Every Vote Count
The game was developed as part of MS.c Medialogy thesis together with Ingi Jansson Müller , supervised by Ph.d Luis Emilio Bruni.
A multiplayer interactive narrative game that offers multiple players to engage with a narrative and make collaborative decisions to progress the storyline. Each player uses a personal voting device which allows them to partake in the democratical group decision making
Developed as part of M.Sc Medialogy Thesis, the project aims to explore new possibilities within the realm of interactive narrative games. Physical group dynamics come into play as every viewer can express their opinion to how the story should unfold.
My Role
The research was conducted with academic statistical approach, aiming to measure users engagement with the virtual and the physical experience. Throughout our experimentation we tackled different questions such as what kind of choices were the most meaningful for them or how does the opinion of other group members effected them in their decision making process.
Challenges
Network Structure
To create a seamingly responsive experience, we had to implement and use a networking framework solution from the prototype stage of development. To answer our needs, we choose to use Unity MLAPI networking solution.
As the MLAPI framework was in early release stages, there was a lack of material and guidance to offer us answers or solutions in time of need. Despite that and although we were lacking network development experience, we managed to develop a functional structure that supports multiple simultaneous play sessions and is non restrictive in terms of groups size. Clients were able to access our game through multiple different platform and to enjoy multiplatform communication.
Narrative
Our system was developed in an open ended manner and it is not dependent in the narrative itself. For testing purposes we developed three different narratives with different characteristics such as length or perspective. To ensure quality of the narratives, we developed the story and structure using Twine, and open source interactive narrative development tool. To ensure our narrative writing skills wont effect majorly over the testing results, we based our storylines on narrative structure, concepts and themes which players are somewhat familiar with from consuming popular narratives from both interactive narrative games and other media mediums.
The Story manager system within our Unity project supported easy and implementation of the narratives with intuitive manner to support the designed structure. Our goal is to allow storytellers implement and test their own material in a multiplayer supportive system and to encourage development of narratives that are specially made for such group decision making and socially affected dilemmas.
Research
The project was developed for thesis research purposes, and as such it was specially developed to answer specific research questions. Mainly, we focused on the effect of the social aspect of multiplayer gaming within interactive narratives. Does the presence of others effect people choices? or the way the make those choices? and how such system should look like to encourage user engagement with the system and the rest of the players?
Those questions, and more, were all answered through a specially developed tracking system which reported players behavior in real time. In addition, each of the participants in our testing was later interviewed to extract further conclusions about their experience with the system and how future interactive narrative collaborative systems should be developed. The collected data was later processed and analyzed, using statistical analysis programs and methods.
