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The witch: Identity construction and the fairy tale in interactive narrative

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The witch: Identity construction and the fairy tale in interactive narrative

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Content THE WITCH: IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND THE FAIRY TALE IN INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE by Elizabeth Swensen _______________________________________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS (INTERACTIVE MEDIA) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Swensen ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the faculty, staff and students of the Interactive Media Division for their questions, critique, and guidance throughout the production of The Witch. I would especially like to thank to my committee advisors Steve Anderson, Tracy Fullerton, Jeremy Gibson, and Danny Bilson for their time and insight. Thanks to Sean Bouchard for his hard work as Technical Lead on the project, and Sarah Passemar for her contributions to the art and music. You both brought so much life to The Witch. I would finally like to thank my family for their constant encouragement and patience. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures iv Abstract v Introduction 1 Project Description 2 Audience 3 User Experience 5 Design Trajectory 6 Aesthetic 9 Transitioning to the Digital 12 Additional Discoveries in User Testing 13 Language of the Witch 14 Areas of Exploration 20 Conclusion 29 Bibliography 30 iv List of Figures Figure 1: The Tunnel 7 Figure 2: The Music Box 8 Figure 3: Paper Doll Prototype 9 Figure 4: Book Prototype 10 Figure 5: The Bridge 11 Figure 6: Digital Book 12 Figure 7: Digital Book Refined 13 Figure 8: Word Stealing 25 Figure 9: Variable Bridge Workers 27 v Abstract The Witch is a single-player, narrative game on the Apple iPad where one plays a girl labeled by her neighbors as a witch. By manipulating the language said by other characters in the game, the player shapes how the witch protagonist is viewed and, in turn, how the nature of the storybook changes over time. By standing at a crossroads of physical and digital media, The Witch project strives to leverage and challenge the conventions of traditional, children’s fairy tales in order to construct a new kind of interactive, identity-building system. This set of mechanics uniquely uses traits from three categories of such systems prevalent in interactive media: component, variable, and fixed. Keywords Interactive Narrative, Witch, Fairy Tale, Game, Identity, Storybook, iPad 1 Introduction The interactive book has fascinated readers in its paper form for years. With the advent of Choose Your Own Adventure titles in the late 1970's, as well as puzzle and riddle books that date back even earlier, audiences became enthralled with the ability to navigate narrative in an otherwise traditionally linear medium. With the mass production of handheld digital devices, designers have begun exploring ways to take advantage of the familiarity of books in the development of new narrative experiences. From games like EA Mobil's Cause of Death, which adds time sensitive choices to the Choose Your Own Adventure format, to Moving Tales's The Pedlar Lady, a motion graphic fable, technology is allowing designers to leverage the joy of reading. With the release of the Apple iPad and other eReaders and tablets, the possibilities for interactive storytelling expanded based on the affordances of the new devices. These objects suggest the form of a book, specifically an oversized children's picture book. This shape gives an expectation of a reading experience, and the gestures that specifically the iPad allows are synonymous with our more instinctual exploration of children's paper books. We can point at objects and characters we have questions about, follow text and action with our fingers and receive immediate input. This project investigates how the conventions of the storybook transplanted in digital media can inform the establishment of character identity. This essay will describe the design, creation, and user experience of an interactive narrative called The Witch, created 2 especially for the Apple iPad, and how it embraces and subverts the conventions of the traditional, storybook fairy tale to inform the creation of a new character identity system- one that uniquely combines several identity conventions already established in games. Project Description The Witch is a single-player, narrative game for the iPad where the player takes the role of a young girl masquerading as a witch in order to navigate the physical and social space of her storybook. The whimsical premise of this fable is juxtaposed with the choices the girl must make regarding her curiosity and the integrity of her own identity. The girl can alter her disguise for different situations by playing into or against the rumors that other characters say about her, taking the text others speak as a costume of attributes. By mixing different types of adjectives and titles, the character can take on more nuanced roles and overcome more difficult challenges as she tries to get to the market and back home, actively taking a role in constructing her identity. This involves physically dragging words used by those around her and attaching them to her body, forming a disguise of language. Each page in the book becomes a level with characters and objects the witch can explore. Talking to other people gives her more words- the tools of her identity. Exploring objects tells her more about the world and her place within it. These pages