Empathy and Jeopardy – challenges in interactive storytelling

There is an issue I am struggling with when trying to develop interactive stories: how can you make your audience emotionally engage with the experience?

In traditional storytelling you get swept along with the story because you care about what happens to the protagonist. In a good story you empathise with the hero’s plight – so you feel excitement when he springs into action, you fear for him when he is in danger and you feel heart-warmed when he lives happily ever after. If you don’t understand a character’s motivation on an emotional level you don’t engage with their story. As Mr Spielberg knows, it’s the stories that make us feel rather than think that connect with big audiences.

Most interactive narratives make me think rather than feel.

When you interact with a story you aren’t encouraged to empathise with a protagonist. You are as much a part of the story as he is. In some cases you are the protagonist. Instead of mirroring emotions that you see on screen, you step away from the emotions to make intellectual decisions, to solve puzzles, to win.

Win is an important word here. Almost all interactive stories have an element of game play, of success and failure. This has (at least) two benefits:
1) winning provides an incentive to continue with the story, rewarding participants for success
2) a win-able experience suggests the possibility of losing, providing the participant with a sense of jeopardy and narrative tension

However, the imperative to succeed can damage emotional engagement with a story. For a start, it limits the kinds of story you can tell, especially since almost all of tragedy and comedy is based on failure. Imagine an interactive Hamlet for example; would you win by killing Claudius in the first act?

And while any TV or film producer will tell you that jeopardy is a vital ingredient of engaging drama, this is so when the hero has to make the final choice that will either save or condemn the love of his life, the audience can lean in and think, what would I do if it was my loved one and I had to make this decision.

Jeopardy in a win-able interactive drama is of a different nature. The audience thinks, what shall I do in this situation in order not to lose. It’s an intellectual decision, not an emotional reaction.

I don’t have the answer of how to reconcile the need for emotional engagement in a story with the intellectual requirements of interaction. But I do know that next time I develop an interactive narrative, I’m not only going to think about what I want the audience to do. I’m going to think about how I want them to feel.