Story Lab [part 19]: Interactivity, Agency & Player Objectives

One of the main aspects of our project is the ‘Player Objectives’ system, and it’s probably the one that we’ve experimented with and adjusted the most. As our understanding of the project developed, the objectives system continuously evolved, and we’ve only recently decided how the objectives will function within the final product.

Instead of creating a complex network of objectives, we’ve decided to simplify things and instead release objectives in ‘sets’ as Atticus’ investigation progresses. We realised that our initial idea to create a ‘tree’ of objectives would be both overwhelming for players and unnecessarily complicated to control/administrate.


With our new system in place, players will still be able to select the objectives that they want to complete AND we’re hoping to encourage players to team up and work through the activities together by only releasing new sets of objectives when the current ones are completed.

By releasing objectives progressively we’ll also be able to use them as a guide for Atticus’ ‘Investigation Updates’. With the new system in place we’ll be able to predict what information will have been discovered AND what Atticus will be able to reflect on and discuss in his regular updates.

My main concern when deciding to simplify the objectives system was that we’d be limiting player agency as well as the audience’s ability to shape the progression of the narrative.

While I do think that this new system will grant us greater control over the flow of the story/investigation, I also think that players will still be given an adequate amount of agency and control over the story’s progression. After all, it will ultimately be the completion of the ‘Player Objectives’ that drives the story forwards.

Because players will be given a choice of objectives, they’ll be able to customise their experience of the story based on their own interests. In addition to this, players will also be able craft a more unique experience through the messages that they send Atticus via the Facebook page (this is how players will ask Atticus to send them evidence). When players message Atticus (us) we’ll respond ‘in character’ and hopefully engage in more personal conversations with players.


Anyways, this’ll probably be one of my final posts before we finish producing ‘The Barlow Enquiry’. It’s been really interesting to see the project starting to take on it’s final form, and now that we’ve begun to populate the Blog with posts and evidence it’s becoming more and more apparent just how much we’ve been able to get done in the last few weeks. Speaking of which, the Blog has turned out way better than I thought it would (props to Bec for becoming the WordPress master).

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