provide small 3 challenges to the witch, but are not meant to serve as gatekeepers to the story. Puzzles have multiple solutions, and most pages are more focused on word choice and character interaction as opposed one goal. The story abruptly changes once the witch reaches the town. She surrenders her borrowed cloak to the Alchemist and must return home as a child, rather than a witch. As she passes through the pages again, they change, flavored by the choices and words she assumed when she first walked through them. The words she chooses and the way she interacts with characters and elements on the page shape the nature of her return journey through the book. On the journey into town, the player tells the book who the witch is through her actions. On the journey back, the book responds by describing what it might mean to be that particular witch. This is not a strict judgment- nor are any results designed as a punishment for actions, but rather these moments of change strive to draw attention to the consequences of word choice and the identity one builds for one's self. Audience While the language of The Witch does not exclude children, some of the themes of ostracism and loss available in certain scenarios may be emotionally mature for very young readers. This piece is clearly reminiscent of a fairy tale, but because of these tonal 4 elements, it is best suited for the nebulous, literary category of “young adult.” That is to say, The Witch remains formally simplistic, but its thematic appropriateness varies based on the interests and maturity of the individual playing. The open nature of the iPad may be able to bridge the gap between more mature players and younger children. Just as books encourage cross-generational play- guided reading sessions peppered with education or explanation- so can an interactive storybook. As discussed previously, the iPad can function much like a book. It can be propped up and guarded, but it can also be shared on a table or a lap. Book-sharing actions like pointing at an image of importance, or following text with a finger is rewarded in The Witch with movement and additional content. While the project is not intended as an educational game, it draws attention to the use of specific language, which may allow for small, teaching moments in adult/child play. Because The Witch is designed to be like a storybook in many ways, that simple idea shapes the audience significantly. It accepts those who enjoy elements of traditional reading in play, and will likely dissatisfy those who do not. Much work has been done by The Institute for the Future of the Book as well as XEROX Parc in their Experiments In the Future of Reading exhibit to study and explore new ways of reading, or how to change reading to fit the literacy of the future. Such efforts are not within the scope of this particular project; still, it is important to acknowledge that any foray into digital reading is following in these larger footsteps. From examining user-controlled text speed in Speeder Reader (Back, Cohen, Gold, Gorbet, Harrison, and Minneman), to user 5 interest-based topic and content expansion in Fluid Fiction ("XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading"), these exhibits, and work like them, helped build a foundation for explorative, digitally aided, interactive fiction. User Experience In order to interact with the story of The Witch, the user must perform a series of fairly simple tasks. The first activity is reading. This might seen self-explanatory given the form, but it is important to mention as it is one of the key ways the game gives feedback and narrative context to the player's actions. Certain actions are hinted at, or suggested in the course of the narrative, and while these actions are not required to progress, cohesive aspects of the experience will be missed if the text remains unexamined. Exploration is accomplished by tapping the screen. Tapping causes the witch to move across a page horizontally, following the direction of the gesture. Tapping on objects of interest gives the player additional narrative text or dialogue. Narrative text appears in a designated space, arranged like the text area in a picture book, where dialogue occurs in speech bubbles near the speakers. By instigating more dialogue, the player can discover additional words, which serve as wearable items and that are visualized as torn out of the page. Creating identity through found words requires another simple touch gesture: the drag. Dragging words with one's finger moves them across the play space. Dragging them on the witch character assigns her that value or that identity. Manipulating this identity 6 through combining words is the core of the player's experience, or at least the core way the player can enact change within the narrative. It is no coincidence that the most powerful action within the game is also the most unlike a book. The player is doing something almost magical within the realm of the world, turning words into facts. They mirror this action by also doing something strange and manipulative to the form or idea of a book, by taking torn, stolen language and moving it as they please. It is by breaking the physical idea of a book that the witch is given freedom of identity. The last major action is storytelling. While some aspects of The Witch my seem preconstructed, especially on the journey into town, the player's actions and the identity they build are continually forming the end of the tale. Each page remembers important acts completed there and changes the ending narrative for that page accordingly. Whether or not the user is aware of it, they are cooperating to tell the story of the witch. They are complicit in her fate, a weighty responsibility lightened by the framing of a fairy tale. Design Trajectory This project began as a short story I wrote in 2007 by the same title. It follows a witch through her daily errands, framed by the way others treat her. The story concludes as the witch returns home, when she reveals herself to be a young girl. Why she dresses as the witch is largely left to speculation, but her journey through the story hints at a hostile landscape, one unsuited for children. Here identity was made secretive by necessity. To wear the witch costume is to be safe, but also to be something false and masked. 7 The concept of disguise, specifically one crafted by the opinion of others seemed worthy of further investigation. The unveiling of true identity and the balance between childhood and maturity also led some of the first experimentations in this area. The following were the first in a series of evocative knowledge objects to explore the tone of the work. Figure 1: The Tunnel The Tunnel is a long alleyway lit by a couple of fading streetlights. The ground is littered with shed clothing: a bonnet, an apron, and a scarf. At the end stands a vague figure. Users were asked to place their eyes up to the tunnel and describe their emotional reaction. There was a general consensus of foreboding, intrigue, and mystery, but the lack of explicit information left some users dissatisfied. 8 Figure 2: The Music Box The Music Box was another tone piece, one that sat playing a discordant tune. If a user opened the box, it revealed an ambiguous figure, spinning slowly, layered in red ribbon. Rocks filled the box where treasures would normally lie and the broken, crooked mirrors gave only a slanted reflection. If one dug under the rocks, one would find a key, but few users were willing to touch the project. These two pieces conveyed two early core ideas: one- that the figure in both wished to remain far away or covered and two- that these characters were willing to do this by making an observer uneasy. These qualities became less central to the story of The Witch, but some of this early danger and guardedness remains in certain scenes one might find in the journey back narrative. Specifically this almost hostile secrecy is reflected in the more sparse return scenes triggered by aloof or reserved actions earlier in the game. By turning away the attention 9 of characters during the day, the witch can be alone at night. Whether she finds solitude frightening or comforting in these cases is left for the player to decide. From this point, the project turned away from the purely thematic, and moved closer to its original form- that of a story. With the book format, the medium shifted to match and took on a distinctly paper aesthetic. Aesthetic Paper as an aesthetic is not new to the interactive world. Games like Nintendo's Paper Mario or Infinite Ammo's Paper Moon use paper to gild this material style to content. Paper cutouts afford a certain roughness and color one might associate with amateur crafts. The medium suggests fanciful play, but also draws attention to its material, physical nature. Many of the early prototypes of The Witch played with the physicality of paper- what it means to crumple, fold, rip, or burn it. While The Witch is ultimately a digital work, it learned a great deal from these early forms, and unlike some of its stylistic predecessors, it has tried to marry its style to its narrative. Figure 3: Paper Doll Prototype 10 This first paper prototype was an effort to explore recombinant expressions and outfitting, similar to that of a paper doll. While this had a childlike, playful feel, conveying story through the loss of costuming was thematically and physically problematic. The act of removing items from the character felt invasive and emphasized loss of identity rather than the manipulation of one. Still, the paper itself made light of what may have been very serious if it were made from cloth, or if it strived for a more detailed rendering of the expressions. Figure 4: Book Prototype This second paper prototype focused in on the book form, with five pages or scenes. Players took words provided by dialogue and stuck them to the faceless character with Velcro. While there were aspects of this project players considered charming, the system running in the background (a human being, in this case) was very slow. Organizing responses to user action became unfeasible over multiple scenes, suggesting that a computer would be a sensible replacement. Even with that conclusion, some of the most 11 enthusiastic responses to this iteration came when attention was drawn to the physical material specifically. Figure 5: The Bridge One of the result conditions of the early paper prototypes was the loss of a bridge, where a physical, paper asset had clearly been burnt with fire. In this moment, the user correlated real consequence with his/her choices, but on a level almost separated from the story. This distance between the world of the story and the player's understanding of that world's physical properties draws attention to the thematic separation of the character's world and the player's. Maintaining this boundary is important to The Witch. Just as the game expresses awareness of breaks in the narrative, the player must be made aware of breaks in the world. When the material, the paper itself, contextualizes distress by being affected in physical ways, the story seems conscious of the reader's world. 12 Transitioning to the Digital A few important mistakes were made when transitioning to a digital format. The first and perhaps most significant mistake lay in the choice of platform. Due to accessibility and ease of distribution, the first digital prototype of The Witch began as a traditional, mouse- based Flash game that could be played and demoed on a standard laptop or personal computer. The basic mechanics were similar to the current project- players moved the witch by clicking on various objects and locations, but the platform was ultimately extremely unsatisfying, especially with respect to reading. Where a standard computer seemed to prompt immediate user input in an early test, an eReader and tablet like the iPad facilitates the expectation to sit back and read. Where pacing needed to be forced in the early version, users appeared to take more time with the second digital prototype despite the content remaining the same. Figure 6: Digital Book 13 The early prototype also suffered from trying to seem book-like. Play space was divided between a left page of narration and a right page of illustration and player action. While this looked something like an open book, users were prone to ignore the text, as it populated a place that did not seem to react to them. The iPad, however, did not need to be dressed up like a book because of its already book- like form. The play area and narration area became condensed to one, illustrated page. Figure 7: Digital Book Refined Additional Discoveries in User Testing Informal playtests began early in the process of this project, where special attention was paid to the emotional response of participants as well as their engagement with the text. This led to the creation and adjustment of the early game scripts that formed the first and 14 second digital prototypes. Because The Witch straddles physical and digital media, there were some early UI communication problems. After another informal gallery showing, feedback was used to adjust usability and general UI design to ease the boundary between acting and reading. Players were confused about where to focus their attention during the experience, specifically questioning when the game wanted them to read and when it wanted them to act. Sometimes the system would cue a series of responses to rapid player action that would be performed out of time, compounding the problem, as text seemed to respond erratically. This greatly informed the current interactive model for the project, one that separates reading moments from acting moments. Now, when the player does an action the changes the text or condition of the story, the active area of the scene dims, drawing attention to the new element. This new portion of text is dismissed with a tap, bringing the active, playable area back to full brightness. This causes the player to know immediately when their actions create change. It also reminds him/her that the text is central to this experience and may be vital to understanding the gameplay of the level they inhabit. Language of the Witch Beyond the visual and technical aspects, The Witch takes on a very specific narrative aesthetic, borrowing from early archetypes and ideas about language, specifically those within the fairy tale. 15 Words are powerful sources of early magic. Curses in the ancient world were words given form, where magic was to bend words into will. To say a curse was to declare and make it true. “Serious categorical curses are declarations, utterances that automatically change the world, bringing into existence the state described in the propositional content” (Danet, Bogoch 136-137). That is the core of The Witch's central mechanic. Within the game, to steal someone else's word and place it on the witch is to make objects and other characters view her in that light. This is not an exact science- words carry different meanings to different people. Some words overpower others, and some carry little more weight than a whisper. Certain pages of the experience reward a kind of language alchemy, where the player creates additional meaning by combining specific words together. In this way, the words themselves are witchcraft. The word "witch" is likely the most powerful of those presented in the project. It is both word and character, an archetype that carries varying, but generally formidable, connotations to those that hear it. I cannot hope to address the history of the term throughout human history, but it is worth looking at briefly within the context of the fairy tale. Witches serve as challenges and constraints to heroes, and as threats to the children that read about them. Witches punish bad behavior and are punished in turn by the noble- hearted. They are largely devices to these ends. Rarely do they make up traditional protagonists. Western culture draws these associations in part from the Brothers Grimm: 16 “Romantic scholarship attained its greatest influence with the publication of the Gesammelte Volksmarchen of the Brothers Grimm. In these tales - Wilhelm Grimm's editing saw to that - the witch is without exception old and evil,” (Bovenschen, Blackwell, Moore, and Weckmueller 114). There are exceptions, of course, where witches are heroes and healers, wise figures that aid the protagonist, or are the protagonist themselves, but these figures are more often modern constructions. The modern understanding of the witch is more complex than the older manifestations of the archetype. A study by Kistin Wardentzky in the late 1980s asked children to recount certain Grimm's Fairy Tales and to construct similar stories on their own. She found that despite their familiarity with the evil, one-dimensional witch, when children told their own stories, the witch was a far more nuanced character: In the children's fairy tales witches are extraordinarily opalescent figures. They do not at all resemble the