Narrative Theory Series
Agency in Interactive Narrative
In business contexts, an agency relationship is when one party can act on behalf of another. A real estate agent, for example, acts on behalf of buyers or sellers. So agency is based on the capacity to act generally.
In the context of interactive narrative, agency relates to structuring the capacity of your audience (you can also think of them as users and/or players) to act and co-create the narrative experience along with your narrative system design and its content. Agency as a design principle is often, if not typically, a desired aim — in other words, you design for agency, because you want your audience to feel empowered to engage the narrative. Interactive narrative design entails creating a sense of agency in your audience-user-player so that they feel their actions are meaningful and rewarding.
Agency and CX (Customer Experience)
Both games and films port well into other kinds commercial activity, such as toys and merchandise of various kinds. And toys of course are used by youth to imagine their own heroic narratives. The hero’s journey works well with what is called industrial convergence — the coming together of Hollywood (entertainment), Silicon Valley (technology) and Madison Avenue (marketing)– to promote a whole product ecosystem structured around a narrative concept and vehicle.
As an example of this industrial convergence, watch some of this Lego Avengers walkthrough.
There are some things we can note about this content:
- Notice how a game version of the opening scene slows down considerably what is allowed to happen in the film. A film, as a linear medium, has to quickly get past this plot point in order to get to the next scene and story beat. Films are based on editing, but games produce a continuous time-space continuum to occupy.
- There is a new character in the game who wasn’t in the film– YOU. Or, actually some guy talking over the walkthrough. Joe Schmoe User and his constant commentary.
- The game replays verbatim many of the exact moments and dialogue of the film.
- The toys support a constant reliving of the film through both the interaction of a video game, and the purchase of toys presumably for general action figure fun.
- Tony Stark looks very different as a Lego billionaire.
Censor’s Warning
Here’s a question to consider: if your company designed a massive multi-player virtual game world based on a popular film franchise, upon discovering that players are using the games affordances for somewhat juvenile behavior (i.e. performing pseudo-pornographic actions), would you design these affordances and behaviors out of the interaction possibilities?
There can be some dangers in allowing an audience to relive their favorite films through interactions in the storyworlds of those films. Some players of games are notorious for lewd behavior, as in the various instances of abusing Luke Skywalker in the Battlefront games.
Saving the World from Global Warming
Now let’s consider another case of the ‘misuse’ of your interactive narrative. This time you are the automaker General Motors and your clever marketing team has come up with the idea to have visitors to your platform design their own Chevy Tahoe commercial, similar to the way that they can design their truck on the website. This is what happens very quickly (PG rated material below):
Chevy Tahoe Ad 1
Chevy Tahoe Ad 2
Chevy Tahoe Ad 3
Imagine you are in charge of the marketing team: What do you do?
The point of these examples of course is that, when your audience becomes users of your digital story, they also become co-creators of it. In other words, you begin to lose control of your narrative. So some questions emerge:
- Do you want to give control away?
- Don’t you have to give up some control in interactive narrative?
- How can you constrain or restrict control?
- Is losing control good or bad?
- How do you shape choices that users make?
- Should you censor your content?
Apparently McDonalds hasn’t learned these lessons, and their latest interactive burger making interface has been trolled as well:
Agency:
- Allowing Users to Make Decisions.
- Structuring Choice via Indication, Feedback and Control.
- Interactions should be Meaningful (not trivial).
Designing Freedoms vs. Constraints
At a very high level, there are generally two contrasting views of human agency:
• Our social and cultural conditions highly limit our choices and possibilities, so we take up ‘positions’ within the sociocultural matrix and navigate/negotiate our actions in a highly constrained field. This is the ‘World-to-Subject’ direction.
• Humans create themselves, based on consciousness and free will, engage in world- and self-making especially in making their up their own narratives about themselves. This is the ‘Subject-to-World’ direction.
• And of course, there are various middle arguments between these two contrasting views, which find value in both positions and aim for a conception that is not at any of these far extremes of possibility.
Supporting Agency
Agency in an interactive narrative won’t happen just by using an interactive technology, because users might not even notice the ways in which you’ve built agency into the experience. You have to support user agency in a wide range of specific design features based on some general high level principles, such as by providing clear Indications of affordances (i.e. it’s not enough just to have an affordance — people have to notice it’s there!), and by providing clear Feedback and Control mechanisms (letting people know that something has happened when they do something).
