Interactivity: Doctor Who’s “Attack of the Graske”
‘Attack of the Graske’ was a Doctor Who interactive game which premiered on the BBC Red Button on 25 December 2005, following the seasonal special ‘The Christmas Invasion’, which enabled viewers to travel with the Doctor for a brief time and help him out with saving the universe.
Interactivity, then, is defined as ‘the degree to which two or more communication parties can act on each other (Liu and Shrum, 2002: 54), and while not a recent example, having been succeeded by many other technologically superior interactive games; ‘Attack of the Graske’ was one of the first interactive games to be specifically produced for Doctor Who since its revival the same year and gave viewers a, at the time, uniquely personal interaction with the character of the Doctor.
Initially, the game follows a rather generic narrative structure with the Doctor, through breaking the fourth wall, invites the player to join him for a “trip in the TARDIS”, which is followed by the show’s title sequence.
However, the game’s interactivity begins as the Doctor transfers the power of the sonic screwdriver over to the player’s remote control. The first task arises as the Doctor asks the player to seek out the imposter in the room of a family celebrating Christmas.
Thus, this represents the implementation of “transmissional interactivity” (Veglis & Bratsas, 2017) as the viewer has the power to view different camera angles, and hence they can gain extra information, particularly regarding finding out who the imposter is.
The game then also takes advantage of “consultational interactivity” (Veglis & Bratsas, 2017) as the player is compelled to make a choice, having to use numbers on their keypad to do so and depending on whether they get it right or wrong, the Doctor will react accordingly, either impressed or disappointed by their efforts.
Hence, representing the inclusion of “parallel empathy” (Plewe & Fursich, 2017) as the player feels either elated for succeeding or guilty and disappointed for making the wrong choice and letting the Doctor down.
Narratively-speaking, the increasing amount of interactivity involved as the game progresses, including having to fly the TARDIS by choosing the correct button or lever, reliant on remembering the Doctor’s advice, for example, is representative of a drill-down story as the player has “total freedom” with regard to where they choose to “drill down to get more information (Segel & Heer, 2010).
Namely, the player can choose any option they like, but only one will achieve the correct outcome. For instance, in the final round the player has to work out different sequential codes in order to open the locked door, which requires a little bit of strategical thinking.
Overall, however, this represents the game’s status as one of progression because the player is reliant on performing pre-programmed actions by the game designer in order to win or achieve the desired outcome, as opposed to having multiple options and winning outcomes (RPGmakerweb, 2014).
However, for a simple interactive game, it serves its purpose and allows the audience to engage with the show on another level to the TV series, something which was quite innovative back in 2005, especially for those from a non-gaming background.
To improve it could have offered more challenging tasks and allowed another of the options to be a correct choice, rather than only one being right and the others wrong, as this would make it appear as though the game isn’t too formulaic and that only two outcomes had been filmed for each task: the right answer and the wrong answer.
The Correct Answers Version
The Wrong Answers Version
References
Plewe, C. and Fursich, E. (2017) ‘Are Newsgames Better Journalism?’ Journalism Studies, 19(16), pp.2470–2487.
RPGmakerweb (2014) ‘Progression and Emergence: Two Modes of Play’, RPG Maker. Available at: http://blog.rpgmakerweb.com/design/progression-and-emergence-1/ [Accessed: 30 November 2019].
Segel, E. and Heer, J. ‘Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data’ IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics. 16, pp.1139–48.
Veglis, A. and Bratsas, C. (2017) ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Data Journalism’, Journal of Media Critiques, 3(11), pp. 109–121.
