Review: Select a Story
This interactive story explores how else the tale of Cinderella and Prince Charming might have turned out, and is a prime example of how compelling storytelling and careful design successfully translate the classic ‘Choose your own adventure’ format into an enjoyable #VoiceFirst experience.
#VoiceFirst interactive story games have a special place in my heart, but are difficult to get just right — Judging by how many Alexa Skills of this kind fail do deliver great experiences. This one stands out, so it’s worth taking a look at what exactly it gets right.
The masterminds behind this Alexa Skill are Max and Katie Ernst, who are respectively a developer and a writer(+entrepreneur+attorney+rapper) with strong prominence in the #VoiceFirst community.
So, what is the ‘Select a Story’ Skill about?
‘Select a Story’ is actually a brand that will eventually offer several interactive stories, but currently there is exactly one story ‘Cinder/Charming’, which is independently available for Kindle and as Paperback (so it’s quality content we’re getting for free here, which is something to appreciate).
The actual story explores alternative storylines of the classic Cinderella fairy tale:
- As Cinderella, you try to reclaim your rightful family heritage that your stepmother has ursurped
- As Prince Charming, you try to realize your dream of having your own dragon despite your royal family’s desolate financial status
Where should we start exploring why this voice game is so amazing? With the engagement part, or with the retention part?
Haha, very funny! With the engagement part.
Great choice! Let’s start with immediate factors contributing to the game’s engaging UX, and then move on to some less obvious features.
- Use of recorded voice from a professional reader
As much as I like Alexa, she’s horrible at reading longer passages of text — At least, I find it hard to listen to her saying more than three sentences, and generally avoid making her do so. This imposes a severe limit on producing text-heavy #VoiceFirst games, and I will go into ways to improve on this in another post.
‘Select a Story’ solves this very elegantly by using recorded audio from a professional voice artist, who presents the story in a dramatic and enjoyable way. - Great self-ironic and self-referential humor
There’s no way to be objective about humor, but I personally very much enjoy lines like ‘Of course you’re not giving up — What a boring choice would that be?’ or ‘You considered this option carefully — It’s not like someone read a list of three items to you and you picked this one after a few seconds’. - Immersive first-person narration
As the user, you experience the story from the perspective of your chosen protagonist. This is probably the default choice for an interactive story, but the difficult part is to find a right balance between telling enough about the protagonist’s ‘inner world’ for the player to identify with them, and so much of the ‘outer world’ that the story remains dynamic. - Absence of loops
With ‘loops’ I mean situations like ‘Do you want to do X, Y or Z?’ →‘I want to do X’ → Something happens → ‘Do you want to do X, Y or Z?’, and then you’re free to do X all over again as if it never happened. Loops like this always break the immersion for me, because an actual character wouldn’t ask themselves if they wanted to do X all over again. Loops are easy (and very intuitive for developers) to implement, but feel accordingly ‘cheap’ in a game. ‘Select a Story’ stands out by avoiding them.
Now why should I play this game more than once?
We’ve already covered a huge part of the answer, which is that the story is compelling and entertainingly written, but there’s more!
As an interactive story game, each interaction is a choice — But there are actually three types of choices: ‘Storyline’ choices that determine which part of the story you’re exploring, with no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, ‘progress’ choices, which determine whether you fail or succeed in progressing towards your chosen storyline’s happy end, and ‘fake’ choices where the different options’ paths converge again.
All three kinds of choices provide different motivations to play the game again:
- Fake choices are a way to trigger different content or to make the player identify more with their character, without necessitating the creative effort to produce new storylines. The Mr Robot: The Daily Five/Nine voice game uses these kind of choices heavily and successfully, but ‘Cinder/Charming’ doesn’t have so many of those.
- Progress choices provide an immediate motivation to play the game again or soon after, because you already got involved in the story and identified with your character and want to reach the happy end. As the storylines progress in ‘Cinder/Charming’, more and more choices are of the ‘progress type’, up to a point where there are several riddles.
- Storyline choices build a more long-term motivation to come back to the game and explore the game from the different perspective or with a different approach. Wisely, most of the storyline choices are made at the early stages of the game, so that the player gets a feeling for what they missed.
Is there anything that could make this #VoiceFirst game even more enjoyable?
Hm, difficult! I certainly couldn’t produce a better interactive story, but here are some thoughts about which degrees of freedom there might be:
- ‘’Cinder/Charming’ is basically an audio book, read by a single reader, as opposed to an audio drama, with different voices and sound effects. Each has their pros and cons, but I guess that incorporating more audio drama elements could make the game more engaging (and greatly increase the production costs).
- The ratio of storyline, progress and fake choices creates a fine cocktail of immersion, ambition and curiosity. I personally love those ‘Choose your own adventure’ books where each choice is a storyline choice, but this came at the cost of less compelling storylines and more randomness.
‘Everyone’s a critic!’ — Prince Charming
So, what’s the conclusion?
With Mr. Robot: The Daily Five/Nine and Select a Story, I’ve covered two of the best #VoiceFirst interactive story games I know. They each use very different techniques for telling their stories, engaging the user and making them come back.
There are some things both have in common, such as professional recorded content, and authoring expertise, which make their quality level hard to attain. In another article, I plan to compile some techniques that can help voice game developers without access to such resources get the best of their interactive game idea.
With which points do you agree or disagree? What have I forgot to mention? What was helpful to you? I care to make these articles as helpful to you as possible, so any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
