‘Interactive storytelling helps you connect to yourself’

Playing against yourself

Have you ever stepped into the shoes of your own insecurities and fears? In Adventures with Anxiety, you can. In this interactive narrative – with visual references to the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale – you take on the role of the wolf. The wolf represents the monster inside your head, the inner voice that tells you you're socially inept and should isolate yourself from others. After all, the outside world is full of danger. You could easily get your feelings hurt there. What unfolds between the wolf and the girl – your other self – is a struggle that many will find relatable, involving difficult choices about what you dare to do and what not in the social realm. As a player, you have influence on the plot twists, directing your other self through manipulative sarcasm, crocodile tears, and dramatic shock tactics.

Screenshots from Adventures with Anxiety

TIND

With a healthy dose of humour, creativity, and storytelling power, this interactive design by Nicky Case does something quite different from what you'd expect of a game. The aim isn’t to score points, but to learn about your own social anxieties — and thus how to manage them better. It’s not therapy, and no serious game either, but rather a fascinating mobile experience that makes you think about your own thoughts and behaviours.
Media psychologist Christian Roth has let many people play it and thoroughly analysed their experiences. He has been working with this original form of storytelling for years: interactive narrative design. Over the past two years, as a postdoctoral researcher, he delved deeper with the research project Transformation through Interactive Narrative Design — or TIND, in short.

Personal transformation

“I have a deep desire to help people connect more meaningfully with themselves, others, and the world around them,” says Roth. He is convinced that interactive storytelling can play a vital role in that process. “Humans are natural storytellers. Stories are uniquely capable of showing you different perspectives. And with interactive narrative design – IND – you can even directly experience those perspectives firsthand. You shape the course of the story and learn to live with the consequences of your choices. That gives it real impact and can spark a personal transformation.”


Christian Roth

Shifting perspective

Roth earned his PhD on this topic back in 2016 at VU Amsterdam. His dissertation, Experiencing Interactive Storytelling, explores the appeal of this relatively new medium and introduces a model for analysing user experiences. In the postdoctoral research he has just completed at HKU, he shifted his perspective: from player to designer and educator. Accessible entertainment with an artistic touch, a relatable story, and a message so insightful it can lead to real behavioural change — how do you create something like that? And how can you teach to do this?

Success factors

Together with students of the HKU minor Interactive Narrative Design and the participants in the IND seminar, Roth analysed a series of interactive stories, from the perspectives of the player, the designer and his own view as lecturer-researcher. How to tempt someone to try the game? How much freedom of choice can, and must, you give the player to make it interesting? What role does humour play? And how can you prevent a player from quitting halfway, before they get the message?


Students while playtesting. Image: Christian Roth.

Positive impact

Among a test group of 450 students who played Adventures with Anxiety in the context of this research, 86 percent said they experienced a positive impact after 25 minutes of playtime. As you progress further into the game, the wolf turns out to be not purely evil at all. It also guards you against making wrong decisions. The player will have to make the distinction between rational and irrational fears. When succeeding in this, the player tames the wolf and turns it into a cute guard dog that is very eager to form a dream team with its owner. The tests indicated that the freedom of choice while playing doesn’t need to be that much: three options per plot twist were said to be enough for creating a personal story.

Fear of failure

The analyses were coupled to the actual creation of INDs, to learn through experiment and participatory design-research what works and what not. The definition of ‘transformation’ was hereby translated into a practical work method. Roth isn’t concerned with transformation of worldwide systems, but with little ‘nudges’ at a personal level. The behavioural changes he is looking for, are mostly about tackling mental barriers such as fear of failure or a low self-esteem. Those struggles are quite common among students. “By keeping it small, and close to ourselves and our direct environment, both the design and the experience of these interactive stories stay manageable and their impact more tangible.”

Defence mechanisms

At this year’s TIND seminar, students were tasked with creating interactive experiences centred around psychological defence mechanisms — INDs that, like Adventures with Anxiety, have an effect on personal liabilities. One outcome was the game MUTE, in which you are confronted with a cacophony of disruptive images and sounds on a collection of screens — that you can turn off with a mute button. But what if your own face suddenly appears, in huge size, among them? What to do then? Are you allowed to be there?
Another example is FALE, which explores the tendency to avoid difficult tasks. As a player, you must choose between the easy and the hard way. As you progress, you discover that even the failed attempts can move you forward, little by little.

Mixed Reality

Morality

The tests that were done with this mixed reality prototype, demonstrate how a simple ‘game mechanic’ – throwing a stone – can create an ethical matter. Roth interviewed twelve players with different backgrounds, from game developers and media scientists to storytellers and students. Most of them explained that they cast the stones purely out of curiosity. All of them were moved by the shift in perspective; the moment they realised they were in the same predicament as the miniature people below them. There’s always a moral to every story: a message that has something to teach you. The innovative forms in which these messages can be delivered, makes this medium not just interesting for the various end-users, but also for student-designers.


Christian interacting with the prototype of Life Down the Well. Image: Yannick Mul and Christian Roth.

Creative spark

Roth further talks about how he developed a new approach to teaching and learning, with an important role for physical experiences. Instead of overloading his students with theory, he first gives them a physical exercise. Learning by doing, in a mix of theatre, psychology and game design. “For example, I could instruct them: ‘make yourself as small as possible, and then as large as possible. Now, start your story from the feelings that this gives you.” Roth encourages creators to abandon their preconditioned ideas and ambitions, to instead enter the design process more from their emotions and less from their thinking. In that way, they will create stories that will subsequently also touch upon the emotions of others. Roth: “as designers, they can ignite a spark that can help others to learn something about themselves. An interactive narrative design isn’t automatically a life changer, but it can make you see things somewhat differently. And that could be the start of a transformative journey.”

Duration of the postdoc research: 2022-2024

Research partners:

• HKU School of Games

• Utrecht University

• Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

• Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Tilburg University

• Trinity College Dublin

• World Economic Forum

Contact: Christian Roth, christian.roth@hku.nl

The TIN research is made possible by the HBO-postdoc scheme of Regieorgaan SIA.