It was great to receive feedback and suggestions from Ben and Leena after we gave our pitch for ‘The Barlow Enquiry’. Before the pitch session there were still aspects of our project which we weren’t sure about, however after hearing Ben and Leena’s thoughts I feel like we’re ready to fill in the gaps and keep developing our interactive narrative.
I don’t think any of us have really worked on anything equatable to what we are currently trying to achieve, and for this reason it’s been a little difficult to foster a solid concept of what we should do/what we can achieve with our available resources. Due to my more film-oriented background there was a range of things I hadn’t initially considered when planning our project. I think the ideas discussed after our pitch opened my mind to more of the possibilities that interactive transmedia offers.
For the remainder of this post I’ll discuss some of the suggestions which I found to be particularly interesting & useful. Hopefully through this process I’ll be able to break apart and expand upon some of these ideas.
1. Model ideal player actions:
By getting a few friends ‘in’ on the online activities, Leena suggested that we’d be able to model our ideal audience behaviour and try to encourage certain interactions over others. I think this would definitely be a good idea, as it would at least give us some level of control over an otherwise freely operating audience.
We’re already planning to create additional characters who will help Atticus in his investigations and interact with the players. To a certain extent these characters could also be used to model behaviour, however I think that having actual people interacting with our ‘players’ would be more effective in influencing audience engagement and interactivity. Spreading a heightened level of cooperation would definitely be ideal.
2. Consider linking 1901 and 2016 with another investigation:
How could we create a stronger connection between the 1901 murders and our 2016 investigation? Ben suggested that it might be interesting to integrate a previous ‘cold-case’ investigation which occurred somewhere in-between 1901 & 2016. This would allow us to diversify our narrative and potentially create a more intriguing and detailed story. It would also give us another source from which we could produce evidence and key story points.
Doing this could also attract audiences, presenting them with a challenge; “solve the mystery that those before you couldn’t”. I really like this idea and I think it’s one which we should experiment with in the coming week.
3. Investigate ways to present ‘real-world discoverable’ items:
As our protagonist will be sharing artefacts from the early 1900s it will be key that we produce content and ‘evidence’ that fits in with this time period. Audience immersion would definitely be restricted if our presentation of artefacts was lazy and/or drastically inaccurate (I don’t think this’ll be an issue for our group, as we’ve already had a bit of practice ‘ageing’ documents and images).
In order to achieve our goal of integrating real-world discoverable items we’ll need to devise a believable way to drop off/hide the evidence we want players to discover. Atticus wouldn’t just leave a 100 year old document lying out in public, and so we’ll have to explore the different ways we could produce copies of documents. Photographed copies & files hidden on a usb are potential delivery methods.
4. Let audience interaction drive the story:
As we’re aiming to create an interactive experience it’ll be key to give the audience a sense of agency over the story’s progression. We need to motivate players to take action and follow the story, and their decisions and interactions should enhance their involvement with the narrative.
Perhaps we could try and integrate challenge-based activities for audience members to partake in. For instance, perhaps a certain piece of evidence would only become clear if players discovered and shared a combination of ‘pre-requisite’ clues.
There are many ways through which we could involve audiences and produce feelings of agency. I think the above mentioned challenge system could be effective, however there is further experimentation to be done. I might refer back to some of the research I did for my essay on agency to develop more ideas.