Immersion through illusion

Case Study: The Walking Dead

TURUN YLIOPISTO Informaatioteknologian laitos Interactive Storytelling, essee Miikka Lehtonen [email protected] Joulukuu 2012

Contents
1. 2. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 2 Choices in games ....................................................................................................... 2 2.1. Problems with choices ........................................................................................... 3 2.2. New approaches to choices.................................................................................... 5 3. Case study: The Walking Dead ................................................................................. 5 3.1. The interactive story structure of The Walking Dead ........................................... 6 3.2. Strong writing, good characters ............................................................................. 6 3.3. Better choices through forced role-playing ........................................................... 7 3.4. Social interactions and small but meaningful choices ........................................... 8 3.5. Making the player care .......................................................................................... 9 3.6. Dont abstract the horror...................................................................................... 11 4. 5. Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 12 References ............................................................................................................... 14

1. Introduction
Immersion is a key component in telling any good story. If the audience is not invested in the story, they will lose interest or even walk away without ever experiencing the story all the way through. There are different ways of building immersion, and these ways vary between the different styles of storytelling, interactive or not, as each style offers its own tricks and possibilities. On the surface it would seem that computer games offer the widest possibilities. A storyteller choosing to operate with nothing but text can tell their story through interactive fiction. Those wishing for a more cinematic approach have access to high fidelity visual and aural components along with dedicated software designed for cinematic storytelling, along with professional voice actors. Along with these possibilities come a host of requirements and problems, some of them shared with all forms of interactive storytelling, others unique to the medium. Since games are by definition interactive, the audience is not merely a passenger along for the trip, but an active participant in how the story is told. This means they must have a meaningful part in crafting the storys outcome if they are to feel at all invested in it. These meaningful choices and tangible effects come at a cost. Game development schedules are tight as are budgets and teams often find themselves struggling to find the balance between unrealistic amounts of extra work and unsatisfying consequences. Even a small amount of customizability creates exponential amounts of extra work as the team has to write and design all these additional possibilities, supply them with high quality art assets and voice acting and test them thoroughly (Fendt et al.). This essay discusses the unavoidable limitations placed on this method of storytelling by the game development process and what the consequences of these limitations are if they are not taken into consideration. It also examines the success achieved by Telltale Games with their 2012 episodic game The Walking Dead, where they were able to bypass these limitations through careful design and skilled writing. Why did The Walking Dead succeed with comparatively limited resources where others have failed with much more? What are the lessons we could learn from it?

2. Choices in games
As computer and video games are a relatively new form of interactive storytelling, they have always been something of a derivative medium. They have borrowed heavily from other forms of storytelling for both style and content. For the purposes of this essay, one of the more significant borrowed concepts is the idea of choice and morality. While the concept itself is universal, it could be argued that the systems for moral choices in computer games draw a direct lineage to traditional pen and paper roleplaying games. It is hard to say whether this is because the game designers themselves grew up on these traditional games or because the first games to offer these kinds of

systems often were based on traditional pen and paper RPG licenses and thus had to strive to replicate the experience the best they could. Whatever the reason for their inclusion, computer gamers welcomed the new systems with open arms. Early pioneers like Planescape: Torment, Fallout and Knights of the Old Republic won praise for allowing the player large amounts of choice in how the story progressed and even allowed them to impose their own code of morality on the game world. Whether the player chose to be good or evil, these choices affected how other characters in the game world viewed the player character and even the ultimate conclusion of the story. These kinds of moral choices are a traditional method of increasing player immersion in the story. The player feels his actions and decisions are having a tangible effect on the game world and the story and naturally the opportunity to role-play the player character as the player sees fit also greatly increases immersion. These choices are also one of the biggest problems for storytelling in computer games due to the limitations of the medium.

2.1. Problems with choices

While storytelling in computer games offers all the challenges faced by storytellers operating in any medium, it also has its own challenges and pitfalls brought on by the requirements and limitations of the medium itself. The most obvious limitation is that all the additional paths and branches created by the players choices require large amounts of additional work from the development team. Even a small number of choices will soon increase workload exponentially as the team has to generate assets and story, test new areas of the game and so on.

Figure 1: Even a small number of choices lead to exponential story paths

Ideally significant branching points in the story will lead to discrete story paths. To use an example a player might choose to investigate the haunted mansion or the pirates cove for additional clues. Any choices made in these areas lead to further paths and so on.

