An interactive review about interactive stories

The screenshot depicts a quiet suburban street on a sunny day. A white mail truck is driving away from the camera. In the foreground are a few trees and a house. In the background are mountains and a lake. The text overlaid on the image reads, "Without the human element, we hardly recognize stories."

ChatGPT was used in parts for the translation of this article from German to English.

I’ve taught you all I can, now go and make history! Or a blog article, more likely…

Out of the city and into the small town of Providence Oaks in the mid-1980s. “Lake” is a kind of charming small adventure, I really enjoy. The protagonist, Meredith Weiss, takes on a sort of “vacation job” in her hometown, temporarily filling in for her father as a postal carrier. The small, interactive story is more about the people in the town than the plot itself. So, for two weeks, you drive around the lake town, deliver mail, talk to the locals, and enjoy the digital tranquility.

The game’s simple art style, at its best moments, resembles “Life is Strange,” and at its worst, like a small developer’s attempt at an open-world game. It’s not perfectly polished, but it doesn’t need to be to effectively convey its atmosphere. While delivering mail, you can listen to the local radio station. The music is…

With its ten songs, it’s a bit too limited and not particularly diverse. So, over time, it becomes somewhat tiring and annoying.

Although monotonous, it fits the microcosm of rural life. The limited song selection can be attributed to the part-time radio DJ of Providence Oaks, which is even mentioned in a conversation with him. So, I’ll let that slide—after all, he also has to take care of his potato plants, even though all I can see are endless fields of wheat.

Gameplay-wise, Meredith’s daily routine is one of relaxing monotony. You don’t need to exert much effort and can simply enjoy the surroundings. The only goal is to deliver all the letters and packages to their recipients. In between, you chat with people, and at the end of the workday, you get to decide how to spend your free time: reading a book, watching TV, meeting up with an old friend, or helping a colleague from the city with a contract. Everything is pleasantly mundane. While I don’t need this kind of banality in every game, it’s surprisingly nice not having to play the big hero every once in a while. While there are important decisions to be made that impact Meredith’s life, they don’t carry weight for Providence Oaks or the whole world.

A Screenshot from "Lake", depicted are Meredith and Kay, an old friend of hers, standing on a wooden lookout in a forest.

The interactive story is interesting—or rather, the fact that there’s an interactive story at all is interesting. I often find myself wondering whether it’s really necessary, even though I’m a big fan of interactive narratives, I love games by Telltale and Dontnod, and I even wrote my pre-scientific paper for my Matura (Austria’s high school graduation thingy) on interactive storytelling. But the question “Why even bother?” is one that should be considered at times. So then, why even bother?

Interactive stories are like the realization of video games as a narrative medium. Games are interactive, meaning they offer possibilities that linear media do not. If we truly want to explore the narrative potential of games, we need to tell interactive stories. We shouldn’t just have freedom in our gameplay, but also in the way we tell our stories.

Interactive stories are often just a nice illusion to make players feel more involved in the game. I don’t actually make real decisions, as the authors already determined all the choices for me. Sometimes, authors also need to include fake choices where it doesn’t matter what the player does, because higher powers dictate the direction of the journey. And probably rightly so, since I’m not an author—I might make the decisions I want, but they may not be the ones that make a compelling story.

There are quite a few games that attempt the construct of interactive storytelling. The effort involved is usually very significant, because you essentially have to write more than one story. But if you don’t want to put that much work into it, you might have to deceive the player a bit. However, in my view, games that label themselves as interactive stories aren’t necessarily the best examples of what interactive narratives can offer. They are…

The type of sandbox I’m referring to comes in many different forms, like “Crusader Kings”, FIFA’s career mode, “Breath of the Wild,” or “The Sims.” These are games that let stories emerge naturally from gameplay, often by contextualizing mechanics as characters. By making gameplay less direct and representing certain functions in the game as people, they automatically tell a story. After all, without the human element, we hardly recognize something as a story.

People create stories, so why not just take real people and throw them into a situation where stories can emerge? What an idea! While the narrative may heavily depend on the individuals’ perception and willingness to engage, it can lead to wonderful stories. These stories might always carry some meta-elements, making them less immersive, but they don’t get any more interactive. “Dungeons and Dragons” had it already figured out in the 80s, I guess.

two screenshots, one of a minecraft server with multiple players and one of a crusader kings game

Did “Lake” need an interactive story? No. Did it harm the game? Also, no. In this case, I think…

Ironically, a world is also defined by the things that don’t happen or aren’t discovered. These elements still contribute to the process of creating the story. I believe most authors who write stories know things about their worlds that never make it into the final narrative because they aren’t necessary for the story’s flow. Yet, they’ve built and enriched the world with this hidden knowledge, making it better even if we never see it.

Perhaps this text is just an attempt to come to terms with the fact that I can’t see everything in a game. The “gamer reflex” to always explore where the main quest doesn’t lead, to first look left in 2D games because there might be a collectible hidden there, or to chase that unnecessary 100% completion, even though it doesn’t enhance the experience. I haven’t been playing games to 100% completion for a long time, but I still catch myself collecting extras, even when I’m not really enjoying it.

If you actually only chose one of the options throughout, then on one hand, I’m impressed by your determination. On the other hand… well, is this really the definitive version of the text? What’s part of the canon of this blog, and what’s just extended universe? I suppose we’ll never truly know.

Sometimes it’s enough to simply fake things—we love magic tricks, even when we know it’s just a trick. Sometimes, all the things we miss when experiencing interactive stories make the world feel a bit more convincing. And sometimes, it’s the truly abstract stories, like those in “FIFA” or “Crusader Kings,” that stick with us. They may not always be necessary, but that doesn’t mean we should stop telling interactive stories. At best, they enrich the way we write and experience stories; at worst, a story might not work as well as it would have in a linear form.