Post 5 : Fighting Slippery Traces of Fantasy

My experience reading the Fighting Fantasy book was a pleasant one as I have been long been a fan of such books, having read the choose-your-own-adventure series. When asked to compare these types of stories with something like “Slippery Traces”, my vote surely goes for the Fighting Fantasy books, even though they are supposedly old media. Reordering of media by the user as they allow in Slippery Traces, to me, fails for a couple of reasons.

1. The lack of a well-formed narrative. By giving limited choices, like in the books, the author was able to reduce the number of possible permutations of the stories and pay attention to making the narrative smooth; by making it consistent in message and flow. In “Slippery Traces”, though there has been effort by the author to select and categorise the postcards, it lacks a sort of flow in the narrative that it presents. This is really an issue which crops up with giving choice. It’s a delicate balance between offering choice and developing a well-formed narrative.
   
   
2. The human need to find a “right” answer. I think this need has been overlooked in our desire to allow people to gain multiple experiences within the same context. In class discussions about the project as well as when we were reading the books, it was quite apparent that people wanted to know what the “best possible” outcome should be. There is an underlying need for people to find the right answer and it might irritate them greatly to find out that there is no “best” answer really. Not all of us are fans of philosophy.

Now we ask ourselves that did having a computer make things a lot better in terms of the work “Slippery Traces”? Well, for one, things like hotspots would have been rather hard to have been convincingly carried out without computers. But I’m not so sure when it comes to the contribution of computers in the well-formed’ness of narratives. The large amount of choice such a system offers may not necessarily be a good thing.

Post 4: Little Red "Interactive" Riding Hood

We first started out by thinking about what is the message the story aims to convey; either that of a moral or that of a happily-ever-after feeling. Having decided on the moral of “not talking to strangers” as our overarching message, we proceeded to highlight events in the given story that were not critical to espousing our message. These were decided as the points of the story that could be interactive. This resulted in too many choices being available to the players and we got swamped in the various possible permutations that arose. We then took a step back and decided that the players should be able to make their decisions only for a certain character they pick. This method of limitation did wonders in terms of reducing complexity for us, the game designers.

Looking back, two things stuck out when it comes to interactivity; deciding the overarching message and handling complexity. There has to be a purpose to inserting interactivity into any medium. Usually it is a case of making a stronger point for the message you want to bring across. As interactivity is a double edged sword (it could present stuff that is incongruent with your message), its use must be limited in order to ensure that the overarching message gets transmitted. Next, we have learnt about interactivity as a being a mechanism where the user can make significant changes to the system and get a response in return. On that note, as a game designer, one is easily faced with the problem of permutation. How to reduce complexity without reducing interactivity too much is something designers have to think a lot about. A regular way of going about it is to put up dead-ends for some potential tracks as to simplify matters. What would be really interesting is if we could design AI that keeps your overall story arc in mind and then responds to players suggestions in a way that they do not deviate too much from the intended message.