Interactive story-telling can be way better.

Off-late, a trend that’s been followed blindly is the interactive narrative / story-telling way of gamifying content. ‘Bandersnatch’ from Black Mirror S4 & a ton of L&D courses follow a system where the player chooses the direction of the story & its progression, thus giving the player a false sense of ‘free will’.

If you think about it, due to time & budget constraints, it’s impossible to design for all the possibilities of the story, so ultimately the story ends up with limited alternatives & with a limited opportunity to actually bend the plot of the story. Your actions don’t matter, the story progresses in a similar fashion regardless of your choices. So ultimately it boils down to either the story ending or the story going on a different path with binary choices, pre-determined themes playing out, where your choices simply don’t matter.

However, games that don’t promote themselves as ‘interactive’. Let’s look at Civilisation here, there’s no plot as such in Civilisation & yet every campaign has a different path to success, you make stories that are extremely unique to you. So, Civilisation is essentially a series of game mechanics that if put together, give you a different story every single game depending on how you play it. ‘Free Will’ truly exists here, as every single action has a consequence attached to it.

We need to think hard about where we take gamification. We need to keep improving it. Keeping this context mind, I will reluctantly use this phrase, "it’s possible to design systems that help develop & foster real stories!"

#gamification