Interactive storytelling: Activity-and-Choice Story-Games

In this post I'll define a genre of video games that I'll call 'Activity-and-Choice Story-Games'. These are exemplified by games like Detroit: Become Human, Life is Strange: True Colors, The Wolf Among Us, and Florence.

These games can be seen as an evolution[1] of Point-and-Click Adventure Games, in which the puzzles of those games are replaced by 'activities' the player undertakes and choices they have to make. We'll get to what activities and choices are in a moment. These changes have been made to make this genre more story-focused.

[1] that B evolved from A doesn't automatically make B superior to A. Bs could be simpler than As, not necessarily more complex. Evolution does not have a direction. So we're not saying this genre is superior to Point-and-Click Adventure Games.

Here are some other prominent examples of 'Activity and Choice Story-Games' (A&C Story-Games): Life is Strange 2, Telltale's The Walking Dead[2], and Tales from the Borderlands. 

[2] The first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead is a transitional form, that still involved some puzzles. The subsequent seasons of it became more pure A&C Story-Games.

Traditional Point-and-Click (P&C) Adventure Games are puzzle-focused. The player solves puzzles to progress through the game and its story. The player can pick up objects, look at objects, use objects (e.g. turn on a light switch), or use one object on another (e.g. putting a key in a lock, to open the lock). These actions are primarily means for the player to solve the puzzles.

This affects the kinds of stories that can be told in P&C Adventure Games. One, what the player is primarily doing is solving puzzles, and thus that is the main thing the player's character is doing in the game's story -- going about, solving puzzles. And two, the story can only[3] progress after a puzzle is solved. This second effect slows down the pacing of the story. It might take the player quite some time to solve a puzzle. All of these things restrict the kinds of stories that can be told in P&C Adventure Games.

[3] This isn't strictly true, some story events can happen while the player is going about trying to solve a puzzle. However, that can't be a story event that would change the game world in any way that would prevent the player from solving the current puzzle. Such story events are uncommon.

The story has to be one in which the main character is going around solving puzzles, where it still has to make at least some sense if the story is put on hold for potentially a fair while, till the player has solved the puzzle. The focus on puzzles thus detracts from the ability of these games to tell a story.

Activities

In Activity-and-Choice Story-Games, one of the elements that replaces puzzles are 'Activities'. An 'activity' is some simple task that the player needs to undertake, where there is minimal challenge for completing the task. An activity there is to provide the player with ways to interact with the game, and they tend to be story-focused.

Activities are usually straightforward tasks, and present either no or minimal challenge. In many of the games, the player will be told what the current activity is (perhaps in the form of the activity's goal or as an item in a to-do list).

Here are some examples of activities, from the early parts of Life is Strange 2, in which you play as a teenager, Sean:

• After coming back home from school, and chatting with a friend on a deck outside the house, you go inside. Your dad and little brother are there, you have a conversation with them, and your dad says that you have to decide whether your little brother or him gets the last chocolate bar. You get to be the judge making the decision of who gets to have it (you can also choose to have it yourself).
• That night you're going to go to a party with some classmates, and before heading out, you need to grab some stuff to take over: drinks, snacks, a blanket, and some money for supplies. You have to walk around the house, and get the items. And you have options for what to choose as the drinks to bring, and what to choose as the snack. You have the option to take some of your dad's beer, and some money from your dad's wallet, or not.
• Later you and your brother are on the run, and need to find some place to stay overnight. You come across a national park area, and the activity is going down the paths from the entrance to where the campsite areas are. During this there's conversations and some things you can look at. And after you've found some shelter, there's the activity of collecting some firewood for a fire. That's just a matter of exploring around and finding pieces of suitable wood.
• Then there's lighting the fire, then sitting there engaging in conversation with each other.
• Later on in the game, you stop at a roadside gas station and store, and get some supplies for the trip there. There's various options for what to buy, and you've got limited cash, so you have to think about what are the priorities.
• Sometimes an activity can be as simple as walking from location A to location B. Along the way there may things the player can look at, and people they can talk to.

