to figure out well what are what's the type of interactivity I need to have in my game What's going to work for my game specifically um so this is going to be a talk about sort of going through six steps of figuring out how much interactivity does my game story need um and uh we're going to start off with just I think the first step in this is figuring out what does the player get from the interactivity like what are you trying to accomplish with it before you

even start think about what's the player going to get out of and they can get a lot of different things out of it right um you know we often think of those perfect narrative experiences it's like this really nice package everything is great you play it once you get to the ending and you're happy but a lot of players crave re replayability a lot of players want to stay in your game longer than maybe just your core Quest or whatever or so much they want to play things like Rog likes this is a screenshot from Hades I'm sure everybody knows that um you know where they sort of there you're making a Rog like where you can go on multiple runs so so to put a narrative into this they made a narrative that fit that structure right they built the narrative around the replayability and you should be thinking about that too if that's one of your goals having a replayable game how is the narrative going to support that another thing players really crave is reactivity right the idea that uh the game is going to react to the choices they make this is a screenshot from Fable um where in that game you would you would go on a pretty linear story throughout the game but the game was just very reactive to the choices you made what weapon were you wearing what things had you done in the previous Quest and NPCs would stand around and

applaud or Boo or whatever depending on what you've done and players really love that feeling of just the game is noticing me it's it's seeing what I'm doing and it's commenting and not just in like stat upgrades but also the characters in the game they're going to they're going to comment on it the game is seeing what I'm doing another thing players really cave is shareability like you can think of streamers right like this guy went out of his way to make a video about a Ball's gate three play play through with evil you know an evil alignment and and having a paladin and they want was able to make a unique thing for his stream because of you know having something that was interactive in the game uh that he could play off of and it's not just streamers who want this too right it's players play games talk about them with friends talk about them in discussion groups they want to say hey I want to share my experience but also have something that's unique as I'm sharing it right so I'm not just telling you if you're playing a game that's totally linear you're sharing something the other player probably already knows um another thing that you know going back in balers Gate 3 again self-expression it's why you have creative players and game games like this players want to

even if even if the story is fixed being able to create your own character to take through it can be very meaningful similarly with self-expression though you can take it to the nth degree you can go all the way to a game that allows full self-expression full interactivity like The Sims and you some point sort of stop having so much of a fixed linear narrative but you can still have something and obviously players love this game and some see it as a storytelling experience um and some games it might your interactivity might be the entire point of what you're making this is a shock from Dwarf Fortress uh and you know if you go that far down that road you're sort of again still the this is the whole point of what you're making and that's fine too sometimes players go to that they want something that's maximally interactive that does all the things so the next question you should ask yourself is what does the player expect from the interactivity which is a little bit different than what they get because they're going to come to your game with certain expectations you know they may come to a game with genre expectations right they're coming to play an RPG and you have to decide well

how much interactivity we're going to put in but if you had none you would be going against the genre expectations right and that's fine sometimes you want to do that uh but you should be aware that you're doing it how are you going to have to teach the player how you're doing things differently uh than the genre expectations um you know an RPG could be a case or Again State of Decay uh it's a survival game a light Survival game where the genre expectations in a survival game where you can go a lot of different ways to figure out how you're going to survive you need to have a narrative that supports that you need to have something that has that space for the player uh to make different choices in the game world will react to that not only in a systems and like a game mechanics way but also in a narrative way of course again in State of Decay they may also be coming with with player fantasy expectations like players come to a game thinking oh this is the game where I'm going to get to do this it's sort of sold to me as like how are you going to survive the zombie apocalypse what choices you going to make if you're selling the player on that fantasy you need to support it with the narrative you need to make sure there's enough um sort of interactivity in there that as they make their choices about how

they're going to live through that player fantasy the game is reacting to it and again going back to the church on the darkness the game I did this had a lot of fantasy expectations that kind of went wrong actually so this game you're infiltrating this religious cult we sold it as like try to figure out are the cult leaders good or bad um but a lot of players came to the game sort of expecting oh I'm going to get to talk to everyone really do detective work about it and you can't do that but it's also kind of an action game with stealth in it uh so a lot of and because of some scope reasons a lot of the characters just run away from from you and other ones start shooting at you right away um so you're like hey well this isn't really the fantasy I had sure I can talk to some characters but what are the rest of these characters I was expecting something different and that's something to think about uh when you're selling a certain player fantasy in the game to make sure your game is living up to it and not not bringing the player something they weren't expecting or you know hopefully adjust your marketing to be selling the game you're actually making um so another thing you should think about in terms of expectations is how your game sets expectations within itself right so if you look at this this

