10 ways to do Interactive Storytelling PART 1

I promised in my earlier post to write about different interactive storytelling solutions. Obviously if you look at it widely, you can argue that all games are interactive storytelling. However the deepness and style of stories varies a lot. I intend to look at games that are defined more by their storytelling abilities than other aspects.

There are some big and popular solutions available, for example 3D chats like IMVU and Second Life are used a lot for telling stories. Also MMO games and especially their roleplaying servers are places for people to co-operate in story building. EVE Online is an MMO that gives very much freedom for the players to build the world, its economy and its political powers.

However these types of games or chats don’t actively support the stories with game mechanics and lot of the effort is fully up to the players.

Bioware’s old Never Winter Nights also had a mode where players could create scenarios themselves and then play them through with friends. Again lot of effort needed for the builders and players to organize themselves but some active communities where built around the player made environments.

I will list 10 very interesting interactive storytelling games that I’ve run into. These are games that actively focus around story building and give players some means to do it. The order is mostly chronological. This is roughly the order of me playing them or learning about them.

1. Façade

Façade is a classic one-act interactive drama created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern in 2005. You are playing the role of a person who is invited to visit a couple in their apartment. The couple is programmed to react to what you say and different outcomes for the evening are possible. Façade is referred a lot as one of the key installations of interactive stories.

Façade has crude 3D graphics and very simplistic UI but playing it is an interesting experience. My first time to play it took like 2 seconds (I managed to exit the outer door before entering the house) and even at the longest the story doesn’t run too long. So it’s easy and fun to try to find ways to get to different outcomes.

2. Storytron

Storytron ‘s creator Chris Crawford is a legendary figure among game developers. He started the Game Developer’s Conference and held the unforgettable Dragon’s Speechthat led to his ongoing voyage to create the ultimate storytelling games.  He argued that games where getting too repetitive and didn’t meet the mediums full potential.

Chris has been working with interactive storytelling since early 1992. Storytron was originally published in 2009. It is a platform for creating storyworlds, but it was deemed too difficult to use and it is undergoing changes.

3. Sleep is Death

Sleep is Death is a very interesting 2-player game by Jason Rohrer. It’s a game where anything can happen and that responds intelligently to everything you do. The trick is that the other player is controlling the environment and all other characters. So she is being like the game master in classical role playing games. The other player then plays the main character experiencing the story.

When playing Sleep is Death the game master has to practice first using the UI and all the available functions. The game will be much more fluent if the game master knows what she’s doing and can react quickly to the player’s actions.

4. Epic Mafia

I once wrote a longer piece about this game. It is online version of the party game where you have citizens and mafia and citizens are trying to guess who mafia is before mafia manages to kill all the citizens. This is not your most classical storytelling, but playing EpicMafia creates interesting mixed experiences where your real personality and the role you play are intertwined.

Epic Mafia is also a game where a group of people are given goals and roles and then let go to play with the given rules. It’s all based on free-form chatting and few selections made along the way and it works well. The roles work in a certain meta level where people also talk about the game dynamics and are not fully immersed inside the roles.

The numbers 5-10 will be in the PART 2!