How inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling is shap­ing the future of cinema

We’ve all groaned in frus­tra­tion at a movie while being bom­bard­ed by cliché after cliché. We’ve screamed at our heroes for mak­ing the kinds of sil­ly mis­takes that can only lead to their demise. But what if we could break the fourth wall and take the nar­ra­tive reins? It could become a real­i­ty a lot soon­er than you might think.

Inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling has its roots in graph­ic adven­ture games, pop­u­larised by titles like Ron Gilbert’s ​‘Mon­key Island’ series and Tim Schafer’s ​‘Grim Fan­dan­go’, both of the now-defunct pub­lish­er LucasArts. The con­cept of these orig­i­nal adven­ture games was decep­tive­ly sim­ple. In ​‘Mon­key Island’ play­ers were put in the shoes of wannabe pirate-cum-goof­ball, Guy­brush Three­p­wood, as he pur­sued his dream of becom­ing a swash­buck­ler. In ​‘Grim Fan­dan­go’ you played as pro­fes­sion­al grim reaper Manuel Calav­era, work­ing for the Depart­ment of Death, sell­ing trav­el pack­ages for the Ninth Under­world. The influ­ence of cin­e­ma on LucasArts shone through in its atten­tion to writ­ing, humour and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. What pop­u­larised these games was an empha­sis on a sur­re­al­ist aes­thet­ic and a razor-sharp script, a rar­i­ty in the gam­ing world even today.

Sad­ly, though, wit and humour were not high on gam­ing audi­ences’ pri­or­i­ties, and the genre became unsus­tain­able. Stu­dios tried to jazz it up by adding action ele­ments or oth­er­wise ​“pop­corn­ing” the genre, but to no avail. Adven­ture games were out of fash­ion and prac­ti­cal­ly dis­ap­peared. At least for a while.

In 2006, for­mer LucasArts employ­ees res­ur­rect­ed the genre with Tell­tale Games, a com­pa­ny that re-intro­duced the for­mu­la through short­er, more cin­e­mat­ic games with less of a focus on puz­zle solv­ing. The com­pa­ny licensed huge­ly pop­u­lar film and tele­vi­sion fran­chis­es like Back to the Future, The Walk­ing Dead and Game of Thrones, allow­ing gamers to expe­ri­ence cher­ished worlds in an immer­sive new way. For the first time, play­ers were being chal­lenged on a moral lev­el, pre­sent­ed with gut-wrench­ing eth­i­cal dilem­mas – like choos­ing which team mem­bers would be left at the mer­cy of a zom­bie horde, or decid­ing if ​“just a scratch” required an imme­di­ate, dras­tic remedy.

Oth­er stu­dios quick­ly fol­lowed suit. Super­mas­sive Games, inspired by pop­u­lar genre titles like The Shin­ing and The Evil Dead, pro­duced the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed ​‘Until Dawn’. The company’s man­ag­ing direc­tor, Pete Samuels, reveals that their inten­tion was to keep the play­ers cen­tred on the filmic ele­ments of the sto­ry rather than fid­dling with con­trols. ​“We felt it was impor­tant to keep the sig­nif­i­cant com­plex­i­ty away from the play­er so that they could focus entire­ly on the char­ac­ter arcs that they we’re cre­at­ing, their choic­es, and their sto­ry,” he says.

The game utilis­es a ​“but­ter­fly effect” sys­tem, allow­ing play­ers to expe­ri­ence an entire­ly dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive depend­ing on the choic­es they make. Imag­ine going to see a film where the audi­ence has the pow­er to vote on, say, whether the pro­tag­o­nist should take the steep­er, quick­er path down the moun­tain, or play it safe and fol­low the long way down. Do you stand your ground and fight the ser­i­al killer edg­ing towards you, or turn and run?

Inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling is not with­out its lim­i­ta­tions, and the tech­nol­o­gy can be a cut-off point for over-ambi­tious imple­men­ta­tions. Accord­ing to Samuels, the ​‘Until Dawn’ team defines these lim­its by how impact­ful the play­ers’ choic­es would feel. ​“The lim­i­ta­tions were dri­ven main­ly by the effort required to cre­ate the con­tent,” he explains, ​“and how much branch­ing and nar­ra­tive vari­a­tion we felt would deliv­er on our promise of choic­es tru­ly and sig­nif­i­cant­ly affect­ing each player’s story.”

Rhi­an­na Pratch­ett, the writer behind dystopi­an sci-fi ​‘Mirror’s Edge’ and the recent­ly reboot­ed ​‘Tomb Raider’ fran­chise, says that nar­ra­tive restric­tions often presents obsta­cles that are sim­i­lar to those faced by screen­writ­ers. ​“With tech you have to be aware that some things are much more ani­ma­tion inten­sive to ren­der, there­fore more expen­sive,” she says. ​“Often los­ing char­ac­ters and plot points is a result of design or bud­get deci­sions rather than tech.” Pratch­ett adds that dras­tic mea­sures can also be tak­en: ​“For exam­ple a lev­el might get dropped, or a char­ac­ter might need to die to fur­ther the game­play, or there’s just not time to cre­ate them.”

