Interactive Narratives

Overview

Interactive narratives refer to a generation of revolutionary storytelling software that has created new possibilities in how stories are told by presenting the user the opportunity to actually direct and even change storylines in real-time interactions with the characters. The user is presented with a protagonist and a wide cast of supporting characters, a specific setting (time and place), critical exposition about the characters' background, and an initial basic situation. Indeed, once the narrative is begun, no plot event necessarily occurs; no plot event is preordained. The ongoing narrative is just that, ongoing, events designed through user interaction as the user moves through the narrative.

Through simple voice commands, joystick manipulations, body movements, and/or striking keys on a computer keyboard or clicking a mouse, the user becomes part of the story, either by creating a persona to operate within the storyline or by creating a sort of observer presence who is a part of the narrative landscape but is apart from the story itself. In either case, interactive narratives, using cutting-edge digital technology, offer environments that are at once immediate and realistic as well as inviting; the reader/user, whatever the role, is immersed in the world of the story itself. Unlike the narratives of novels or films or television, with interactive narratives the story is now open, ever-changing, and complex in that the narrative events themselves are no longer pre-determined and fixed by some controlling authority. In a traditional book, Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby must die in a swimming pool; not so with interactive narratives. An entire genre of interactive narratives now gives users the opportunity to revisit landmark works of literature and even iconic movies and play out alternative plot twists. Within the immersive environment of interactive narratives, the age-old question, "What happens next?" is more than a question casually raised by a reader; rather it is a decision the reader/user must make, a decision that within the interactive narrative will impact what happens next.

At its core, interactive narrative is the technology of testing possibilities within an entirely consequence-free environment. Mistakes, ineffective judgment, snap decisions all can be played out harmlessly within the unfolding narrative; indeed, in subsequent adventures those errors can actually be rectified and new courses of action explored. The result is to entirely reinvent the role of the reader; indeed, the word "reader" now requires quotes because interactive narratives actually seldom involve literally reading. There is a voice-over and the rest is the immersive world of immediate action played out in front and (depending on the generation of technology) all around the user.

Applications

Within what is really still the first broad generation of interactive narrative development, the technology has been used largely for entertainment, the interactive narrative concept has begun to be used in other endeavors, other fields where the risk-evaluation strategy and interactive engagement techniques of the genre have greatly expanded those fields. In education, for example, interactive narratives have been developed as a tool for reimagining the classroom dynamic itself and for introducing active learning as students can bring to life classic works of literature and test character motivation or students can learn situational ethics about a range of topics from bullying to racism or they can revisit and re-investigate the strategy for landmark historic decisions and even test alternatives (the free-wheeling engagement of "what if"), or they can trace through the steps of a complicated science lab experiment without risk of injury or loss of materials (Baldwin & Ching, 2017).

In businesses, corporations are able to use the interactive narrative technology of possibilities and its system of likely (or unlikely) consequences to evaluate employee decision-making skills, train or retrain employees, and even wargame potential problems involved in any major corporate decision. In law enforcement, the technology of narrative possibilities can be used for both training police in the hazards of unscripted encounters with belligerents as a way to evaluate officers' mental stamina, decision-making skills, judgment, and reaction times. In the military, the technology has already found application not only to train soldiers in the art of combat through virtual reality scenarios but upper echelon command has used the technology to work through large-scale scenarios involving planned short or long-term military missions.

But by far the most advanced uses of interactive narratives have been in the entertainment field. The appeal is understandable. After all, storytelling has been an element of the human experience since ancestors gathered about open fires and related stories of the day's hunt or enthralled a ring of listeners with invented tales often wildly imaginative tales designed to entertain. Storytellers themselves were seen as gifted (in many cultures storytellers were seen as spiritually endowed and even magical); after all the storyteller, most often through pure invention as scripted stories simply did not exist, was able to construct believable events involving vivid and engaging characters and then organize those events within a tight causal link all moving toward some Big Bang closing event that would bring satisfying closure and, in turn, offer some satisfying theme or lesson—all for the delight of the listeners. Although the medium for storytelling has radically altered, that dynamic remained essentially unchanged: the author in control, directing the unfolding events; the listener (and later reader) essentially, necessarily passive, grateful to be engaged certainly but really not a part of the unfolding action save as a non-intrusive spectator. And returning to the story, that is repeated interactions with the stories—from the fables or Aesop to the novels of Stephen King, from the tragedies of Shakespeare to the movie scripts of Paddy Chayefsky, from the stories of O. Henry to the classic episodes of Seinfeld—whatever the genre—brought the limited pleasures of returning the reader/viewer to the familiar, the known, returning to enjoy classic lines and/or classic scenes. The storyline was unchanging, the outcomes fixed, the events locked into inevitability. The imagination, that is the complex intellectual and intuitive faculty able to invent characters and, in turn, direct stories in the first place, was presumed to be entirely the gift of the storyteller.

