Interactive Narratives

Definition:
"Interactive Storytelling (IS) is a form of digital entertainment in which users create or influence a dramatic storyline through actions, either by issuing commands to the story's protagonist, or acting as a general director of events in the narrative. Interactive storytelling is a medium where the narrative, and its evolution, can be influenced in real-time by a user"

Narratives have evolved over the years from linear to non-linear, chronological to scattered stories, in all forms of art, speech, songs, film, television, games, photography, theatre, visual arts and even role playing games. The word ‘narrative’ is a synonym for the word ‘story.’

It is the collection of events following a pattern or pathway of some sort. It has developed into a process of presenting events which have a general sequence.

There are multiple stories within stories, some don’t even have a sequence and focus more on the scattered aspect leaving the viewer to piece the story together like a puzzle.

Interactive narratives have a number of formats but the most common is digital. With the abilities that technology has to offer, it is easier to store data digitally vs. analog for the multiple options that the interactive portion of a narrative may have.

These narratives that users are able to interact with have had a growth in popularity in all forms of mediums: movies, YouTube videos as well as games.

These narratives are in a sense seen as a sort of “game” for users to experience and view. It can be seen as a combination of movies, TV, games as well as books and some may consider them not as a “game,” but rather a multimedia entertainment.

One video game company has made the interactive narrative experience especially popular with pop culture themed games and characters called Telltale Games.

Their list of games is fairly extensive and growing widely with the use of pop culture theme references. They've produced and are currently producing games in an episode and graphic novel style for popular TV shows, movies, etc.

The list of games Telltale has developed are:

• The Walking Dead Seasons One & Two
• Game of Thrones
• The Wolf Among Us
• Back to the Future
• Jurassic Park
• Borderlands
• Sam & Max
• Minecraft

Their most popular is The Walking Dead separate but referencing from the TV series and graphic novels themselves.

This profession of creating interactive narratives as a sort of game is allowing the players to play as their favorite characters or a character in their favorite fictional worlds to live out their own personal story making decisions as if they were role playing as that character in that world.

The appeal of fighting zombies and making tough life or death decisions or making conniving schemes in Westeros of Game of Thrones has had lots of appeal for the general public.

Not only can these games be played alone but with friends and taking turns sharing the experience with others.

Telltale is targeting all people who have a love for these TV shows and movies to involve themselves in their own personal story experience where they have the freedom to interact and make decisions for themselves within the story.

Lions Gate Entertainment the studio that is behind the success of Hunger Games, has invested in Telltale Games for them to produce what is tentatively being called “Super Shows” which is planned to be a cross hybrid of interactive television and video game features to be distributed through streaming services for consumers.

This is innovation for interactive narratives as it would now give a way for viewers to not only sit and enjoy the content from a viewer perspective, but now as a participant of the show.

Since Telltale Games is famous for their style of games being released by episode, which gives the participant or player a chance to wait and be excited for the next episode much like a TV show, it is bridging the gap between games, books, movies, TV shows and all these other mediums into one.

The innovation to the form of medium is hoped to be successful and influential for all interactive narratives for future.

Telltale Games and Lions Gate’s “Super Shows” may be a disruptive form of media for television but also changing the way we view and participate in not only TV shows but perhaps even future films at theatres as well.

Inaccurate Guess of Interactive TV vs. Regular TV

Perhaps for future applications we’ll be seeing more interactive narratives on streaming services and Telltale Games may be an example for future companies and projects.

Telltale Games