is sort of a perfectly linear story right going from event to event to event quest to Quest whatever um and let's say that we're like hey we should make this more interactive narratively right okay well how could we do that we could do that this way right now it's an interactive story it's it's perfect um and if you do this you this isn't very common but you sort of set up this case where it's like hey I get to make this cool Choice and then I don't get to make any choices again like what wait what happened to the game so this isn't very common but this is a little more common right where you have a game that feels very linear all along the way and then suddenly like surprise multiple endings uh and you you know this can be again the player is learning from your own game what they're going to get and it'll end up disappointed in the ending if it doesn't live up to what they thought were the rules of the game that were established early on so this actually happened to us in the suffering where the structure of the game originally looked very much like this where you were sort of going you were doing different objectives you had along the way you could like choose sort of good or bad things to do with each but there wasn't lot of feedback about

it along the way and then oh surprise multiple endings at the end so what we did was we started first we added sign posting along the way to say hey this thing you've done is actually a really big choice you should uh be thoughtful about it you should realize you've done it proceed differently in the future so this was better but still not quite there so we ended up add adding just enough again this was an action horror game this wasn't somewhere P person was necessarily expecting any interactivity um so we wanted to make sure there was enough to sort of show them hey this is the game you're getting into to uh this is what you can expect as as you keep going and so when you get to the end you're like oh of course I've been seeing this all along the way so as you've established sort of the ground rules between you know what is the what do you want the player to get out of the interactivity and what can the player expect out of the interactivity you should start thinking about well what are the layers of interactivity that I care about and there's a lot of different ones you can care about you don't necessarily have to care about all of them to put some interactivity in the game right so one

layer is what I call moment to moment you know you can play through Fable again to go back to that example where you're getting this sort of reactivity along the way to all the choices you're making um but the the narrative itself is actually pretty fixed but it still feels very reactive because in the moment you're getting all this feedback from the system you know if you if you're interested in this sort of momentto moment feedback something I recommend checking out is sports games are actually really excellent at this the sort of play-by-play commentary you get out of systems uh just feel this makes you you know feel very centered in what you're doing while they're talking about what I did it feels great even though you know the game's going to go nine innings maybe over time uh but you sort of get that feeling in a way that I think other games could learn a lot from those systems like in MLB the Show here is just super high fidelity very well done you also just might have momentto moment sort of interactions in conversations you might have branching dialogue that doesn't need to affect the end of the game but just might be in that moment you're having fun like in Monkey Island here navigating through conversation trees learning little bits of extra things things about the characters even though there's not like

extensive branching in the story so that's sort of the momentto moment layer just you know what's happening right then doesn't need to affect anything later the next layer up you might say is like the Quest level right I'm going to this is example from Fallout 3 I'm going to go on Quest and Fallout 3 I'm going to get different outcomes depending on choices I make um and then that's that's going to feel meaningful to me because I'm going to see these little changes now the interesting thing about Fallout 3 is it actually has a very linear sort of main quest structure sure it has side missions all along the way that you can do uh but as you go through these different quests you're going to see these little changes but you're going to stay on that sort of very linear rail so it's going to feel reactive but not actually be branching all over the place of course the the Cory to The Quest level is you can pay this off with multiple endings and that is something Fallout 3 did you know they had this sort of beautiful wrap up at the end that went over all the events that you did um and how everything you know sort of paid off for these characters that you had touched along your way in your journey through the capital Wasteland um but then you know the the the next

evolution in layers above this then would be to actually go to multiple paths and that's something they didn't Fallout for where they actually had again those sort of linear Quest structures but then it actually forked into different paths and you might miss whole sections of it um and this you know creates an even more different experience for different players then you get into challenges of like hey can we make these all interesting to the same amount do we have time to do all this content because then here you're going to start missing content this is really great if you have you know a pretty large team pretty pretty large budget uh and some cool stuff can come out of this is it necessarily better than what we saw in Fallout 3 not necessarily but again it comes back to what are the choices you're making for your game so the next layer I want to talk about isn't at The Quest level but just at the Character level um you know it's sort of like forming up a party in an RPG to go through a pretty linear story with them hey well at least I'm experiencing it with different people along the way right um so the layers uh again this sort of character level can happen in State of Decay where the simulation is out these different characters who are um sort of uniquely

