Life Is Strange: episodic video games prove as addictive as episodic television
"In another important respect, however, Life Is Strange is quite on-trend: it's being released episodically, every six weeks, in two- to three-hour instalments. The premiere episode arrived on 30 January; episode two followed at the end of March, and the next is set for May.
Dividing a title into chapters and publishing them in succession has become something of a phenomenon in the gaming industry in recent years. It started as a low-risk alternative to the usual blockbuster release strategy – and of late has begun to yield many games that, like Life Is Strange, might never have been green-lit under the traditional system.
Simon Parkin, a freelance writer on games for the New Yorker magazine, believes the popularity of the episodic approach has been 'facilitated by the rise of digital distribution methods', which have made it 'much easier and cheaper to release any number of titles'. Instead of pressing and shipping costly discs to brick-and-mortar stores, publishers can now upload a title to online marketplaces like Steam and Sony's Playstation Store, where players can download them instantly.
That ease of digital access has all but revolutionized the dissemination of games."
(Calum Marsh, 26 April 2015)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Microsoft Research India: Rich Interactive Narratives
"The Microsoft Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) research project aims to combine traditional forms of storytelling with new visualization technologies to create compelling interactive digital narratives. The RIN project is an undertaking by Microsoft Research India in collaboration with the Interactive Visual Experience group in Microsoft Research Redmond and the Microsoft Research Connections."
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Subservient hunter hawks Tipp-Ex white-out
"Leave it to a brand of ink–correction fluid to create the most entertaining YouTube campaign since the Old Spice response videos. The clip below, for Tipp–Ex, with a hunter who encounters a bear at his campsite, sets in motion a whole interactive choose–your–own–adventure game where you decide what the hunter should do to the bear by typing directions into a field above the video. (The hunter uses Tipp–Ex to erase the word "shoots" and asks you for replacements.) It's basically Subservient Chicken all over again, but with a YouTube spin."
(Tim Nudd, 2 September 2010, Adweek)
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Mik ParsonsSHARE
Free HTML5 App for writing 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Books
"Who hasn't, at least for a moment, thought a Choose Your Own Adventure book would be fun to write? It's like making a game out of words. Branching narratives are a surprisingly natural approach to make books interactive. But they're a logistical nightmare. Multiple storylines? Converging plots? How could you keep even a simple story straight? ...
Now, inkle is making their internal compositional software available to the public free as an HTML5 web app called inklewriter. So, without any coding expertise at all, and without much preplanned plot, either, you can simply start typing an interactive novel."
(Mark Wilson, Co.Design)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The History of Choose Your Own Adventure Story Fiction
"Choose Your Own Adventure's 'you' centered decision making, and exciting pace, has been cited as an influence in numerous games and media that followed the series. Examples of Choose Your Own Adventure's reference in the gaming world includes Japan's popular Bishoujo video games, which combine narratives with gameplay and mark the beginning of 'the trend in modern gaming toward using technology to allow players control over their stories... taking on characteristics of highly detailed Choose Your Own Adventure novels,' Choose Your Own Adventure is credited with partial responsibility for the heightened popularity of Role Playing Games, including Dungeons and Dragons. Other games which have been referenced as inspired by Choose Your Own Adventure include Mass Effect II which has a narrative–based adaptive difficulty setting where potential gameplay is altered by a player's decision–making early in the game and FormSoft's Adventure Player, a portable memory stick for PlayStation that allows players to build narrative–based games. The Interactive Fiction community has also credited Choose Your Own Adventure as being a major influence of their works."
(Chooseco LLC)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