It becomes quickly apparent that catering to all these discrete events and possibilities is unrealistic. If allowed to branch out again and again these story paths and possibilities will result in countless variations of the story, which ideally should be accounted for when the story concludes. Interplays Fallout role-playing games have attempted this, but with the necessary tradeoff that the story concludes in written form. After the player completes the game they get text screens which outline the ending and how it affected various factions, nonplayer characters and places in the game world. Thus every ending does reflect the players choices and actions, but might not be all that satisfying as an experience. A more common approach is the so called diamond model. Named after the suit of playing cards the model visually resembles, the diamond model states that interactive stories have a common starting point, branch out to various degrees during the story and then come together for the conclusion.

Figure 2: The diamond model

The immediate problem with the diamond model is that as the story approaches its climax, players will invariably start to feel like their choices matter less and less. A good example of this problem was the Mass Effect Trilogy by Bioware. The three part space epic placed players in the role of Commander Shepard, the last hope of the universe against an otherworldly menace. During dozens of hours of gameplay across the three games players made hundreds of choices. From the very start the publisher promised players that their actions would affect the trilogys ultimate conclusion and how the story played out. Of course this was not true: the game had a single unified ending. Bioware did try to account for player choice by reintroducing characters and choices from past games, but largely in peripheral roles. As a result players were disappointed and voiced their frustration with great volume. The earlier two games in the trilogy were well received (at the time of writing, on the review aggregator site Metacritic.com they have user review averages of 8,7 and 8,9 out of 10, respectively) whereas the final game in the trilogy was poorly received and was

commonly named as one of the biggest disappointments of 2012. The extreme negative reaction tarnished the reputation of Bioware, formerly one of the most respected development teams in the industry. As problematic as player choice is, it is also becoming something of a requirement in most game genres. What, then, is the solution?

2.2. New approaches to choices

In his 2011 paper Structuring Narrative Interaction: What we can learn from Heavy Rain Huaxin Wei approaches the problem of implementing choices from a production standpoint. He examines the 2010 game Heavy Rain which was at its time of release praised for offering players significant amounts of choice in how the story played out. Heavy Rain was remarkable in offering a long and freely branching story told with extremely high production quality. This, of course, is the nightmare scenario. In his paper Wei examines the mechanics behind the branching and how the game disguises its prescribed narrative structure and gives players enough control to just feel critical to the narrative experience. While these lessons are not immediately usable for all game designers due to the unique style of gameplay Heavy Rain offered, they are worth considering. As production qualities and thus budgets for both money and time spent increase, games wishing to offer significant amounts of player choice will possibly have to look at new ways of producing content or resorting to offering just the illusion of choice. The latter is the conclusion reached in a 2012 study which studied the illusion of player agency (Fendt et al.). The study offered players a simple game which seemed to offer them large amounts of choices. In reality these choices were largely inconsequential. Their experience was then compared in a blind test with a control group who experienced a story where they had more actual effect. The study found that if left to their own devices, the unchanging story left players feeling less satisfied than the control story. However, as long as players were given explicit and immediate feedback following these choices, they came away satisfied and feeling a larger sense of immersion and player agency. This was also one of the many methods used by Telltale Games in The Walking Dead to achieve a great sense of immersion with limited resources.

3. Case study: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is a 2012 game by Telltale Games, a small independent design studio based in San Francisco. The game was well received by both critics[7] and players[8], reaching high scores and almost universal praise for the sense of immersion and investment players felt in the story.

The Walking Dead is based on series of graphic novels by the same name but almost exclusively features characters and locations designed for the game. The game was produced on relatively limited resources, but through clever and innovative use of mechanics and good writing managed to enthrall its players. It also achieved a level of success which allowed Telltale Games to announce a second season for a later date.

3.1. The interactive story structure of The Walking Dead

Much like the graphic novels it is based on, The Walking Dead tells the story of a group of human survivors after a civilization ending catastrophe. After most of humanity is wiped out by zombies, the few scattered survivors must find safety in a world that is suddenly filled with dangers. Told from a third person perspective, The Walking Dead has the player control Lee Everett, a man previously convicted of unspecified crimes and on his way to prison as the story unfolds. Everett meets various survivors and joins up with them in an effort to survive. Notably the game also introduces Clementine, a child who has been seemingly orphaned in the disaster. Lee unofficially adopts the child as his own. The players interactions with Clementine throughout the story were especially praised by many players and critics alike. The game itself is a traditional point and click adventure game where the player moves around game scenes interacting with characters and objects, solving puzzles and participating in dialogue with other characters. The story of The Walking Dead is told through five episodes, each consisting of roughly three to four hours of gameplay. Each episode was released separately, one to two months after the previous one. This allowed the team to utilize a two-tiered story structure (Mateas, Stern) where each episode works towards an overarching larger, or global, plot while also standing alone as a self-contained smaller, or local, storyline. Each episode is designed to function like an episode of a TV show. All of them start with a recap of the previous episode or episodes, highlighting significant choices or events from them, and each one ends up with a teaser of what is to come in the next episode. Player choice within the story is largely limited. Players have no control over the large overarching story and limited control over each episodic story. Instead, the choices are largely social. The game places a heavy emphasis on social interaction between both Everetts group of survivors and the various characters they meet. Despite this the game succeeds thanks to a variety of factors.

