E - Entertainment | TEDxSIBMBengaluru 2019

The way we tell stories has naturally changed since Aristotle defined the rules of tragedy about 2,500 years ago. According to him, the role of storytelling is to mimic life and make us feel emotions. And that's exactly what storytelling, as we know it, has done since then. But there is a dimension of life that storytelling could never really reproduce.

It is the notion of choices. Choices are a very important part of our lives. We, as individuals, are defined by the choices we make. Some of our decisions can have very significant consequences and completely change the course of our lives. But in a play, a novel or a film, the writer makes all the decisions in advance for the characters, and as the audience, we can only watch, passively, the consequences of his decisions.

As a storyteller, one is always fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. The aim was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories. Today, a new way of telling stories has been introduced, a way that has interactivity at its heart- Interactive Storytelling.

Envision this - A scene from the game, called "Detroit: Become Human" and we are in the near future, where technology made possible the creation of androids that look exactly like human beings. We are in the shoes of a character called Connor, who is an android, and he can do things beyond imagination.

There are multiple playable characters who can die as the story continues without them; as a result, there is no "game over" message following a character's death. The story will branch out depending on which choices are made. These can be viewed in a flowchart during and immediately after a given chapter; the player can rewind to certain points in the story to reshape decisions, if they choose to do so. Certain scenes feature countdowns, which force the player to think and act quickly.

There are scenes where you have to make choices whether to save a fish lying on the ground or to save a little girl in hostage situation; and that too under time pressure. You need certain information to take the decision and determine the best approach, i.e. Deviant's name? Deviant's behavior? Emotional shock?

There’s one another example of a TV series – “Bandersnatch” presented as an interactive film released at the end of December 2018. A brief tutorial, specific to the device being streamed on, explains to the viewer how to make choices. They have ten seconds to make choices, or a default decision is made. Once a playthrough ends, the viewer is given an option of going back and making a different choice. There are 150 minutes of unique footage divided into 250 segments. According to Netflix, there are five "main" endings, with variants within each ending; such endings may be intercut with credits, similar to other ‘Black Mirror’ episodes. There are between ten and twelve endings, some of which are more vague as endings compared to others.

In most cases, when the viewer reaches an ending, the interactive film gives the player the option to redo a last critical choice to be able to explore these endings. In some cases, the same segment is reachable in multiple different ways, but will present the viewer with different choices based on the way they reached the segment. In other cases, certain loops guide viewers to a specific narrative regardless of the choices they make. Some endings may become impossible to reach based on choices made by the viewer, unless they opt to restart the film. This action will erase all stored information about which options they had selected while watching the episode on that device.

It is just one way of playing or watching the scenes but there are many other ways of continuing or ending it. Depending on the choices we make, we could have seen many different actions, many different consequences, many different outcomes. So that gives us an idea of what our work is about as an interactive writer. Where, a linear writer needs to deal with time and space, as an interactive writer, he needs to deal with time, space and possibilities, has to manage massive decision trees where each branch is a new variation of the story.

One needs to deal with thousands and thousands of variables, conditions and possibilities. As a consequence, where a film script is about 100 pages, an interactive script like this is between 4000 to 5000 pages. But in the end, the experience is very unique, because it is the result of the collaboration between a writer creating this narrative landscape and the player making his own decisions, telling his own story and becoming the co-writer but also the co-actor and the co-director of the story.

Interactive storytelling is a revolution in the way we tell stories. With the emergence of new platforms like interactive television, virtual reality and video games, it can become a new form of entertainment and maybe even a new form of art. Interactive storytelling can be what cinema was in the 20th century, an art that deeply changes its time.

As time changes, and we stride into the future, entertainment is undergoing great changes too. At TEDxSIBMBengaluru, great artists will cast some light on some of the advances on the horizon.