Game have for a long time used a system that offers choices to the user. Thats interactive narrative right?
But many games uses what I like to call pseudo interaction, a false interaction where the choices have no meaning.
You all know what I am talking about, choices that has no meaning or that the user cant actually choice the second options.
Lets take a classic Zelda: Ocarina of time.
(I couldn't find the actual screen where the user can pick yes or no)
In OT, the user after beating the castle maze, will for the first time in the game "interact" with Zelda.
And this is such a failed narrative game design if I have ever seen one. I have hated this part of the game since I was a little kid.
What happens in the game is that the user, gets to pick if he/she wants to help Zelda. IF the user picks No, the game simply just repeats the exact same question, no matter how many times the users tries to say no. I have even tried doing it over 100 times to hope and find some easter egg, this is also probably when I transitioned into a full cynical person thanks Miyamoto, I belived people back then.
OK, the point is that this offering of a choice just makes the game worse.
That is the first type of pseudo interaction, a choice that cant actually be picked.
The other versions is also very classic but often not missed out by people I would say.
This is when the game offers choices and regardless of what the user picks the user receive the same content.
Visual novels does this repeatedly. The game offers the users multiply choices, and often many in a row. But regardless of the pick the user will get the exact same result. It becomes even better as it can often then be that the game has just started so the user wont know that the pick did not actually matter until they reply the game(why it can be missed).
Abstact explanation:
User can pick go left or right in a forest.
Right pick, user faces a red troll with 10 hp , and one attack club smash, which deals 2 damage
After this user reach town A. The pick never affects the main story, so it was an isolated incident.
Left pick, user faces a red troll with 10 hp , and one attack club smash, which deals 2 damage
After this user reach town A. The pick never affects the main story, so it was an isolated incident.
Regarldess of the users interaction with the software they will have the exact same experiance, and if the users replys the game, they will probaly only feel disipointed learning that the choice they made eariler didetn amtter.
Or as in most cases the game will offer different endings, but as mentioned if the user gets ending A,B or C etc. Is not actually affected by the forest interaction. Biggest problem here is then that a user will believe it has meaning, and will try and pick every possible combination of choices in the game. Where many,many can be this pseudo interaction, wasting the users time. And will clearly make the user have a bad experience playing the game.
If there is one game that I feel did this excelled at pseudo interaction, its Dragon Age. The game offers a myriad of to ridicules many choices trough the game, but then its only like the 3 last choices who affects the ending. While the argument is that the choices(some of them) affects the companions. True but... thanks to the companion gifts a user can pick anything and just bribe them, so its like 10 out of a 10000 choices that has any meaning.
While we are at Bioware, lets go into forced narrative.
Which is when the game forces the user to read the games story. While its understandble that the game developers want people to read what they wrote, they should not forget that many users acutally enjy their games while completly ingore the story. Many games do this, if I remember correctly before in WoW, the text had to be written out right? Now the text can be written down right away. Still Bioware offers a great example of forced narrative.
In Star wars the old republic. They have created a new user interaction in a mmorpg, spamming the spacebar. Many, many users have no interest in whatever those alien's long time ago said, don't get me wrong I do read most of the story, and listen to the voices, but I know many users who don't. Especially at the non English parts I imagine many users just spamming it away. A huge problem here is that a mmorpg attracts so many different users, a designer cant believe they all care about story. For my self some times I just wanna level, so even at a new area I will just press away like crazy to get to the killing. And then with the next character...
Many users just wants to get here as quickly as possible.
The the system is pretty crappy, a user cant skip a conversation of the conversion offers evil or good choices. So the user has to sit and press away tons of pseudo interaction, to come to the parts(if they exist) that matters. The thing is there is such an easy solution to, not to the foced narrative in every game as it takes differnet forms. But for this game I have it:
Skip button!
Its not harder then that, just copy how visual novel genre does it. Let the user have a skip button which will make them jump over all pseudo interaction to the actual few choices which are meaningful.
This would make the users that have no interest in story happy, and for example when I have a hangover I really don't want to listen to wookie languish. But just like very other person I still want to max my evil meter. And as this value affects the users, appearance, item possibilities, titles etc this is what most users are caring about.
Side note: To what I can see in Swtor, a user has to actually max evil or good to get good items at level 50, which makes it meaningless to play the game as neutral alignment as that wont amount to anything(if we are speaking min-maxing)