Indication: the perception of an affordance, based on design principles such as visual hierarchy and contrast, guiding attention, using metaphors (e.g. this is a button, that’s something to grab, etc.). Your design needs to clearly indicate what its affordances are, since many interactive experiences have affordances but they can be opaque depending on the skill of the user.
Control and Feedback: based on our interactions with the design indications, something happens and we can tell that something has happened — the follow-on event is communicated clearly. For example, as we go about deciding which avatar we want to use, the border changes color, and makes a click sound letting us know which avatar we’ve currently selected.
Multimodal Disambiguation
Fun to say out loud and indispensable in design — and in fact, used all the time by designers who don’t know there’s a concept for this — multimodal disambiguation, once understood, will make your interaction design work easier and highly effective.
Despite all the syllables, the concept is straightforward: concatenate as many sensory modalities as makes sense to reinforce the conveyance of a single clear meaning. An easy to understand instance of multimodal disambiguation is teaching your dog to sit:
To really clarify your intention, you integrate many sensory modalities around the very simple message conveyed from human to canine:
- Spatial position — you standing in front of the dog
- Sound — semantic meaning, “Sit.”
- Sound — embodied meaning (a general seriousness or firmness in your tone of voice)
- Visuals — your hand gesture
- Visuals — making eye contact
- Reward — this can be multi-sensory, ranging from a spoken “good boy” to a pat on the head or a tasty treat
Every bullet point above is a sensory modality, i.e. a perceptual channel through which meaning can be conveyed. Interaction design is replete with instances of multimodal disambiguation, as with our avatar selection UI example above. Here is a different one below for comparison:
It would appear from the screenshot above that when you go about navigating through a bunch of avatars in order to decide on one,
- the face converts from cartoon to photograph (that’s pretty special!)
- a green border appears around it
- it probably makes a beep or blip sound when you momentarily select it
- it probably makes a different beep or blip sound when you decide to choose that avatar definitively
- you get a bonus check mark graphic confirming your choice ✓
- who knows, maybe there are additional soundtrack elements, like cheering in the background!
In other words, it’s just like teaching or telling your dog to sit, because it is applied multimodal disambiguation! This concept integrates indication of affordances to your user/player/audience member and also supplies system feedback on control actions.
Levels of Structuring Agency
Ultimately agency will be structured along low level behavioral vectors (e.g. push this, click that), mid-level cognitive vectors (e.g. multimodal disambiguation, which combines sensory and cognitive dimensions), and high level cultural constructs (e.g. acting out character roles in a social space).
By vector I simply mean a line of analysis, not a calculus vector determining how a rocket reaches its target or spline in a vector image application like Illustrator. In math, a vector simply has a magnitude and a direction, so it can be used to describe a path for analysis as well!
Visual contrast is an example of a low level perceptual that defines how well you are able to sense foreground versus background elements:
Visual hierarchy is cognitive — i.e. it makes you notice something — but is also behavioral because it supports immediate action with an affordance.
Cosplay would be a good example of agency enacted in a higher stakes space of socio-cultural construction which entails a relatively high level of personal commitment.
Agency in Life vs. an IDN
- In an Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), agency has at its disposal vastly different QUALITATIVE resources for interactions. For example, my avatar might have super powers, advanced technologies to use, might be capable of performing magic, etc.
- In the Real World, the QUANTITY of choices will always be greater than in any IDN, though the qualities are more constrained, because we can’t do the kinds of things that are possible in a fictional narrative in everyday life. There’s an infinity of actions we can do in real life that you cannot program into an IDN.
- IDNs have to manage a relatively small number of possible choices/interactions to create agency, so the sheer QUANTITY of choices available is constrained even though the QUALITIES can be rather fantastical, which is the exact reverse of ‘real life.’
Any IDN Will Highly Limit Choices:
- Because computational resources are FINITE: there’s only so many choices you can anticipate and code.
- Because World-to-Subject agency is usually implemented in some ways — the player/user is highly constrained by the virtual/digital environment.
Luck
Which activity allows you to experience more agency, chess or horse betting?
This is kind of a trick question, because if you illegally dope up your favorite horse and injure all the other ones, you can certainly experience a very high degree of agency in horse betting! But assuming proper betting behavior, there is generally going to be a very low level of agency in gambling because too much is outside your control and actions.
Many interactive experiences will utilize various kinds of chance operations, such as random dice throws or probabilities of events occurring. There is not much agency in luck, randomness or chance, but these elements can support an overall agential experience because life as we experience it is full of such happenings and they add qualities such as texture, believability, rhythm and challenge to our interactions.
