{"id":109737,"date":"2020-02-28T21:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T21:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/358951"},"modified":"2020-02-28T21:11:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T21:11:00","slug":"dont-miss-using-the-language-of-film-theater-to-entice-new-players-in-fmv-game-erica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/02\/28\/dont-miss-using-the-language-of-film-theater-to-entice-new-players-in-fmv-game-erica\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Miss: Using the language of film & theater to entice new players in FMV game Erica"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jack Attridge just spent the last few years of his life making an FMV game, Erica<\/a><\/em>, but he\u2019d prefer if you didn\u2019t point that out to him — or at least, not in those exact words.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that he\u2019s ashamed of his work; by all rights, he\u2019s quite happy with it, and it released to mostly positive reviews earlier this month. It\u2019s that he just doesn\u2019t like that term that much, owing to its somewhat checkered past. Moreover, there\u2019s a bigger problem at play here: he doesn\u2019t even really like that style of game at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, there\u2019s the fact that the genre descriptor is part of a bygone era, and no one knows what it even means anymore,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cBut, honestly, if you\u2019re going to ask me to sit here and list some of my favorite FMV games, I\u2019m not sure I can name a single one.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Attridge, that isn\u2019t a problem. Touted as a generational leap for FMV games – or, as Attridge would put it, the interactive film genre – on the surface, nothing about Flavourworks\u2019 Erica <\/em>stands out as wildly inventive, save for its suggestion that you use a linked smartphone to play it rather than the traditional controller. But, as Attridge points out, that\u2019s exactly the point.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to make an interactive film, not because we were huge fans of old FMV games, but because we felt there was a big opportunity there,” he explains. “No one was making the sorts of decisions I wanted to see, so I just said, well, we can do it ourselves…A lot of them are very subtle in nature. I doubt most people who play Erica <\/em>will notice them, at least directly, but I think they\u2019ll feel the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

Designing an interactive film for game fans and new players alike<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Early on in development, Attridge sat down with his team and set some ground rules for the project that radically increased the amount of time and exertion applied before they could arrive at the finished product. Many of these decisions stemmed from his own idiosyncratic frustrations with what he views as the limitations of not only FMV games, but narrative games as a whole. While they vary in complexity, according to Attridge, they all point to a singular axiom: that story games focus too heavily on existing video game players as their core audience, when they represent a tremendous opportunity to bring new players into the fold.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cMy main goal was to make a game that my mom or my dad would play without looking to me for advice, or stopping to check their phone,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve shown members of my family games that I\u2019ve worked on before, and it just never worked. With Erica<\/em>, I wanted to use the familiar language of film to basically bring people in, to ease the phobia of games.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rule that the team struggled to implement the most was also the one that Attridge felt the strongest about. As he puts it, in most narrative games, the protagonist will prattle on about a lot of topics that the player often doesn\u2019t even care about, and then the game will give you the opportunity to weigh in with the choice of a single line, which he believes is an insufficient model for player interaction.<\/p>\n

To solve this, the team decided that the player character Erica would never speak throughout the game unless the player actively made the choice to raise her voice. While it might sound like a relatively minor stance, it rippled out into all aspects of the game\u2019s production, especially its dialogue.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re basically asking a screenwriter to write in an entirely new medium of an interactive film, and then we\u2019re taking away one of their key tools, which is the protagonist delivering exposition,\u201d Attridge says. \u201cWe had to structure the entire story so that it worked without Erica even saying a word. All for a thing that a lot of people probably didn\u2019t even notice in the final game. But I think it was worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rethinking player interaction through the lens of interactive theater<\/strong><\/h2>\n

From Attridge\u2019s view, narrative games need to fundamentally rethink player interaction, even on the level of their basic interface. In most FMV games, you make decisions by pressing on-screen buttons, or bringing up a map and picking where to go, which Attridge describes as immersion-breaking. (\u201cYou\u2019re interfacing with an interface,\u201d he says. \u201cIt breaks the language of cinema.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the early stages of making Erica<\/em>, when Flavourworks implemented the touchscreen controls, Attridge found the one-to-one gestures of opening an envelope or dusting off a book to be quite compelling, even intimate, compared to pressing a generic \u201cuse\u201d button. But when it came to more abstract concepts, such as representing Erica\u2019s thought process, the team endeavored to depict it in a more compelling manner than a winding internal monologue. <\/p>\n

While they eventually arrived at a Heavy Rain<\/em>-style spatial configuration that displayed Erica\u2019s thoughts spread before her like a constellation, Attridge instructed the team to keep the amount of expository text to a minimum. Instead, they tried to represent decisions through actions, rather than a list of commands.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s one part of the game where a detective asks you for your diary, and you can choose to give him your diary, or just tear out the page he wants,\u201d Attridge says. \u201cThat\u2019s supposed to represent your level of trust in that character. The same logic applies when you choose to open a door for someone, or lock the latch. Those actions speak more for the player than a traditional dialogue tree, we feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the project, Attridge spent many hours debating the nature of branching choices in story-based games, and what function they should serve. He describes seeing a theater production of Punchdrunk\u2019s Sleep No More – an interactive display where patrons wander around a large space while the actual play happens in multiple rooms at the same time – as the impetus for him quitting his job to make his own studio. To capture that feeling, Erica <\/em>echoes Punchdrunk\u2019s radical emphasis on the nature of context. While some of your choices do alter the particulars of the story, most of them determine where you are when key events in the story occur, which can totally alter your perspective on the situation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To keep things consistent, the team decided to set Erica\u2019s script to a persistent clock, which means that an event will always happen X number of seconds into the game, and Erica\u2019s location depends on your choices.<\/p>\n

\u201cContext is everything,\u201d Attridge says. \u201cThat\u2019s really my philosophy of it, it can make anyone look like a hero or a villain. By showing the story through different lenses, we tried to make it more than a choose-your-own-adventure book. And I think for the most part, we succeeded.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sum of these decisions all go back to Attridge\u2019s philosophy of the marriage of film and games, which he describes as not a marriage at all. To him, watching film is a \u201clean-back\u201d experience, but playing a game is a \u201clean-forward\u201d experience, and he wanted to make sure that players who were new to games (like his mother) were forced to engage with the game, such that they would resist the urge to turn the game off and go back to watching Netflix. While he thinks the team mostly succeeded at that task, he also feels that approach limited the game\u2019s appeal with more seasoned players, especially those who expect a more ludic approach to the story design – and perhaps bear a small amount of skepticism towards the use of film in games. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think if our game was a traditional 3D narrative game, it would probably get a lot more attention from existing gamers,\u201d he says. \u201cThe actual level of fidelity and depth of interaction is very high. But if you can\u2019t get away from the preconception that it\u2019s video, so there aren\u2019t emergent possibilities here, there\u2019s not much you can do about that. There\u2019s a radio with 17 different stations. There\u2019s a bit where you ring the bell at reception, and if you keep ringing it, the other character will stop you. But if you only ring it once, then the other character will start ringing it instead.<\/p>\n

“I do think it all goes back to the gamers wanting it to feel like a game,” he adds. “They want to see all the decision points, they want to know what endings they\u2019ve gotten.  I don\u2019t want to see the structure of something that\u2019s supposed to be real and human. That\u2019s why we hide the programming of games. They love that affirmative feedback, but I don\u2019t. And I think that\u2019s part of why Erica <\/em>stands out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jack Attridge just spent the last few years of his life making an FMV game, Erica, but he\u2019d prefer if you didn\u2019t point that out to him — or at least, not in those exact words. It\u2019s not that he\u2019s ashamed of his work; by all rights, he\u2019s quite happy with it, and it released to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}