Study Task 6 - Planning a Practical

I intend to visually and practically investigate: Interactive Storytelling 

In order to do this I will: 
Examine key aspects of existing interactive stories, such as choose-your-own-adventure books, visual novels and interactive video games, and then recreate a short story using these mediums.

Primary Research: 

• Create my own interactive stories and find out how effective they were by presenting them to a target audience and getting them to rate it/answer a questionnaire,
• Create a 4 panel comic with one blank panel and ask a target audience to fill it in,
• Create story panels in grayscale to put emphasis on lighting and composition.

Secondary Research:

• Look at screenshots of visual novels and video games presenting choices, compare techniques and replicate,
• Read interactive stories and play interactive video games, as case studies, to analyse techniques used to pace story, present choices and how the choices affect the narrative.

Media and Processes:

• Traditional: Textual story, interactive comics, storyboards that fold out,
• Digital: Visual novels, flash games, 4 panel comics - fill in the blank panels.

Context:

• Recreate existing textual stories into interactive stories using what-if scenarios.

Study Task 5 - Practical Approaches

I intend to investigate how interactive stories present choices, and whether these choices make the story experience better than traditional storytelling. I aim to explore how the effects of the illusion of choice on readers, and how they make moral and ethical choices. I also intend to look at interactive storytelling more practically; how they are paced and presented. Storyboarding techniques that can be adapted to help with composition of visual storytelling (graphic novels, comics, visual novels, video games). This relates to my research since it helps me refine the choices I present in the interactive stories I make and learning the rules means I can understand and adapt with the medium.

I plan to create a narrative and present it as both a traditional linear story and as an interactive story too. I will also make a variant of this story where all there are multiple choices but they all ultimately lead to the same ending and compare it. I also plan to comapre different mediums of interactive storytelling, exploring both traditional mediums like text and comics and digital mediums like visual novels and maybe a simple, experimental video game. To rate the effectiveness I could present questionnaires and polls to an audience. The end product could be an interactive video game/visual novel or an interactive comic/novel.

Study Task 4 - Introduction

I first wrote brief overview of my proposed research topic, "Can interactive story-telling efficiently tell astory?":

I plan to explore interactive storytelling and how it conveys a story and how this different form of delivery makes or breaks a story. I plan to look at the one of the main key mechanics of interactive storytelling - choice. I intend to explore the value of giving readers a choice, or at least the illusion of choice and how this affects the overarching story experience. Some other mechanics I will look at are composition, pacing and ethics/morals. I aim to look at a multitude of interactive story templates and mediums; visual novels, ‘Choose-your-adventure’ books, interactive comics and video games are a few mediums I plan to recreate short stories in. I will recreate the same story in these mediums and plain text as a control to experiment with which works best. My final product could be an interactive story told using many mediums.

I then rewrote it into an introduction/summary for this project:

Ever since early-man gathered round a fire to tell stories of harrowing experiences and thrilling wonders, storytelling has evolved exponentially. It has, in essence, become an art form in itself. Story is an age-old, generally recognized key factor of narrative-driven animation and has the ability to make or break an animation. That said, there are still innovations happening in story, literature and animation. One such modern development of storytelling is the ability to give the reader limited control over the direction of the narrative. It is a storytelling technique that the reader can interact with. Since the first ‘Choose-your-own-adventure’ book in 1976 by Edward Packard, interactive stories have been adapted to fit modern formats.

Interactive storytelling can take on a range of media and formats such as text-based ‘Choose-your-adventure’, visual novels, interactive comics, and choice-driven, point-and-click video games. Over the past few years, it’s popularity has grown but traditional narrative still remain mainstream. Is interactive storytelling a viable competitor to traditional storytelling? To what extent does interactive storytelling tell a story efficiently? This project aims to explore the various methods of presenting an interactive story and how they are different, for better or worse, compared to traditional storytelling.

One of the main mechanics looked at is the presentation of choice, or the illusion of choice. The value of giving readers a choice will be assessed for how much it contributed to making a narrative immersive, interesting and memorable. The moral and ethical aspect of choices too will be explored by use of prototyped interactive stories that will act as polls. The final outcome of the project would be a polished narrative told in different interactive mediums, to gauge which works best and why.

This then continues on to triangulate my finding on the aspect of choice in interactive storytelling.

Study Task 3 - Image and Theory

Suggestions from peer feedback:

• Primary research:
• Make my own story:
• Ask participants to write/draw the missing paragraphs/panels of a short story/comic,
• Questionnaire
• "Did you think your choice mattered?"
• "Which version (interactive or linear) did you enjoy more?"
• Rate out of 10
• Instagram poll

• Secondary Research:
• Comic composition
• Examples:
• Telltale Games
• David Cage
• Until Dawn
• Screenshots
• Media:
• Virtual novels
• Play interactive video games
• Read comics
• Recreate existing stories with 'what-if' scenarios