Interactive storytelling: audio and audiovisual logs

In an earlier post, I talked about how games are often divided between interactive gameplay segments and non-interactive storytelling segments like cutscenes.

I want to look at other techniques that are used to add storytelling elements into games. In this post I'll talk about audio logs, and what I'll call 'audiovisual logs'.

The first-person shooter BioShock (Wikipedia | Steam) popularised audio logs. In BioShock the player starts out by entering an underwater city built to a utopian vision, whose society has -- for reasons unknown -- broken down and most of its inhabitants have either been killed or are scattered.

As they traverse through the city, they may find objects that look like old-fashioned tape recorders. If the player picks one of these up, they can listen to the sound recorded on it, which is usually like a diary entry recorded by a character who was an inhabitant of the city (often they are one of the major figures who lived in the city).

Here's a short video of finding and playing an audio log from early on in the game. 

The audio logs the player finds are the main means by which the player learns about the city's backstory.

Audio logs are sound recordings that the player can come across, that are usually related in some way to the location they're found at. E.g. the player might find an audio log recorded by a character in that character's private quarters. They tend to be fairly brief (I would imagine that most of them are well under a minute long), and while listening to them the player can still move their character around and shoot or whatever.

I'm using the term 'audio log' in a broad way. Instead of them being objects that the character finds and can pick up, they can also be recordings that are automatically triggered when the player does something, such as entering a certain room for the first time, or looking at a certain object (like opening up a locker and looking inside). The game Gone Home (Wikipedia | Steam) has audio logs of this nature.

In Gone Home, the character comes back from an overseas trip, to the house that her parents and sister had moved to while she was away. For some mysterious reason, when she arrives no-one appears to be home. The audio logs that the player hears as they progress through the game are what primarily informs them about what has actually happened. (These audio logs are like journal entries that you sister wrote to explain the situation to you. During the game it is not explained why it is that you're hearing these journal entries as if they were read by your sister. It's only at the very end of the game that the player gets a kind of explanation of it).

Terminology note: "audio log" is the most common name for these kinds of things, but they actually go by different names in different games. For example, in BioShock they're called "audio diaries", and in Bioshock Infinite (the third Bioshock game. Wikipedia | Steam) they're called "Voxophones". And these are just some prominent examples of games that use audio logs.

There's also what I'll call "audiovisual logs", where the player will not only hear the other character(s) talk, but see a visual representation of them and what they were doing at the time.

Here's what an audiovisual log could be like: where a character had recorded a front-facing video on their smart phone, that the player watches that as if they were watching a video. I'm not sure if that sort of audiovisual log has been implemented in any game or not. I haven't come across them.

But the kind of audiovisual log I'm talking about are a bit different. Say that the log is of several characters having a conversation around the dinner table in the dining room of a house. In these audiovisual logs, the player would see that audiovisual log when they're actually in that dining room. They'd see the characters sitting on the chairs around the table, that's right in front of them. So these are an 'in situ' visual representation of the characters.

In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (Wikipedia | Steam), the player is investigating what happened in a town where something strange has happened and all the people have gone missing. As you explore the town you'll come across audiovisual logs here and there, which show conversations between town inhabitants that were happening as the strange occurrences were happening.

The audiovisual logs are like 'traces' of the past, whose presence is somehow connected to the strange happenings. In them, the people are visually represented by golden glowing blobs of light that roughly represent the shape of their body and which follow their movements. Here's a short example from early in the game.

In the sci-fi game Tacoma (Wikipedia | Steam), you're investigating what happened in the space station Tacoma and why all the crew are missing. As you explore the space station you'll come across scattered audiovisual logs. These were recordings made by the space station's computer, and they show events that happened in the lead up to the crew going missing.

These are presented slightly different, in that the player can control the playback, by pausing and scrubbing back and forth through the conversation - in order to better be able to catch all of its details. An example from early in the game can be found about 15 seconds into this trailer for the game.

With most audio and audiovisual logs, the player is free to move about while the log is playing.

How can we understand these audio and audiovisual logs from a storytelling point of view?

They provide backstory, and function somewhat like a flash-back in a movie. The audio logs that are like diary or journal entries serve basically the same function as finding a diary or journal entry written on paper, that the player can look at and read the text of.

They may also provide some world- or character-building.

In some of the games, it feels fairly unrealistic for there to be all these audio logs scattered around the place. And it sometimes feels unrealistic that the recording was made in the first place. E.g. an audio log recording of a doctor doing some surgery where they suddenly decide to do something horrific, and the nurse is horrified. Who decided to record audio of what was happening during that part of the surgery? These sorts of contrivances can detract a bit from the storytelling.

(From a gameplay perspective, that your character can be still moving around and doing things while you're listening to an audio log, makes a bit of a difference. Compared to you having no control while listening to the audio log. It means the storytelling details of the log are integrated a bit more smoothly with the gameplay).

In the four games that we've looked at -- BioShock, Gone Home, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and Tacoma -- there is a mystery as to what happened prior to the events in the game, and the logs are the primary way that the player can piece together a picture of that.

There is a kind of puzzle element to it. The player hears the pieces (individual logs), and those pieces may not explicitly spell out the overall picture of what has happened. The player may need to themselves connect the dots to figure out the overall picture.

This isn't to say that that's the only way these logs could be used in a game. However, what does seem to be pretty inherent to such logs is that they provide backstory.

There can be a gameplay challenge, of finding the logs. BioShock is like this. If a player doesn't search thoroughly enough, they might miss several of the audio logs. That's some interactivity that's associated with the logs (in finding them). And the game might require user input to play a log (more interactivity). But the recordings in the logs are non-interactive. In this sense they are a bit like a cutscene.

What I said in an earlier post about cutscenes also applies to these logs. The logs may together form a strong narrative, but the player's experience of that strong narrative is diluted by the very loose narrative of the gameplay segments between each log that the player finds. Also, because the logs are fairly short and are scattered about, it is more difficult to use them to form a strong narrative. The logs tend to work better as more stand-alone pieces, that don't have the strong connective-tissue between them that's required for a strong narrative.

But while cutscenes can be used for flashbacks, flashforwards, or what is happening in the present, the logs only seem usable for (what are effectively) flashbacks. So they can only contribute to strong narrative for the backstory, not the story that the player experiences first-hand.