Activities are usually something relevant to the story, and they're more like scenes in a movie than any interactive parts of P&C Adventure Games are. Often they're 'slice of life' kinds of details.

Another example of an activity, from the start of Life is Strange: True Colors, is unpacking your bag when you arrive from out-of-town to the place you're staying at. You unpack the bag item by item, and for some items she might reflect on the role it had in her life, or some other items are textual (like some letters), which also provide a bit of a window into her life. Thus it provides some backstory. At the end of the process she goes to put her bag under her bed, and in doing so finds the guitar that her brother had gotten her as a present, which leads to a cutscene of her taking it out, commenting on it, and playing a bit of it.

While undertaking an activity the player may be able to look at things in their surrounds (including other characters), and the player character may comment on them in a way that reveals their thoughts on what is happening at the current point in the story. The player may also be able to talk to characters in their surrounds, about things relevant to what's currently happening in the story.

Activities may be very basic, easy-to-solve puzzles. That is, puzzles that can be quickly solved, and which present very little challenge to the player. Because A&C Story-Games de-emphasise puzzles, if they do contain some puzzles, they will (in addition to being easy) contain much fewer of them, compared to the number in a P&C adventure game.

Activities may also involve Quick-time Events (QTEs), to add small moments of interactivity and/or challenge in cutscenes. Successfully completing a QTE is usually easier than solving a puzzle (and of course it is a quite different kind of difficulty), and QTEs are compatible with a story-focus, because they can be embedded in cutscenes.

Choice

The second component of A&C Story-Games are choices.

We've already mentioned how choice can play a role in Activities. For example, in Life is Strange 2, when Sean and his brother are on the run, they come to a gas station and store, and with their limited money they have to choose which supplies will buy (if I recall correctly, there is also an option to steal some items). The player may also have choices in what to say to other characters, when they're talking to them.

These games may also have more explicit choices. Where the game presents the player with between 2-4 options for what to do, in the vein of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. For example, there may be an argument going on between person A and person B. Should your character

• Take person A's side
• Take person B's side
• Stay out of it

The first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead (2012) innovated on this formula in a way that proved to be very successful, and which also helped to popularise the use of choice in games. The main part of this innovation was to make the choices timed.

They applied this formula to both "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style choices and dialogue choices. The player would only have to a very limited amount of time to make a decision. If they failed to make a choice in this time, it'd either result in inaction from their character, or them choosing a default action.

Second, they made the choices very difficult -- where there were pros and cons to all the options.

Having to make a quick decision about a difficult choice turned out to be quite immersive. It forces the player to put themselves in their character's shoes.

Since that first season of TellTale's The Walking Dead, the use of choice in story-focused games has become quite popular. Interestingly, though, the use of timed choices hasn't been widely taken up. For example, the Life is Strange games have choices, but they're not timed.

Sometimes the choices are about personal expression rather than being difficult choices. For example, early in Life is Strange: True Colors, your character can choose which of two potential bad-guy characters will be the villain for the LARP another character is setting up.

A&C story-games replaced puzzles with activities and choice to make the games more story-focused games. Lets look at the consequences of this for the storytelling in these games.

Because the focus in P&C is on puzzles, the interactable objects in the environment, the descriptions, and character conversations, are all primarily oriented towards solving puzzles. That is, to give the player clues for solving puzzles, and the means to solve puzzles. That is not to say that there's no story focus regarding these things. Only that such has to be secondary.

If puzzle-solving isn't put first, then the details presented to the player could hinder their ability to solve the puzzles. E.g. providing details that don't at all help with the puzzles may mislead the player about the solutions to the puzzles.

Whereas in A&C Story-Games, the objects in the environment, looking at them, and talking to characters, can all have a story-focus.

