Erica and the rise of the interactive story

Working through the night to the rising sun.

Not too long ago there were the whispers of a trend on the horizon for modern day storytelling, and though it's difficult to predict, I feel it may be starting to come true. As you can likely presume given this title, I am referring to the rise of interactive story telling across the media world. By this I specifically mean the type of stories where the audience are able to make key decisions which influence the direction of the narrative or the decisions that people within that narrative make. When done poorly this can come off as a gimmicky affair, with little substance being added to the story, but done right and it can make for a deeply engrossing and involving experience wherein the audience feel deeply connected to the story that they helped to tell. It goes without saying that crafting such a network of narrative tangents is never easy but it has been interesting to see more and more folk give it a swing in nowadays and I'm starting to wonder if taking on this challenging endeavour has the potential to become a bit of a trend.

 Now of course, Interactive storytelling is not in itself a new concept, even outside of the world of gaming. Taking the concept to it's most basic, one could claim the the original 'Interactive Stories' were actually those 'Choose your own adventure' books from back in the day. From the late seventies to the late nineties there were oodles of these storybooks in which the direction of the title character was at the total discretion of the reader. (and the scenarios that the author could envision.) Since then the concept went beyond that series of books and has been used on a number of properties throughout the years for no reason more than it is a concept which people enjoy and resonate with. (In fact, I used to own a Doctor Who themed CYOA book when I was a child.) Of course, there is only so far that such a concept can travel on print, so once people realised that the same idea could be bought to life with computer programs it only made since to give it a go.

These sorts of 'games' are most commonly labelled as 'text based adventures' and easily the most famous of them would be the Zork series. These programs were revolutionary for their time as they painted a world for the player all through purely text descriptors and allowed them to navigate through that word with typed prompts. Others had tried some similar programs before, but Zork was the first to really test the limits of what a text parser was capable of with complex algorithms able to recognise a decent number of permutations. (making the process of play less frustrating.) Zork would take players through a fantasy adventure experience and in recent years there have been countless odes to this genre of game design (Both 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' and 'Saints Row 4' had direct references to it.) as well as new genres broached using it. (I find that the horror genre tends to get the most mileage out of it)

All this takes us to the modern day, wherein 'interactive stories' is a term no longer used to refer to literature or text based adventures, but for high quality snippets of visual entertainment. For me the best example of this evolution would be a little title from last year called 'Erica'. Now, usually I use the term 'little' ironically for a game that you've obviously heard of, (Yep, my obsessive compulsive sarcasm is so bad that I don't ever deploy it cleverly anymore.) but for Erica I'll say there's a least a good chance that you haven't seen it. That's a shame too, because Erica is clearly quite the passion project with a lot of heart behind it and I think there's something quite special there. That isn't to say the 'game' isn't without its problems, just that it is something that should have been explored by more people. (Especially since the developers, Flavourworks, seem to have labelled themselves "World leaders in live action video games." With such high self-attributed praise like that, you know they're worth paying attention to!)

Erica is a live action interactive story that follows the tale of a young, perpetually confused, girl played by Holly Earl who appears to be suffering even now from the murder of her father several years prior. The mysterious details around the tragedy and the weird cult-ish vibe that her Father gave off still resonates with her up until her young adulthood. Only then do the consequences start to catch up to her in a very real way as Erica finds herself being threatened by an unknown assailant and ends up under incredibly flimsy police protection. The rest of the story revolves around Erica trying her damnedest to piece together exactly what's going on and, more importantly, what her role to play in all this is. So there it is; vague but a concept that could hold some promise as an investigative thriller. The problems come a little bit from the execution which takes the player a bit too close to the main protagonist so that the audience becomes disorientated every time there is a sudden time jump or scene transition, which can make it hard to focus on the narrative; but apart from that the whole thing is rather fun to play through.

From the surface, Erica looks to have enough quality of technology and equipment to stand toe-to-toe with decent budget TV shows and that makes one wonder if this is the trajectory that such interactive ventures are destined to head in. Heck, if one of these projects receives funding and support from a major publisher could we one day be looking at a multi-path Hollywood-level interactive story with the budget to match the latest summer blockbuster? Maybe, provided that Hollywood even survives this lost summer. (Just kidding. Maybe.) In fact, we've already seen this sort of project poked at by the mainstream through an interactive project that received considerably more press; 2018's 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch'.

Now Bandersnatch is no masterpiece, (as I don't think any of these projects are, it's just the baby steps of a genre finding it's footing) but it certainly cannot be overlooked how much of a pop culture event this little interactive story was; especially in comparison to it's video game contemporaries. When Netflix first dropped Bandersnatch it became the talk of the video streaming world, which made it the cool thing to get behind. The main stream media would even mention Bandersnatch and TV show sites would cover it's success, completely oblivious to how close this piece of media was to the dreaded video game world. (Didn't they know that video games turn people into serial killers?) Off the back of Bandersnatch, Netflix went so far as to launch an entire Interactive section to their streaming service which... two years later still barely has anything on it, but the infrastructure is there for anyone to step into and make something special out of.

And I think that's what will eventually start happening given the popularity that such stories have exuded even outside of the mainstream cadre of content developers. Take YouTube for example, who just last year decided to advertise and recommend an independent CYOA-style series of YouTube video's made my YouTuber: Markiplier. That series, 'A Heist with Markiplier', makes use of YouTube annotations to simulate the ability to make decisions in the story and veer off the beaten path, with the added bonus that, due to the nature of this story, all of these permutations are wild, funny and unexpected. The series itself proved to be quite popular as well, with the introductory video boasting 16 million views as of the writing of this blog, so it seems there's something of an audience for Heist/Adventure/Horror/Post-Apocalyptic/Musical/Choose-Your-Own-Adventure extravaganzas!

With the surprise resurrection of 'The Wolf Among Us', the inexplicable popularity of 'Life is Strange Series 2', and the building anticipation for this year's 'Dark Picture Anthology: Little Hope', it's clear that the interactive story genre has a place amidst all the high-octane demon decapitating action and the... whatever it is you people do in 'Animal Crossing: New Horizons'. Erica's relative unseen splash into the market may seem like a bit of a failure, but I feel there's too much promise in such an idea for things to be left there and I expect to see interactive stories take on a whole new life of their own in the coming generation. (That generation is still coming right? I feel like nothing is certain anymore...)