Integrating a game with a story—lessons from interactive television concept design

Abstract

This paper is a summary of the concept work on interactive stories done within the Future Interaction Television at the Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere. One of the largest questions we dealt with in relation to the design of program content for interactive television was how to provide interesting interactive content for future television viewers. Television as a medium has established traditions for how it is used. These are not likely to change drastically overnight. Because of this, the context of viewing has to be considered when developing new concepts. Interactive television systems are still under development and standards are still pending. Although the aim of our research has been to consider interactivity from the viewers’ and the content production community's perspective, work on this topic also provides insights into what kinds of iTV broadcasting techniques will be needed in the future. Most importantly, our work here shows an interactive television show concept that can be used already, with television broadcasting as it is done today, only using the Internet as the return channel. As households move into the digital era and the television sets become technically interactive (e.g. come with a built-in return channel), the interactive part can be shifted over from the Internet to be used via the television sets. In this paper we propose a solution that combines a game with a traditional story, which in our example prototype is a simulated television series. Our concept relies on the game having effects on the series and vice versa, but solves many of the familiar problems of interactive stories, as the parts still stay separate. Consequently, the concept gives viewers greater freedom of choice; in our concept one can choose to only watch the series or only play the game. However, the strength of the concept is that doing both adds something special to the experience of both watching and playing. We implemented this kind of concept as a prototype called Footprints of Power. The concept was tested and the test results indicate that interactive stories following this approach could enhance the experience of both playing and watching.