Will Kenny remember that? Unpacking the Telltale formula.

goinoutwithabang

“This game series adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play.”

This inviting introduction has become the defining hallmark of Telltale Games. It invokes excitement and anticipation, heralding a game world where the choices that players make matter, and will be met with realistic consequences. Following the success of The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series, The Wolf Among Us: A Telltale Games Series and the recently-released Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series, it would appear as if this studio has crafted an excellent system for producing games with strong interactive narratives. Despite this success, however, players have figured out the secret to Telltale’s magic, and the California-based developer now needs to update its patented storytelling tactics or face a fall from glory.

Much of what Telltale does works, and it works excellently. Unpacking the Telltale experience not only reveals a few tips and tricks that have made it so very engrossing, interesting, and incredibly successful, but it also uncovers a couple of flaws and limitations that the studio must overcome in order to keep its stories interesting.

The Performance of Interactivity

50 years ago, Joseph Wizenbaum impressed the burgeoning tech world by introducing us to one of the world’s first chatbots – ELIZA, who you can still take a moment to have a chat with by clicking here.

ELIZA is remarkable in that it feels like you’re speaking to a psychologist. The more time you spend speaking with her, though, the more it becomes apparent that what you are playing with is actually a very simple machine. You soon start to notice a few trends, most notably the way that she always takes what you say, and turns it into a question.

This has since given rise to what the University of California’s Noah Wardrip-Fruin has called the “ELIZA effect”, a phenomenon whereby a very simple program tricks a user into thinking that what they are interacting with is complex beneath the surface.

Perhaps it is a bit unfair to compare Telltale to ELIZA, but the comparison is apt. On the one hand: many of Telltale’s choices do lead to consequences: character will briefly refer to the player’s previous choices, those who the player decides to help or save will live a little longer, and so forth There certainly are consequences, but don’t really last all that long.

It is here that Telltale’s own “ELIZA effect” comes into play. Anyone who has played a Telltale game is probably more than familiar with the phrase “X will remember that”. Speaking with other characters and making big decisions will occasionally create this small prompt in the top left-hand corner of the screen. It tells the player “what you just did mattered” and creates the impression of strong interactivity.

In reality, most of these little prompts don’t lead anywhere. Characters sometimes die right after they “remember that”. Other times it is just briefly mentioned only to never be brought up again; it’s a Chekhov’s Gun that never ends up being fired. They “remember that”, but nothing comes of it.

The real strength of these prompts lies in what it communicates to the player: the idea that each choice might lead to a consequence. That alone is enough for a player to invest meaning into what they are doing in-game.

It works in a manner akin to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is a theoretical prison where each prisoner feels watched at all times – but there’s only one prison guard. It achieves this by being designed around a central guard tower. The view into the tower is obscured such that the guard can look out but the prisoners cannot look in, and the prison cells surround the guard tower in a circular fashion. This results in a system whereby the prisoners might be watched, yet the guard can really only pay attention to one prisoner at a time; The mere possibility that the guard may be watching them at any given moment is enough for the prisoners to behave at all times.

In this way, Telltale’s performance of interactivity tricks players into taking all of their choices and decisions as seriously as the last. Most of your dialogue choices and decisions don’t matter – you quickly realise this as you’re playing through the game – but the constant reminders that characters will “remember that” performs as an in-game Panopticon, alerting you to the fact that any one of your decisions might matter.

The result is what feels like a deeply engaging interactive story. Players talk and make decisions as if everything they do matters, even if they know that most of it won’t. It works wonderfully well most of the time, but players are starting to wise up to Telltale’s tricks, and the performance of interactivity is starting to grow stale.

The Glorification of Choice

One of the first things we do after finishing a game with choices and decisions is to compare and debate the choices we made with fellow gamers and friends.

These water cooler moments – what did you do with the Well of Sorrows in Dragon Age: Inquisition? What starter Pokemon did you pick in Pokemon Red/Blue? What outcome did you choose at the end of Deus Ex? – are often just as exciting as the decision itself. They’re intellectually stimulating and force us to confront ourselves, what kind of people we are, and where our priorities lie. They turn this hobby of ours into a platform for moral and philosophical discussions.