3.2. Strong writing, good characters

It should go without saying that any successful story, interactive or not, requires good writing and characters. Despite this, writing and characters are usually among the weakest elements in any given game, even those claiming to offer strong narrative experiences.

Characters are often stereotypes, two dimensional cutouts rather than fully fledged characters, who can without effort be accurately described in a single sentence. And whats more, that single sentence could effortlessly apply to a large group of characters from a wide variety of games. In contrast The Walking Deads writing is possibly the largest single factor to its success. Writers Sean Vanaman, Gary Whitta and Mark Darin succeed in writing believable and sympathetic characters the player can relate to. Perhaps this can be explained by the writers pedigrees. Darin is an experienced game writer who has worked on multiple games for Telltale Games. Whitta is a long time games journalist who in later years has transitioned to screenwriting in Hollywood. And Vanaman is a long time games journalist, who has taken an especially critical look at clichs and weaknesses in game design and writing through his work with the Idle Thumbs website and audio podcast. The story introduces sympathetic and antagonistic characters, all with believable personalities and backstories and very human writing. Combined with good voice acting this makes it easy for the player to get immersed in the story. While the games story does feature many traditional elements and is at times predictable, the writers are not afraid of toying with the players expectations. Surprising twists and early deaths for many seemingly significant characters helped eliminate player expectations and created a heightened sense of danger. Players could not be sure of anything which made every choice seem more meaningful. When death or significant change can hide behind even the most seemingly innocent options and choices, these choices suddenly carry a lot more weight than they normally would. The writing also manages to keep the characters consistent throughout. While naturally motivations, personalities and situations change and are sometimes obscured for storytelling purposes, the characters remain internally consistent throughout. This is crucial in any interactive story, as inconsistent characters and characters who act against established personalities and motives can be misinterpreted. Players can incorrectly perceive poor writing to have storytelling significance where none is intended. (Si, et al.) It is also worth noting that while the game deals with supernatural elements, the actual plots, global or local, focus on the mundane elements. The supernatural acts merely as a force which drives the characters and is not the focus of the story. Rather the story deals with everyday problems like finding shelter or food. This gives players a good access point into the story, because much like the characters, the important events in the game are something everyone can relate to.

3.3. Better choices through forced role-playing

Many games offer players choices and many have these choices result in more meaningful changes and effects than The Walking Dead. While it does offer a significant amount of choice, the actual effects they have on the story are limited. The global overarching plotline will play out with minor differences despite the players choices and even the local plotlines in given episodes or scenes are for the most part set.

This is all largely compensated for with the way The Walking Dead handles choices. Because the writers are not afraid of surprising and even shocking plot twists, players quickly learn to be wary of even the most innocent-seeming choices. The real triumph, however, is that with a few exceptions all these choices are aggressively timed. Every time the player has to make a choice from the smallest lines of dialogue to life or death situations, the choice is accompanied by a rapidly dwindling timer. When the timer hits zero, the game automatically selects the default option on the players behalf. These choice windows are so small that players rarely have time to consider the mechanical ramifications of their actions. Instead they quickly learn to role-play their version of Everett and make choices they feel he would. The writing helps, because Everett is intentionally left as a blank slate. His past and motivations remain somewhat up to the players interpretation, so they can react from a pure perspective without being weighed down by their perception of what Everett may have been or done before the start of the game. While this may not seem important, the effects are dramatic. In most games players have the time to carefully weigh out their options and even consider outside information on the consequences of their choices if they so choose. In The Walking Dead players largely have to make their choices on the fly, less on intellect and more on intuition. Whatever consequences and effects these choices then have, they feel more personal and immediate as a result. The effect is heightened, because The Walking Dead tells a dark story where many choices have extremely negative outcomes. Even if the player feels like theyve played perfectly, the stories can still have negative or even tragic outcomes which then feel like the players fault. I made that choice and then this horrible thing happened.

