Talk Title: How Interactive Should My Game Story Be?

Effective talk: Player interaction with the story and world

Year of Talk: 2024

Video Link: How Interactive Should My Game Story Be?

Steps to determine the amount of interactivity needed for the game:

1. What does the player get from the interaction?

   1. Possibly allow for more variety in the story and it helps captivate players.

   2. Let players replay the story to get new responses and different outcomes for the final story.

   3. Players enjoy having the story react and change to their choices. This can be when an NPC remembers something that happened in an earlier mission or a village that didn't exist because the player didn't save it in time.

   4. Being able to share unique moments in the story. If the story surprises or makes the players feel unique then they will want to share it with others. Can also help with notoriety and more people buying the game.

   5. Giving players options to customize their character's looks or traits can help make them stand out and feel unique in the world, even if the story is mostly linear.

   6. Some games try to make interactivity the whole point of the story and the game which leads to a lot of unique story making.

2. What does the player expect?

   1. Genre Expectations: Certain genres have certain established ways of doing things. RPGs always have multiple speech options. Shooters need a lot of types of guns to use. Needs to show how the game might do it differently.

   2. Fantasy expectations: It's important to consider what the player's fantasy should be allowed and take that into account. If the game is meant to be a zombie game then there needs to be zombies that are trying to eat brains.

   3. It's important to properly set expectations for how the story is meant to progress. Will it be linear or a branching path? Will there be some key moments that will change the story drastically or only change minor things? Make sure it's clear to the player so they know what to expect. Adding some sort of obvious moment where the player's actions affected the story is a clear way of showing this off.

3. Layers of interactivity?

   1. Moment to Moment: This is when someone is playing a game and they see things changing and reacting to the world and the player's reactions in real-time. Normally the game feels very interactive. Having branching dialogue can allow players to learn more about the world without affecting the end of the game.

   2. Quest Layer: When players are completing quests and advancing the stories they can see how characters are reacting to changes and act differently from the start of the quest vs the end. Especially if there are a lot of back-to-back quests with the same characters.

   3. Multiple endings: The larger layers are how interacting with the story leads to multiple endings and unique outcomes. This helps the players see the impact they've had on the game and lets the players decide if they did a good job.

   4. An extension of the Multiple-ending layer is having multiple paths that can lead to one of the endings. This helps not only block content that the player might want to complete in a later run but also makes decisions feel more impactful.

   5. Characters: Each character is meant to be written uniquely and make sure they have personality. Creating believable characters and having that layer the player can interact with means that when situations start occurring to the characters the player feels a connection to said character and might want to help.

4. Depth of interactivity?

   1. Having NPCs throw out basic lines while in gameplay makes them feel like they are reacting to the world and the player's actions. Having barks makes the characters seem realistic as they are interacting with the world and its changes.

   2. Branching conversations allows for a wide depth of conversation. It can be only one or two options deep or allow the players to go a dozen or more options deep better to understand every part of the lore and the story so far.

5. Teaching the player about the game's Interactivity

   1. Not all players might be used to the interactivity in the game. So it's important to clarify how decisions made in the game affect the story.

   2. Some games will show off what the players missed from the story or in a mission. Other games mention at the start of the game how each decision will have an effect on the story.

6. Playtest the narrative:

   1. Testing the game with players and seeing how they interact with the level and types of interactivity can give data on its usefulness.

   2. This helps determine how much more explanation of the interactivity is needed. Or if players find it too annoying to use.