Telltale has picked up on this – and capitalised on it completely.

At the end of every episode players find themselves presented with an online tally screen displaying how other players responded to the most critical choices in the game.

It’s incredibly satisfying to immediately compare and contrast yourself with how others react and respond to the same situation. It invites self-reflection, and even adds an extra point of discussion to those memorable water cooler conversations. These surveys can show you, for example, how much more violent or compassionate you are compared to everyone else who has played through the games.

This reveals a deeper design philosophy in motion at Telltale. By focusing on the choices themselves, the developer makes an implied argument about what it is that ultimately matters in an interactive story. Rather than trying to program, design and create a hundred different branching paths, these games instead focus on building and designing interesting, complex and nuanced choices that force players to think. Yes, the games are linear, but the choices are what matters.

It’s a smart approach, but its impact is starting to degrade. Consequences are a vital element of decision-making: we don’t make choices out of context, but instead take into account the potential consequences. This didn’t matter initially – when the lack of consequences wasn’t so apparent – but now the illusion provided by Telltale’s “ELIZA effect” is starting to erode, and players have caught on to how little impact their choices have. This diminishes the meaning and value we ascribe to those choices that we encounter, and ultimately makes Telltale’s future instalments less of a joy to play.

Interactive Storytelling and the future of Telltale Games

Interactive storytelling is a difficult beast to tackle. From the Choose Your Own Adventure books we used to read as kids, to BioWare’s epic role-playing games, all interactive forms of storytelling fall into the same dilemma. It’s difficult to justify spending money, time and resources on gameplay, branching paths, cut scenes and dialogue that only a few players will encounter on their first play through. Unless you’re making a game that’s only a few hours long and meant to be replayed, you’re definitely going to have to take some shortcuts and make your game more linear.

This isn’t a question of whether or not shortcuts should be created, but what those shortcuts should be. We have seen plenty of examples of what a shortcut should not be. The debacle surrounding Mass Effect 3’s narrow ending is an excellent example of this. The online controversy surrounding that ending took place not so much because of its content, but because of its structure. By reducing an entire game trilogy and hundreds of hours of choices to three endings that are chosen during the last hour, BioWare effectively negated and nullified the meaning inherent in those decisions.

Up until recently, this is not a problem Telltale has had to worry about. Players can finish a season of The Wolf Among Us and rest comfortably knowing that any important decisions they made may return to punish or reward you in Season 2. This tactic of deferment has worked well for now, but is quickly growing stale.

The Walking Dead ended Clementine’s story in Season 2. Players found themselves facing multiple endings; the one that they saw was not determined by prior choices and long-term consequences, but rather by two pivotal decisions made at the very end of the game. Much like Mass Effect 3’s ending, this negates two seasons worth of decision making, and cements a dangerous reputation for Telltale.

Playing through the first episode of Game of Thrones, I noticed that an odd phenomenon had begun to occur: I had stopped caring. All those little choices and decisions I had to make during the course of the game no longer felt meaningful. The game would constantly remind me that one character or another “will remember that” but I struggled to care. The illusion has begun to crumble. The ELIZA effect has begun to reach that inevitable point where the user realises how simple the system is. The prisoners have noticed that they can break rules in their cells, and the guard at the centre of the Panopticon won’t take action against them. The Telltale system, once brilliant and innovative, is starting to lose its lustre.

Telltale needs to innovate, and fast. The stories and experiences crafted through its unique form of storytelling are brilliant, but are quickly growing stale. If Telltale wants to remain a relevant and exciting player in the market, it needs to start learning from its competitors’ mistakes and start making some smart and innovative changes to its formula. If Telltale doesn’t adapt, then it will surely perish.

they have really good points, here is the full article

http://www.doublejump.co/will-kenny-remember-unpacking-telltale-formula/