3.4. Social interactions and small but meaningful choices

The Walking Dead leans heavily on social interactions. The actual puzzles in the games are fairly simple and more emphasis is based on how the player interacts with the various characters he meets. A core mechanic introduced early on is that the game notifies players when a non-player character has remembered something they have said. As an example, upon meeting a farmer for the first time the player is asked to describe his relationship with Clementine. The gamer offers the choice of telling the truth, lying, trying to evade the question or saying nothing at all. Whatever the player chooses, the non-player character will remember it and it will possibly have an effect on a future interaction with that character, even across discrete episodes.

Figure 3: Choices may have long-lasting effects

Additionally, as the story is very dark indeed, as the story progresses many of these interactions become awkward or even painful. What will the player say or do when confronted by a man who has just lost his entire family and is lashing out in his pain? This is a very human situation which everyone is familiar with at least on some level. Even if we havent personally dealt with a similar situation, we understand the pain of losing a loved one and how we ourselves, or at least other people, would react to it. We can immediately relate to it and again are forced to subconsciously react to the situation as we ourselves would. The game does not give the player time to consider what the most beneficial option to pick is. This immediately makes the choice and its results seem even more personal. A common problem with many games is that they try to make the choices too big. Will you save this planet or that planet? Will you save humanity or doom it? While we can at intellectually understand these choices at least on some level, they dont mean anything to us on an emotional or personal level. They are rendered abstract and any effect they might have is entirely a byproduct of the games production values and cinematics, whereas in The Walking Dead players are constantly dealing with choices they can understand all too well from their own experience. Additionally, since the player constantly feels like they are driving the story, when something terrible does happen and for instance characters die or leave the story, the immediate player reaction is that they caused it, even if this is not true. In actuality most character deaths, entrances and exits are pre-planned, but the game succeeds in hiding this fact thanks to its excellent writing and by conditioning the player early on to expect that his choices will have consequences.

3.5. Making the player care

Upon all these foundations is built the games best element, Clementine. Lees adopted daughter is quite possibly the best written and acted child character in any video game.

After making the player unconsciously adopt the role of Lee Everett, the game then places them in charge of a young childs well-being in a world full of horrors. The effects are profound. After the first episode was released, many players reported that without even realizing what was happening, they had stopped thinking of the game as a game and instead were only or largely concerned with Clementines well-being as this small sample of player feedback demonstrates. I found myself actually taking her presence into account when making decisions and always checking up on her.[4] I couldn't bring myself to do anything bad if I thought Clementine would see it. When you're presented with the choice on whether to steal from the car or not, one look over at Clem sealed it for me. I couldn't do it.[5] The game offers players numerous chances to affect Clementines personality and character. At the beginning of the story Clementine is completely unprepared to face the world in which she must now survive. Episode by episode players see her grow and adapt to the players personality.

Figure 4: Clementine

Additionally, after giving the player the chance to affect Clementines personality, the game places her in jeopardy with the players previous choices having a large effect on how these scenes play out. As an example, one scene in the game has the player teach Clementine survival strategies. The player can give her either good or bad advice on what to do in a variety of situations and even teach her how to shoot a handgun. The game does not force the player to do any of this and will proceed regardless of how well or poorly they did, but all these choices will come to play at later points in the story, when someone is in danger.

If the player taught Clementine well, she may surprise everyone by rescuing someone from a bad situation. If not, another character may step in and admonish the player for the poor job they are doing in raising a child. This is, of course, just the illusion of choice. Because Clementine is such a central character to the story, her ultimate fate is not something the player can actually affect. Should Clementine die unexpectedly, the game will end. But again the illusion of consequence is maintained because the players choices affect the local storyline and this in turn will give the player immediate feedback on their choices in both terms of game mechanics and on an emotional level.

3.6. Dont abstract the horror

As everyone can imagine, a world full of zombies is a nasty place indeed, full of all kinds of horrors. Survival in such a world will require people to do unthinkable things. This is nothing new for people who have experienced even one story set in such a setting and in fact such things have become mundane to experienced audiences. The Walking Dead succeeds in heightening the sense of horror through a strong sense of player agency. Whenever Lee Everett is called upon to do something horrible, whether that be bashing in a zombies head with a rock or chopping off a mans infected leg with an axe before he succumbs to his illness, the game does not abstract the horror.

Figure 5: The player has to face the consequences of his actions, whatever they are.