Despite the cin­e­mat­ic ele­ments of video games still being rel­a­tive­ly nascent, their pop­u­lar­i­ty is already a force to be reck­oned with. ​“When it comes to the video game indus­try as a whole, we’re already on a par with cin­e­ma in terms of sat­u­ra­tion,” Pratch­ett says. ​“Our indus­try rev­enue already eclipses the box office so I don’t think we’re hav­ing any prob­lems there.”

Tell­tale Games has grown from a team pro­duc­ing games for a niche audi­ence to a com­pa­ny that has sold enough copies of The Walk­ing Dead game to rival the num­ber of view­ers who tuned into the lat­est sea­son – a whop­ping 28 mil­lion com­pared to the TV series which peaked at under 20 million.

Tiny inde­pen­dent stu­dio Cam­po San­to recent­ly released ​‘Fire­watch’, a mys­tery set in a Wyoming nation­al park in the late 1980s. Despite the lack of any real ​“action”, the game was praised by video game crit­ics for its evoca­tive sto­ry­line, lush aes­thet­ic and authen­tic, ful­ly-realised char­ac­ters. In spite of its indie sta­tus, it sold over half a mil­lion copies.

The extent to which con­sumers embrace this new tech­nol­o­gy will deter­mine the impact of inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling on cin­e­ma-going. Vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) head­sets are on the verge of becom­ing avail­able to the wider pub­lic, with Facebook’s Ocu­lus Rift, Sony’s Playsta­tion VR and Microsoft’s Hololens vying to rede­fine how play­ers enjoy cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences in video games. And Super­mas­sive is already plan­ning a VR fol­low-up to its slash­er thriller with ​‘Until Dawn: Rush of Blood’, build­ing on what made the orig­i­nal so suc­cess­ful. ​“One thing that’s very inter­est­ing to us right now is how we com­bine this type of sto­ry­telling with Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty,” says Samuels, ​“not to replace the cin­e­mat­ic sto­ry­telling in games like ​‘Until Dawn’ but as a fur­ther addi­tion to the way that we engage peo­ple in inter­est­ing sto­ries where their choic­es make a difference.”

Samuels adds that it seems unlike­ly this type of medi­um could ever replace cin­e­ma: ​“This doesn’t replace oth­er ways to con­sume sto­ries, like film, TV and nov­els, but it cer­tain­ly adds anoth­er inter­est­ing way to con­sume from a very dif­fer­ent perspective.”

The desire to be active­ly involved in an engag­ing sto­ry is a basic human impulse. It takes day­dream­ing one step fur­ther, allow­ing you to live out your child­hood fan­tasies to be a swash­buck­ling pirate, pio­neer­ing explor­er, or wily pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor. Yet it does so not in a lin­ear, obvi­ous­ly script­ed way like tra­di­tion­al games have up to now. No longer do games only have to be war sim­u­la­tors in which your only goal is to make alien heads explode. Pratch­ett thinks that, despite leaps in progress, and increas­ing­ly intri­cate nar­ra­tives in games, we’re still far from an organ­ic world. ​“Some­thing where the world and char­ac­ters prop­er­ly and irre­versibly change around you based on your actions,” she says, describ­ing her ide­al game, ​“and you can prop­er­ly feel that you’re mak­ing your mark on the world.”

Soft­ware devel­op­er Stéphane Bura attempt­ed to go past the ​“smoke-and-mir­rors” inter­ac­tion that cur­rent games have with Sto­ry­bricks, an organ­ic AI that promised to allow play­ers to expe­ri­ence a tru­ly organ­ic world. The crowd­fund­ed com­pa­ny had to close down in 2015, but it offered a clear sign of things to come.

Social media and the ubiq­ui­ty of the inter­net has engen­dered a cer­tain hyper-aware­ness of our envi­ron­ment. Yet it has also made us appre­hen­sive, crav­ing pri­va­cy and detach­ment so that we don’t lose our­selves in humanity’s dig­i­tal hive mind. Movies are one of the best ways to switch off and allow pas­siv­i­ty to recharge our social bat­ter­ies. Inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling, on the oth­er hand, gives us the lev­el of socia­bil­i­ty and belong­ing we have grown so accus­tomed to in the Infor­ma­tion Age.

Inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling games are the yin to cinema’s yang. They exist for any­one who can­not fath­om being alone and unin­volved. By con­trast, a trip to the cin­e­ma offers a brief respite from the con­stant bom­bard­ment of infor­ma­tion that com­mands our atten­tion. Rather than replac­ing cin­e­ma, inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling com­ple­ments it. These medi­ums can con­tribute to each other’s evo­lu­tion, and be bet­ter for it.