- Randomness can be highly effective as a part of narrative/game dynamics
- Much of the world is characterized by randomness so it’s even ‘realistic.’
- Chance is like a force of nature.
- But randomness is purely external to the player/user/audience since people generally act intentionally and not randomly.
In RPGs, luck and randomness adds tension, suspense, urgency, moves the story along, and can resolve conflicts and plot points.
Janet Murray’s “Symbolic Dramas”
Janet Murray has explored interactive narrative through the lens of ‘symbolic dramas’ which she finds played out even in the most seemingly abstract games:
In the original version of the book, Murray famously read Tetris as a narrative experience: a “symbolic drama” that immersed its player in an abstracted version of the frantic busywork of postindustrial modernity. To work tirelessly to slot blocks into the right spaces, never finishing, always failing, is to feel something like the Sisyphean struggle to complete a mountain of tasks in an ever-shrinking day. Her interpretation attracted jeers from self-identified ludologists; the games scholar Markku Eskelinen called it “interpretive violence,” chastising an apparent “determination” on her part “to find or forge a story at any cost.” In the new edition, Murray responds by forging a story about her critics. They want Tetris — or Candy Crush, or perhaps the screen itself — to be a refuge from narrative, she argues, because they’re embroiled in too much narrative already. “It’s a seductive fantasy, very fragile,” Murray told me — the idea that games or other software “can protect us from any reference to the life world,” and just be “an immersion in manipulating symbols.” The fantasy is pervasive: she suggests that GamerGaters, old-school cultural gatekeepers, ludologist hard-liners, and people on the subway are all alike in their implicit desire to imagine games as an otherworld, a playground separate from wider cultural forces. (source)
She created a typology of symbolic dramas in interactive narrative:
- I encounter a confusing world and figure it out
- I encounter a world in pieces and assemble it into a coherent whole.
- I take a risk and am rewarded for my courage.
- I encounter a difficult antagonist and triumph over him.
- I start off with very little of a valuable commodity and end up with a lot of it.
- I am challenged by a world of constant unpredictable emergencies, and survive it.
These are all Metanarratives or Macrostructures, providing a high level logic for narrative progression. they can also be understood as Masterplots.
“Flow”
Structuring agency often means — especially as more game mechanics have been integrated into the interactive narrative — creating a balance between the feelings of Anxiety and Boredom, based on the dimensions of Challenge and Skill. This balance occurs in what has been called in the flow channel in flow psychology:
If you ever felt completely immersed in an activity, you might have been experiencing a mental state that psychologists refer to as flow. What exactly is flow? Imagine for a moment that you are running a race. Your attention is focused on the movements of your body, the power of your muscles, the force of your lungs, and the feel of the street beneath your feet. You are living in the moment, utterly absorbed in the present activity. Time seems to fall away. You are tired, but you barely notice.
According to positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, what you are experiencing in that moment is known as flow, a state of complete immersion in an activity. He describes the mental state of flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
Flow experiences can occur in different ways for different people. Some might experience flow while engaging in a sport such as skiing, tennis, soccer, dancing, or running. Others might have such an experience while engaged in an activity such as painting, drawing, or writing. These moments of flow often occur when you are engaged in an activity that you enjoy and in which you are quite skilled.(source)
In the Flow State, reflexes and thinking are faster, decisions are better, and the experience more exhilarating.
The characteristics of flow:
• Clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable
• Strong concentration and focused attention
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding
• Feelings of serenity; a loss of feelings of self-consciousness
• Timelessness; a distorted sense of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing
• Immediate feedback
• Knowing that the task is doable; a balance between skill level and the challenge presented
• Feelings of personal control over the situation and the outcome
• Lack of awareness of physical needs
• Complete focus on the activity itselfsource
Immersion vs Presence
While these two terms, immersion and presence, are sometimes (accidentally) used interchangeably, these terms generally refer to specific Subjective & Objective dimensions of media experiences
Immersion is the ability of the virtual reality system of actually tricking you in feeling that you’re somewhere else. I’m talking about sensorial information that gives brain the impression that you’re in another place: visual informations, audio, haptic feedback and so on. Immersion is something very technical: it regards how good are all the virtual reality devices you’re employing. So, using an Oculus DK1 gives you less immersion that using an Oculus CV1, due to worse resolution, FOV and so on. With perfect immersion, you have in virtual reality exactly the same sensorial informations of the real world: your brain can’t tell the difference between virtual and real.