generated they might die at any time you might lose them um so you're going to have to decide hey you know who who do I care enough to take with me to be the one that I play going through this story uh watchdog's Legion did a really interesting version of this too where you can promote these characters sort of out of the world and decide hey uh I'm going to take you're going to be the one in my group we're going to go you know do this together and this the The Narrative then in in watch doogs Legion is very fixed right it's not branching all over the place it's not changing a ton uh but it's sort of uh because you're doing it with these different characters it changes enough that it's interesting right and they wrote These tons of variations of the scenes uh with which character you had so it was actually fairly complicated but still in a fairly linear structure and again if you want to go crazy combine all the layers to again end up with a simulation uh something like the Sim something like Dwarf Fortress no authored story feels a lot more you know kind of amorphous as a story doesn't feel like a traditional story players may not say say hey that's a story game at all um and players are

doing a lot of the work here it's really the player story that they're telling so you're going to be um you know relying on them to do it but it g be very meaningful with them if that's your goal uh you're going to want to have that you know leave them in that experience where it's okay that they don't have a fixed story because they're getting this amazing simulation so next up um once you've thought of the different layers you can think about what's the depth of the interactivity I want to go to in each of these layers um and you know this this can you know be in all sorts of ways in your project um one thing I like to think about is just what I call the chatter dialogue a lot of people call these barks you know a lot of times barks kind of get a bad rap on writing teams like the more Junior person has to do that but I like to remind everyone that hey this is actually the most important part of your writing in a lot of ways you know the person who was the lead maybe they get to write the the cut scenes the fancy things but let me tell you those things are probably going to be watched only once right you know the

barks are going to be with you all the time where you're playing while you're spending time in the game and that's why I kind of don't like the term barks it's like are these dogs or what what are we talking about here you know I prefer to to feel like these are meaningful things and hey if the barks are bad that's what players are going to take away from the game uh the great thing about implementing barks you know is that you can tie them directly to players actions as they're going along and they're kind of not that hard to implement you can just Trace things that hey these are the things the players are doing as they're going let's write triggers for those um and they can they can get more complicated this is an example from uh home World remastered um where you know as you're playing an RTS you're directing units around and things like that you're going to um want to you know reack to the different choices you see players making these can get you know simple to like hey I ordered my unit over there it got into combat over there that sort of thing you can get it more complicated where they're reacting to like Hey we're in a tough situation here or winning here those things are harder to implement you can decide if that's sort of worth it on your project

again with branching conversations is another example of where you can go to different levels of depth right so you know when you think of branching conversations it's like particularly as you start out in the industry and you're like hey I'm going to write a branching conversation you might say wow I'm going to make this really interactive and you start making it you have a starting point you're like hey from there I can say three things cool okay from there I can go to these different nodes and I can make these choices and then oh I can make the I'm pretty sure you pretty soon you realize hey I can't fit this on the page anymore it's getting so large right um and you're just having this sort of explosion of content you now have to create and manage as you're going uh trying to develop your whole game uh eventually as as you think about branching conversations more you're like hey some structure like this is actually better where it feels like it Loops back to things it has choices they don't all Fork the entire tree right and you're able to have something that still feels very interactive this way uh but is less of a burden on you to just create um and

and having something that that still really works for the player but doesn't Crush you with the content um you know one way to obviously bring some some without having that huge forking thing uh you can also just have branching conversations that have really meaningful consequences in the sequence of events like The Telltale Games are really good at that for example with The Walking Dead um all right so now that you've thought about hey well these are my different layers of where I'm going to on interactivity here's how deep we want to go on each of them remember you don't have to go deep on all of them there's lots of simpler ways to do things that still feel really interactive um next you have to sort of teach the player that your interactivity is even there because again often when you're doing games that maybe users aren't used to having interactivity they may not even know it's there they may not know they're making these choices on and The Telltale Games are really good about that having this warning up front that says hey you know this this game uh series adapts to the choices that you make the story is sort of tailored to how you

play just really shining a light on this is what players can expect out of the game they're having um you know this was something I did again in the church in the darkness where you know this was a very different type of game for the different type of story for the game we were doing you know this action stealth game suddenly has this weird procedural narrative layer on it so we just wanted to be clear hey you know in this game where the the motives beliefs and actions of the preachers who were sort of the antagonists in the game uh may be different every time you play just be really clear about it from the beginning we actually did this too we made an endings menu right off of the main menu you could pick uh thing that said endings and it showed you what the different endings you had unlocked were um I know looking back I don't love this menu anymore it's sort of pretty cluttered from a UI standpoint kind of ugly um and it kind of encourages the wrong thing to which is encourages like hey look at this thing I've got to go you know I've got to get all of these I got to collect all these things and that really wasn't the intention I really want players to yeah you know get four or five ending something like that that

