The Seemingly Interactive Game: Deceiving Your Audience

Some popular videogames nowadays are story-driven adventure games, like Life is Strange, or Telltale Games' entire catalogue of modern releases. Games like The Walking Dead, Tales From The Borderlands, and The Wolf Among Us all follow characters with unique personalities forced to make difficult decisions over the course of a game. Games OR movies always seek to tell interesting stories, but the biggest fault of many stories is that the CHARACTERS never become interesting.

This is one of the things that sets these narratives apart, forcing characters in tough situations to choose between two non-ideal options, clearly defining the character and giving us a reason to like or dislike them. However, another element that relates to all these examples is the interactivity - or, at least, the guise of interactivity.

While playing these games, there is the physical motion of interacting with the games. These games though, especially Telltale's, harken back to old point-and-click adventure gameplay, allowing players to move around in a single, small area with limited characrters and objects to interact with. Rather than giving free-reign to search a large sandbox area or interact with any character a player may want to, the game makers limit the choices of the player from the get-go, to hone the narrative in to a more linear and controlled progression.

This becomes most clear in critical story moments. In one such instance, in the 1st videogame season of The Walking Dead, two characters are being attacked by zombies and the player must choose to save one of them. If they choose one, the other is not able to be rescued in time. This being the first real instance of this one or the other choices, it's not immediately clear that only one can be saved. However, as the game present the player a similar choice next time - the weight of the decision is clearly felt.

The creators of these games discerned the value in limiting player interactivity. Though it's a game, in some cases the fewer the options available to the player, the more intense the experience becomes. The player doesn't have the option to do something out of the ordinary or figure something out in their own time. This decision calls for the player to quickly choose between two difficult paths and it leads the player to invest to make the right decision.

Rather than letting you do whatever you want, whenever you want, the game forces you to spend time with these characters, see them grow and change, and then makes you decide their fate. It makes you feel like you're a real part of the group, with stakes.

And in the end: these choices don't impact the ending of the game. In almost no way at all do the choices made by the character affect the ending of the story, branching off to many, many endings. Instead, they all branch out and then back in to the same written end.

And that's how seemingly interactive games can create an experience better than truly interactive games. Deceiving the player so that they feel a true rush, a true feeling of responsibility, and a sense of this choice being real. And it works. Because professional writers write better than the average gamer.