With the advent in the late 1970s of video gaming, however, a generation of what would become progressively more and more proficient gamers responded to the immersive and apparently ad-libbed environments of the game world; and as new generations of video games created more and more spectacular storylines and their game worlds more elaborate and more detailed and hence more coaxing, these interactions quickly made sitting quietly reading seem like a non-profitable and entirely unrewarding sort of entertainment. By contrast, video gamers were always thinking, always responding, always moving the action forward. Even as video games themselves became technologically intricate, the graphics aesthetically stunning, and the multiple storylines increasingly dense, gamers became restless; after all, their role was still essentially passive, game developers had conceived of the twists and turns of even the most complicated plot. The story itself was entirely limited by the game's premise—rescuing a princess from a dungeon, for example, or chasing car thieves in an urban landscape or battling aliens in deep space.

Since the 1970s, graphic novels, which developed stories presented in comic-book-like illustrated frames with characters speaking in dialogue balloons, experimented with the concept of interactive narratives long before the first generation of such digital technology first appeared in the early 2000s. Indeed, postmodern novelists in the mid-twentieth century had experimented with novels that offered multiple story possibilities and invited the reader to pick a plot, any plot. Graphic novels introduced the concept to millennials. A story begins with a clear premise; a character would be introduced within a setting and with a backstory and then character would come to a crossroads decision and the reader would be able to choose one of two or three options, and, depending on the choice, the reader would actually flip ahead to the pages where the author would play out the consequences of that decision. Theoretically the reader was reimagining the story itself a number of different ways depending on the choices—but still the limits were obvious. Interactive narratives, from their introduction into the entertainment market, brought together the expansive reach, layered narratives, and multiple dimensions of video games with the premise of narrative interaction and reader participation pioneered in postmodern novels and graphic novels.

Issues

The psychology of the video game world has been imperfectly assessed because of the newness of the technology. An immersive narrative world strives to duplicate the sense of being in a real place, and there is some question as to whether leaving a game can be as easy as a simply closing a book and returning to the business of the day. That totalizing experience may pose a sort of reentry trauma. The goal of interactive narratives is nothing less than to reconceive of data as "navigable," a game world as "participatory" to a degree that allows the user to accept the immersive world as real. The problem, of course, is that the technology has found a cultural niche before such long-term testing can be done. The appeal of the technology, the newness of interactive narratives, and the comparatively dull experience of engaging words printed on a page have made interactive narratives controversial.

For those shaping the technology that creates these interactive narratives, far from stymying the imagination or destroying a cultural archive of stories and characters, interactive narratives provide entirely new dimensions of the narrative art. Like every breakthrough invention since the printing press, the digital platforms that first create and then sustain immersive, interactive narratives offer an unprecedented opportunity for upending the status quo. By introducing choice as an element of storytelling, interactive narratives create a user experience that upends traditional notions of reading in which the reader is a passive recipient of a processed and prepackaged commodity. Advocates of the new technology point out that even within the apparent open confines of an interactive narrative the overriding software maintains control over the general direction of the story; a user cannot, for example, simply introduce an alien space attack or throw the protagonist off a handy cliff or morph a family dog into a robot lawn mower.

The digital codes creating the interactive narrative maintain an app package lock known as a drama manager (DM); a combination film director and scriptwriter, the DM provides a kind of reality check that immediately evaluates user decisions against traditional narrative parameters such as probability and logic, consistent character motivation, and possibility according to the general environment of the narrative itself. An alien attack, for example, would work with a sci-fi interactive narrative, and the protagonist's suicide might be in keeping with that character's established psychology. In that way, events can be both surprising and entirely logical. If the DM assesses a narrative decision as inconsistent, improbable, or illogical, the DM can intervene and question the user to redirect the narrative, much like a computer app asks users if they are really sure they want to do whatever they just commanded the gadget to do. In addition to providing a reliable and sturdy framework for the narrative, the DM directs the narrative chain once the user makes decisions, often termed a narrative generator. It is the DM that adjusts the narrative to the new dimensions of the decision, much like a car's GPS will adjust the designated course in the event the driver makes a wrong turn or is redirected by unexpected conditions.

Within the freewheeling immersive realities of interactive narration, narration itself becomes an activity. Stories and characters cannot ossify, cannot be passively consumed by succeeding generations—now, each time the story is told a new set of circumstances, a new set of decisions, a new set of reactions essentially creates an entirely new narrative. Storytelling, for close to a millennium, held to be the special privilege of a talented few is now dramatically democratized; everyone with computer technology becomes a storyteller. Thus, stories themselves are no longer static things on book shelves; rather narratives are living, inviting the user to exercise the imagination to become part of made-up worlds teeming with made-up people doing made-up things. Interactive storytelling potentially represents a way to bridge two schools of human thought that have been long divided—the hard sciences (e.g., engineering, computer science, mathematics) and the humanities—by bringing together high-end digital technology with the invitation to create, to engage a simulated world, and to direct a story.

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