gives you a pretty good sense of what the simulation is doing um but instead you know some players would see this and say I got to get a mall I love players who who get into that and do that but it wasn't really the intent there another interesting example of this would be like in Detroit Beyond human they actually went even farther showing what was underneath the hood when actually saying hey you made this Choice well actually there's all these other choices you can make here's our tree structure maybe you want to look at this and this is something that actually showed up in the game as you made choices again this has a lot of sort of breaking of the uh uh suspension of disbelief you could say where the the player is really no longer thinking about it purely as a narrative but maybe thinking of it as a hey I should explore this but it's something they did was an interesting choice and I think might fit for your game as well so the interesting thing to think about as you're play as you're working on the game is you're going to end doing all these new interactive things you're going to need to play test play test and play test your narrative so often in games we play test the systems are players learning the controls are they

figuring out how to play and win right we focus on that we don't spend enough time play testing the narrative and this can be hard obviously like so often it's hard to know is it really working until you get to you know the whole thing has to be there to see if it's really Landing but of course by the time the whole thing's there you're shipping and you can't change it that much so try to figure out how do I play test some small section of it so that I see if players understand the systems we have uh in the narrative uh so we can see if it's really Landing all right so this has been a quick summary of how interactive you should think you know your game story should be uh just to go back you want to think about like what does the player get out of the experience of of having it interactive what do they expect out of it um and as you think about those things think about what are the layers we want to do what's the depth of the interactivity we want to do and then finally remember to teach the player everything you have remember to to play test it to see if it's really working so but there's probably another little

summary of this that we could go back to existen for a quick thought on just how interactive your story should be but you know I do feel the urge to kill someone here who I need to kill our waiter oh well that makes sense um waiter waiter when he comes over do it don't hesitate but everything in the game is so realistic I I don't think I really could you won't be able to stop yourself you might as well enjoy it free will is obviously not

a big factor in this little world of ours it's like real life there's just enough to make it interesting so in the end that's the most important answer how interactive should my game story be just enough to make it interesting thanks I think we're pretty low on time but if there's a question or two or I could talk to people after go ahead um thank you for the talk first of all um I I wanted to ask uh specifically about 0. five the idea of um teaching players about sort of the level of interactivity and I was wondering how you sort of frame that up against uh like hidden choices and kind of uh you know things that like might make you know sort of reward a player for like thinking creatively about the systems thank you yeah I mean I think I definitely am a fan of hidden choices and have sort of sort of tried to go that way maybe too much in the past um but I think if

you're saying hey we have some choices at all there are some choices here then you can hide other ones without it feeling like so much of a surprise at the end or whenever the system pops up and says oh wait no that that mattered you didn't know um so definitely pridden choice but just work them in with more obvious choices so the player even knows there are Choice that's going on um you mentioned the last point was play test play test play test your narrative what are your favorite method methodologies for play testing a narrative specifically yeah I mean that's that's tricky again with the like how do we play test when um you know the whole thing isn't done yet I think you know play testing something like a vertical slice to see if the systems are working at all uh can work where you can say hey we've got this chunk of it let's see if it's just working here otherwise you often have to go to like paper sort of stuff where you you know someone is telling the player telling the the subjects the research subjects what this the interactivity or what the the story is going to be and see if they would you

know are are getting it are into it and that sort of stuff uh and then finally do a play test once it is all there just to make those last minute adjustments uh but It's Tricky like I said I was always wondering uh they sometimes have the negative Karma path in games you ever find it disturbing how many people seem not just to just pick it because it's fun but actually go for the negative Karma path is their first path yeah I mean what I found is usually players go with the Positive path the first time right um it's like I I heard someone told me I can't remember who it was was like you know the first person first time the player is going through the game they're playing in in something they know there's an interactive narrative they're playing as themselves and the second time they're playing is the opposite of themselves which is interesting because the first time you know they're getting a more honest experience of what they would do and the second time they're doing everything they don't want to do so that's kind of like not great where it's like I don't want to play a game and just go against the the the opposite of everything that I would prefer to do uh so I prefer you know my my personal take is like having

Karma systems that are more gray it's less like labeled what the good and bad choice is and you have to think about it a little more I mean that's my personal taste obviously lots of different opinions on how to do that um but yeah I haven't se we used to I remember on the suffering we thought everyone was going to play it evil we were certain uh and then we found just from like feedback reading forums and postly stuff that almost everyone did good first um so that was sort of interesting like players aren't as evil as you think is a way of Hope oh I think they turned off your M that is a ray of Hope what's that that is a ray of Hope right exactly all right I think we're out of time thanks everybody [Music]