Presence is how you’re really engaged and feel yourself inside the virtual world. Presence does regard features of the virtual reality experience that the user is living: if the story is compelling, he will be completely absorbed by it; if the world offers social interactions and other avatars interact in a natural way with the user, it will seem more real; if interaction with the virtual world is easy and natural, it’s great; and so on. Presence indicates how much the user feels engaged with the virtual reality experience, how much he feels that one as a true experience he’s living. (source)
Immersion: system design features (what the technology can do)
Presence: subjective response to the system (a feeling of ‘being there’)
A wide range of terms have been used to describe features and qualities related to immersion and presence, such as: fidelity, involvement, realism, blocking out the world, being there, etc. Some of these terms relate more to aspects of technologies and content, while others are more about audience response. Below I have parsed out how some of these terms can be organized in a conceptual space based on whether they connect to objective features of technologies or subject aspects of experience.
Usually you can only assume a partially (not fully) immersed user, where there can still be some distractions from the real world. Even in a VR environment, there is still going to be some awareness of the surrounding space, since there are controllers to manipulate, platforms not to fall off of, other people not to run into, cables dangling everywhere, and heavy equipment on your head to wear.
Representing Agency
Critics of narrative often analyze the power imbalances that distribute agency unequally amongst characters. From a postcolonial perspective, white characters often have more agency in narratives compared to non-white characters. Feminist criticism has argued that in narrative, men are often the privileged agents of story, and that female characters tend to lack comparable degrees of agency. Similarly, adults typically have more agency than children in stories, and so on.
The power imbalances and representations of social biases, cultural attitudes, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and all kinds of assumptions around legitimacy and power relationships permeate every aspect of many if not most narratives. Agency isn’t just about a player or user manipulating the affordances of your artifact — there are agency relationships structured by power dynamics within the interactive plot itself, as depicted in the representations of the characters and settings.
Agency and Audience Participation
We can think of a narrative progressing along a synthesis of two axes: the internal logic of events unfolding within the narrative, and also the continuously shifting interests and responses of the audience. Here we will briefly consider to ‘edge cases’ that explore the latter axis, Japanese Noh theater and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Noh theater often combines multiple plays in a single sitting which can take many hours, and it’s part of the tradition of experiencing Noh that it’s considered socially acceptable to fall asleep during these performances. This is interesting on many levels, but I like to think that this nodding off Noh audience reception practice is based on the production of fluid transitions between conscious and unconscious perceptions of the narrative.
In effect, dosing and waking and snoozing and snoring and waking up again during Noh plays merges the performed narrative on the stage with the dream life of each audience member undergoing shifts between conscious and unconscious perceptions.
Here are some nice quotes about this unusual form of audience participatory agency:
I learned that what I was so bored with as a child was actually something very fun. When I asked Genshō Umewaka about falling asleep during a performance, he said “it is fine, as long as you don’t snore.” This set me at ease. It’s natural to fall asleep if something is soothing, and tough if it’s not. There is nothing more soothing to fall asleep to than a Noh performance.
I was impressed with how Yūichirō Yamazaki would fall asleep. He would somehow be asleep, yet still watching. He was truly an amazing sleeper. He would never snore, only closing his eyes and breathing peacefully. But he was listening, because when there was an important scene, he would instantly open his eyes. He was a genius at watching Noh, and I wanted to be just like him.
Look, if you fall asleep, no big deal. You’ll notice other people who seem to be asleep around you. It’s ok. I mean, you probably don’t want to snore, and you totally shouldn’t bring one of those neck pillow things that you take on the plane, but if you feel yourself nodding off ~ don’t fight it, just give in. You can be rewarded.
You may experience a waking dream, one where your drifting thoughts and the world of the performance merge. This can be awesome. Many plays take place in a dream, and that you should be dreaming within that dream can be a fulfilling duality. Don’t worry; the flute’s piercing high note will wake you up if you’re about to miss something really cool. (source)
At a far opposite extreme of audience participatory (or non-participatory!) action is the audience shenanigans at theatrical performances of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Originally a film musical produced in 1975, Rocky Horror continues to be shown in many theaters around the world to this day because it has become a kind of camp gothic fringe cult hit.
Audience members dress up like their favorite film characters and shout out lines of their own dialogue in between the dialogue spoken or sung by the film characters in order to change the meaning of the original film lines. For example, if you Google “rocky horror picture show audience participation script” you will find nice bracketed text for the audience to shout out at choice moments such as:
There are many clips on YouTube of these live Rocky Horror audience participatory cosplay party atmospheric events. Here’s one to give a taste of what these events are like, if you’ve never experienced it firsthand:
