Maintaining suspense on rereading

When the audience members are exposed to the interactive story, they already know which choices they were offered last time and the sequence of the choices they made. If this reduces the readers’ uncertainty about the outcome, the readers will feel the suspense less strongly when rereading the story than they did the first time. Thus it is vital for maintaining suspense to continue evoking the state of uncertainty by

manipulating the choices offered to the reader during each subsequent reading. Below, we propose some techniques by which this can be achieved.

Note that it is not the case that suspense will necessarily disappear on rereading – there is an effect known in psychology as the paradox of suspense where some readers of traditional media seem to keep experiencing suspense when rereading, even though they already know the exact outcome of the suspenseful episode of the story. However, this effect does not apply to all readers and the level of suspense upon rereading a story is reported to be lower than it was the first time.

Let us consider the situation where readers are offered two options to choose between: (A) and (B). Assume that neither of the choices appears to lead to a clearly good or bad outcome and thus both options present uncertainty. There are a number of different ways that this choice could work on rereading. If on the first reading, readers take one of the choices A or B, but it is followed by narrative with enough further choices, then the user does not strongly associate the final outcome with their initial choice of A or B. On rereading, readers may have slightly different probabilities of the outcome associated with the choice that they took, but will still have considerable uncertainty about the final outcome and the level of suspense will be not very different from the first time (Khrypko & Andreae, 2010).

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A B Choice Reader’s path

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A B Choice

First reading Rereading

Figure 9 Resolving suspense into an undesirable outcome during the first reading. Suppose instead that on first reading, readers take choice B and then end up in an undesirable outcome after only few further choices (see Figure 9). They are then

likely to associate B with a bad outcome. When rereading the story, if they are offered the same choice, they will perceive little uncertainty about the B option. However, they will prefer to take the A option anyway, since they believe that B is a “wrong” choice. They will still perceive suspense at this point since the A option has the same level of uncertainty as before. There is no need to change the choice, although it could be removed with little effect since it has become a “forced” choice.

Now suppose that on first reading, readers take choice A and the narrative is resolved to a desirable outcome after only a few further choices (see Figure 10). As a result, the readers may perceive option A to lead to a good outcome. When rereading the story, if they are offered the same choice between A and B, they will have a reduced sense of suspense, because A will be obviously the “right” choice to take, but they will have little perceived uncertainty associated with that choice. Readers who want to maximize suspense may deliberately choose B (even though they believe it to be the “wrong” choice). Although there is more uncertainty associated with that choice, their suspense will be tempered by the knowledge that any bad outcome is simply the result of the wrong choice.

Figure 10 Resolving suspense into a desirable outcome during the first reading. To maintain suspense on rereading, choices that the readers would now believe to be clearly good should be removed or replaced by new choices presenting a new state of uncertainty (for example, the new choice C in figure 10). Another solution

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A B Choice Rereading

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C First reading Reading

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Reader’s path

would be to replace the choices with a cut-scene with a suspenseful situation creating a state of helplessness and letting the reader witness the suspense.

Note that the situations above may arise even if both A and B actually lead to uncertain situations where both good and bad outcomes are possible; the loss of suspense is caused by the reader’s perception of certainty about the outcome, not by actual certainty. In this case, it may be possible to replace the form of the choices to make them appear to be different, but lets the choices lead to the same set of possible outcomes as the original A and B. Readers may then still perceive the original suspense and be able to explore other paths through the narrative.

Rereading does not necessarily lead to a reduction in uncertainty; if making the same choices leads to a different outcome on rereading, then readers will increase the level of uncertainty that they associate with the choices. This can be accomplished by having non-deterministic branches in the narrative that the system either chooses at random, or by deliberately choosing a branch that leads to the opposite outcome from what happened on a reader’s previous reading. Such techniques can enhance the level of suspense on rereading in a way that would be impossible for a static narrative. This technique can be combined with the cut-scene technique above to force readers to go through the same branch of the narrative that they chose before and discover that it is less predictable than they thought.

4.6

Summary

From the above analysis, it is possible to conclude that readers of interactive narrative will still experience a high level of suspense with repeated encounters if the options to choose from present uncertainty about the outcome. In case the outcome is predictable, the choice option should be removed or replaced by a different option presenting uncertainty.

In addition to uncertainty, the choice option should present a high risk for the reader’s story character, and the stakes have to be high.

In document Emotional Response to Stories in Interactive Narrative (Page 83-87)