prototype of "female evil." Occasionally a benevolent good-natured friendly creature exists behind the crooked nose and warty chin, and conversely a child-hater can lurk within dazzling beauty. On the other hand, such polarized characterizations are sometimes relinquished in favor of witches who are capricious and unfathomable: a single character who aids, advises, and also chastises. Other female adversaries are disdained outsiders, banished and lonely. Yet others are humorously odd jokers. This catalog does not exhaust the range of witchlike characteristics created in the children's stories. In the cast of traditional fairy tale characters in children's fairy tales, none takes on so many guises as the witch, and none is further from unambiguous and easy moral categorization. (Wardentzky 167) These children recognize not only that the idea of a witch is very broad, but also that the witch can be mysterious and intriguing in her ability to take on multiple roles at once as “a single character who aides, advises, and also chastises.” Despite this breadth, the study also notes that whenever the adversaries to the children’s stories were female they “appear above all as witches or stepmothers” (Wardentzky 167). Our idea of the witch 17 may be more varied in the modern age, but the witch is still the prevalent avatar of female evil and a powerful cultural touchstone. In modern art, the witch's identity is brought under additional scrutiny. One example that mirrors the interactive project's deconstruction of identity is in The Interlude of Apotheosis, by surrealist Leonor Fini. Fini creates many images of the witch. Rachael Grew describes the work: The assumption of a new identity is also represented in The Interlude of Apotheosis, as the stripping witch appears to be growing out of, or climbing into a wig, with several others strewn around her. This suggests the duality of the witch’s identity, she is not simply a one-dimensional figure. Fini believed she had multiple sides to her self, and expressed them through dramatic photographic poses and fantastic costumes... (Grew 4) Here, the witch's identity is anchored to her costuming. Revelation and change are brought to the viewer through the complete loss of these elements in Fini's nude witches, or through the exchanging of recombinant costume elements, like the wigs described above. In interactive media, witches still serve traditional roles. In small, flash games like Nobstudio's Witch Hunt, the witch is a cardboard figure made so that the user can feel innocent glee in cursing and tormenting the angry villagers that try to knock down her door. In Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, you can recruit a witch character into your party. Morrigan is written with a more nuanced pen, but she still faithfully plays to her archetype, challenging any strictly benevolent acts the player chooses to make, and championing the self-serving or morally ambiguous. Perhaps that is giving her too little credit, for Morrigan is more complex. As a second-generation witch, her outbursts are 18 colored by the complicated nature of the relationship with her adopted mother and her inherited gift. Likely her attitude towards the pillars of “good” society is soured by years of being hunted by those same, high-minded folk. This attention to backstory and psychological realism, defined as “a subjective scrutiny of the human heart and mind, usually the author's own heart and mind, often in a sort of imagined removal from the everyday and active world...” is not new to the novel, but it is lacking in early storytelling which is more concerned with events than with a close examination of character motivation (Stafford, 214-215). In this project, the witch is almost misleading- a casual name thrown at the main character by her neighbors. The story is less about what it means to be a witch and more concerned with what it means to be called a witch- to live with the titles one has been given. Still, the narrative treats the archetype as seriously as the user plays towards it. The more she seems like a witch, the more the story confirms that this is who she has become. The further the player strays from witchlike actions, the broader the view of those that perceive her becomes. Though the narrative style changes as the story takes a turn from the traditional walk to market to the more surreal walk home, it plays into and with several important fairy tale conventions. The first narrative convention is a theme of childhood innocence being shaped into adult experience, often in the form of a cyclical quest as laid out by the Heroes's Journey in Joeseph Cambell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. 19 The landscape of the journey to the market is one of bright colors and exaggerated figures. People fit into simpler types and use simple language to mark a child's understanding of her environment. The catalyst, or Abyss in this case, becomes the loss of the witch identity and its burdens and protections when the character surrenders her cloak. Once night falls, the character is shown the story's response to her actions throughout the day. When this occurs, the language shifts to be more modern and introspective. The story grows up with the character. In this way, The Witch subverts the Monomyth. Instead of the hero being changed by their adventures, The Witch also shows that the hero changes the language and nature of the story itself. The form and format of the storybook change with action, something uniquely possible in a digital telling. The second fairytale convention internalized in the system is the law of threes- that objects, events and characters often come in sets of that number. Lee Croft argues this is a hallmark of Russian culture that influenced pre-literate narrative and the recorded fairy tales that followed (Croft 42), an assertion backed up by V. Propp in his systematic deconstruction of such narratives in Morphology of the Folktale (Propp, 74). This is more than a regional trend, however, and any broader look into fairytales and myth will show favoritism towards that number, a convention that I wished to pay tribute to in this project. Just as there are three bears for Goldilocks, three guesses at Rumplestilskin's name for the hapless spinner, and three golden apples in the myth of Atalanta, the witch can only hold three words at a time (including the witch word itself). 