Interactive story writing

The Internet has changed a countless number of behaviour in our every day life. It has changed the way we communicate, the way we research, the way entertain ourselves, the way we shop... And Internet has also changed the way we apprehend stories. Indeed, every story-writer should be aware, nowadays, to get the readers involved, because the fans expect that their favorite TV show, video games, comic, etc...take their opinion into account and that the story evolves the way they expect it to.
There are many ways the concept of interactive story writing can be seen. Here are some examples, from the less commercial, to the more consumer-oriented:

1. Fans appropriate the Internet as a place to interpret the stories they like their own way. Fanfictions are the perfect example of such a phenomenon. And if some authors (like J.K. Rowling, the mother of Harry Potter) are in favor of such an active participation of the fans to the story, some authors consider that fans denature their works by doing so (for instance, Georges R. R. Martin, the genius writer of A Song of Ice and Fire, best known as Game of Thrones thanks to the HBO TV show). Some fans do not hesitate to take into accounts the reviews of their own fans - because a fan of Harry Potter writing a fanfiction about it gets some fans who will comment his/her fanfiction - and oriented their stories according to their wishes. An amateur 'artist' on deviantart.com (a website where fans can appropriate stories through drawings) goes further in the concepts, and draws a comic where fans can vote in order to decide what the next page will be. She usually gives three or four proposition, and the one getting the greatest number of votes will then be drawn by her. A clever concept, which is not only used by amateurs, as we will see later one. (http://epantiras.deviantart.com/gallery/29324792)

2. Within the areas of video games, it appears as natural that players want to get involved in the stories. Not just by playing their way through, but also by influencing what is going to happen next. Some games and studios are particularly famous for it. For instance, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout by Bethesda are games known for their huge and open universes in which there is a countless numbers of achieving your goals. There is no one linear action that the player must follows. Basically, the player writes his/her own story within a determined frame, but with an incredible level of liberty. This is also the basic principles of the games created by Bioware. These games, called RPG (for Role Playing Games) rest massively on the quality of their scenarios and the possibility to make choices throughout the stories. The strongest advantage of Bioware's games is that the choices that have been made are taken into account if the sage continues. This was the case for the successful Mass Effect saga, which, in three different games, claims to take every single choice of the gamers into account. But Bioware might have underestimate the importance of interactive story writing for players, since the ending of Mass Effect 3 was a big failure, fans protesting on the Internet, even launching trials for unfair advertising, because they considered that the ending did not actually take their choices into account...(http://www.gamesthirst.com/2012/03/20/mass-effect-3-ending-scandal-gamers-being-refunded-by-amazon/)

3. Finally, the very successful TV show LOST, was the perfect commercial example of interactive story writing. Indeed, if the first season had been entirely written by scenarists, the following ones were not. Instead, the producers of the show used google as a data base in order to know what the fans wanted and adapted their story to it, sometimes making it completely incoherent: they killed Locke when the fans were tired of him, then resurrected him when the fans wanted him back. They created love stories according to the fans wishes and they even made an ending that combined all the hypothesises of the fans altogether. But, like for Bioware, LOST did not make an appropriate use of this wonderful tool which is interactive story writing, since they forgot the essential idea: the story still needs to be written...

Overall, interactive story writing might well be the future of story telling. Getting people involved in the stories they absorb is a wonderful principle and might seduce a lot of people. But the tool should not be used without care, since when people expect a lot and receive a little, they can easily protest. As a proof for it, Bioware is now obliged to create an alternative ending of its saga Mass Effect, which will be given to the players for free, because the scandal surrounding the 'no choice taken into account' was way too big.

Here is a little video made by Bioware for Mass Effect 3, in order to give a better illustration of the principle:

By Natacha