When the player looks at an object, their response may reflect their state of mind at this point in the story. It may also involve their thoughts about a character who has some connection to that object (maybe it's something they own). When the player talks to other characters, it is more about story-relevant details, than to get information for solving puzzles.

We could, if we wish, consider the acts of talking to other characters, and looking at objects, in A&C Story-Games, to be kinds of activity.

What we're calling "Activity-and-Choice Story-Games" would most often be called "Narrative Adventure Games". However, that latter term is often used to refer to a much broader set of games than A&C Story-Games. Some of the kinds of games that "Narrative Adventure Games" gets used to describe include P&C Adventure Games that have a more of a focus on story than the typical P&C Adventure Game, like Kathy Rain, Walking Simulators, like Gone Home and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Visual Novels, like Doki Doki Literature Club, and film-like games that involve only choices, like Last Stop.

(Why do we not consider Walking Simulators like Gone Home to be A&C Story-Games? That game doesn't have any choices, though there's no reason why a Walking Simulator couldn't have choices. It's that pure Walking Simulators, like those games, don't have anything like the Activities we have been talking about. In them, you walk around, perhaps look at objects, open drawers and doors, and perhaps find audio-logs or audio-visual-logs. In literal terms these are 'activities', but they are not activities where the player is given a particular goal, and where the activity(s) that satisfy that goal have a particular role within the game's story.)

Note that there are also "Activity Story-Games", which only include activities, and don't involve any choices. These are much less common. The only example that comes to mind is Rainswept.

Having easy/fewer (or no) puzzles, means that the narrative in A&C Story-Games is less constrained than they are in P&C Adventure Games.

• 'Solving puzzles' will play little or no part in what the player's character is doing during the story.
• There will be less "dead time" while the player is trying to figure out how to solve puzzles, so the story's pacing won't be slowed down as much. Which means the story isn't constrained to be one where it "makes sense" for there to potentially be large amounts of time between each story beat.

The shift from puzzles, to activities and choices, means that each scene in the game can be a specific narrative situation. This is actually quite different to P&C Adventure Games. In them, there tend not to be specific scenes during gameplay segments, but rather a set of locations accessible to the player, for the current set of puzzles they can work on.

Some examples of situations the player might find themselves in in a P&C adventure game. They've been locked inside an apartment, and have to figure out how to get out. Or they need to find a way to distract a guard, so they can go in and talk to the person in the office. In story-terms, these are fairly low-level kinds of details. They're not particularly meaningful.

As we've mentioned before, with a puzzle-focus, the story has to be put on hold until the player has completed puzzles. And because the player usually has multiple puzzles open to them at any point in time, the story can't advance much until the current set of puzzles have all been solved. So there can't be much in the way of story-relevant happenings while the player is working on puzzles. There can't even be much that's strongly associated with the story, that happens within, or upon the completion of, most of the individual puzzles -- only on the completion of the set of puzzles after which the story can move forwards. The ability to work on multiple puzzles at once is good for gameplay, just not so great for story.

And this gives a "genericness" to lots of the details in the game. The object descriptions and conversation choices need to be generic. The player's predicament, for each puzzle open to them at that time, has to be "weak", in that it will also let them work on other puzzles at the same time. If the player has multiple puzzles open to them at once, then when they're walking around in and between locations they're in the same generic holding pattern, until all of those puzzles required for advancing the story have been solved.

With an activity-focus, each "scene" in the game can be about a certain story- event/situation, in a specific moment in time within the story. Within that scene the player is given one (or more, though it's usually one) activity to undertake (and potentially at some points will have to make some choices). That activity, and the player's interactions, have a stronger story-focus in A&C story-based games. So story occurrences can be happening within the scene.

 

Because of how activities and choices allow the games to be much more focused on story, A&C Story-Games are probably what most deserve to be called interactive movies. There are full-motion video (FMV) games that are often considered interactive movies, but these tend to focus only on choices, without any of the activities. As a result, they tend to be shallower experiences.