In a passive form of storytelling the audience would naturally be just a passive spectator, watching as someone else is confronted with a horrible situation. This would be the case even in many forms of interactive storytelling, where such scenes would be depicted as movies or paragraphs of text. In The Walking Dead all such scenes are interactive. In an early scene Lee Everett is set upon by a zombie. The game prompts the player to back away by pressing a movement key, while at the same time trying to position the cursor over the zombie to kick it away. The scene is depicted as sensory overload with strong visuals and disorienting and overwhelming audio.

After the player has survived for a while he has the chance to turn the tables on the zombie and attack it with a weapon, again by positioning the cursor over the zombies head and pressing a button to attack. Each hit has horrific visual and aural effects as bones crack under the assault. By making the player personally responsible for the execution of these horrific tasks the game again heightens immersion. Because the player is already firmly in the role of Lee Everett, the horrors feel so much more real to him, even if mechanically they are simple quick time events or mini games. In a brilliant move Telltale also play with the players expectations in these scenes. In the aforementioned zombie struggle the game does not prompt the player to stop attacking or alert him to the fact that his assailant has been subdued. Instead the player can keep attacking for as long as he wishes or feels like he has to. Player feedback revealed that many players were so startled by the tense scene that they kept attacking the zombies lifeless body over and over again for a long time after it was already dead, before finally realizing they could stop. The results of deep player immersion were in full effect.

4. Conclusions
I sat stunned in my seat. I had to sit there for a moment, just staring at my screen, trying to gather up the strength to continue. No game has made me feel this way. Just finished the game and I'm sitting here crying my eyes out. The Walking Dead is a triumph in player immersion and it is remarkable that it achieves this feat while relying almost entirely on the illusion of choice. As the above player reactions to various story points in the game illustrate, players are well and truly immersed in the storyline. This is further illustrated by observing player reactions to the game. They are consist largely of players describing their actions and choices throughout the story through storytelling terms and talking about their feelings and emotions during various points of the story, rather than commenting on mechanics or gameplay elements. This shows a high degree of investment in the story. Analysis of the games plot reveals that actual player choice is severely limited. The player cannot affect the global plot at all and has limited effect on local plotlines. The game works despite this, because it offers immersive illusion of choice. That is, each player comes away feeling like they made a difference. Players feel like they experienced their own The Walking Dead story, which felt personal and emotional. One of the games designers commented that the development team was thrilled by the tone of discussion surrounding the game. It's mostly just thrilling to see people taking the narrative content of a game with such strong suspension of disbelief and conviction[6]

While The Walking Dead is unique and attempting to outright copy its formula would probably result in a less successful outcome, the game does have a lot to offer both for players and game designers. Telltale Games were able to take a simple game running on an old engine and created with limited resources and achieve remarkable results. They did it by understanding the limitations and possibilities they were facing and making a remarkable number of right decisions. Ultimately the game succeeds because all the systems and mechanics in place are designed to make the player feel invested and responsible for the story. By making the player focus on the moment to moment choices and decisions, the game succeeds in abstracting the global storyline enough so it doesnt matter much when the player has limited effect on it. When complemented with high quality writing and voice acting, the result is a thoroughly captivating experience in interactive storytelling. The Walking Dead teaches us a simple but important lesson: in a time when everything is getting bigger, focusing on details can produce remarkable results.

5. References
Fendt, Harrison, Ware, Cardona-Rivera, Roberts, Achieving the Illusion of Agency; ICIDS 2012, pp. 114-125 Wei, Structuring Narrative Interaction: What we can learn from Heavy Rain; ICIDS 2011, pp. 338 341 Si, Marsella, Pynadath, Importance of Well-Motivated Characters in Interactive Narratives: An Empirical Evaluation; ICIDS 2010, pp. 16 - 25 Mateas, Stern: Writing Faade: A case study in procedural authorship.; Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, pp. 183207. MIT Press, Cambridge (2007) [4] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3480887&perpage=40&p agenumber=10#post403256404 , retrieved 12.12.2012. [5] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3480887&perpage=40&p agenumber=20#post405156155 , retrieved 12.12.2012 [6] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3480887&userid=49699& perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post409909969 , retrieved 12.12.2012 [7] Navarro: Review: The Walking Dead; http://www.giantbomb.com/the-walkingdead/61-34205/reviews/ , retrieved 12.12.2012 [8] User reviews for The Walking Dead on Metacritic.com, http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-walking-dead-episode-5---no-time-left , retrieved 12.12.2012