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.