20 More significantly, there are three consequences or results for each page of The Witch. That is, for every page the witch crosses on her journey to market, there are three possible versions of this page she might encounter on the journey home (chosen based on actions the player took earlier in the experience). In a way, each return possibility represents a new identity for the witch inseparably bound to her actions. The law of threes becomes more than a structural construction, it becomes intimately tied with the fate and personal identity of the character. Familiarity with the idea of a storybook is how one builds an understanding of the possibility space and who the witch might be. Stylistically, the language is also tied closely to the conventions of the fairy tale. More traditional segments are largely descriptive, telling what the witch sees or does, but rarely what she thinks. When the narrative struggles to assert itself, especially when the player is experimenting with picking up and dropping words often, the style drifts to talk more abstractly about how the character is relating to the book, rather than to her world. It thus draws attention to a narrative space completely separated from the fairy tale itself. When the book struggles it attempts to addresses the player, not the witch. Areas of Exploration From the beginning, the focus of The Witch has centered on identity, specifically how words and titles can build and change how one person views another. Titles eat names. They replace individual identity by simplifying it down to one, potentially stigmatic, 21 word. Whether they are positive, familiar words like Mother, Uncle, Grandfather, or negative, separating words like Stranger, Tyrant, Witch, titles take over names. The qualities these archetypes carry with them have numerous associations. One might argue that not everyone shares the same ideas about these archetypes, and yet these archetypes are still powerful, cultural touchstones. Sometimes we choose our own title, but more often they are given to us. These placed words can be earned or unearned, wanted or unwanted, but regardless they become some part of who we are. The Witch explores how one might manipulate the words offered by others to embrace, dismiss or alter the titles they give. It also aims to assert that these choices have consequences. They affect the world around us, and they affect ourselves. In games, literal titles can be given by completing epic quests, as in Blizzard's World of Warcraft, or less literal identities can be made through a series of player actions. In order to better discuss the wide variety of identity and character building systems, I propose to divide these systems into three larger categories: Fixed, Component, and Variable. Fixed identity systems are often best represented by linear, “closed” narrative. In these games, the nature of the main character does not change in response to player actions. In the course of a story arc, characters can expand and mature, but these developments are driven by a story that the player is escorting rather than constructing (Banet-Rivet, Eiserloh, Hughs, and Isbister). 22 Fixed narrative systems can highlight the power of identity thematically, if not mechanically. Adam Cadre's linear work often examines identity. In 9:05, Cadre plays against player assumption by crafting what seems to be a very simple story. The character wakes up to a phone call shouting that Hadley is late for work. The player must then go through the mundane tasks of taking a shower, getting dressed, and driving his car. Upon arriving at work, fellow coworkers look at the character strangely, and he is promptly arrested. The player is not Hadley, but rather the burglar who killed him and passed out in his bed. Should the player have looked under the bed at the beginning of the experience, he would have found Hadley's body, and the game becomes one about escaping the city. Component identity systems allow players to build their character in pieces. A paper doll is a simple, physical system that allows for this kind of construction. Magnetic Poetry likewise allows users to freely combine words within the restraints of the pieces provided and (optionally) the rules of language (admittedly the character in question then becomes the character of the sentence rather than a person). Digital examples of recombinant identity games include, Scribblenauts, where the player draws on a large library of objects, which, in combination, solve puzzles. This type of recombination is less about character identity. The player’s role is instead about constructing a world identity by choosing what exists in level. 23 Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games utilize recombinant costuming to create a visual and narrative identity. Having the hypothetical Sword of the Dragon King is more than an aesthetic and mechanical choice, it also tells the viewer that this particular character has slain said Dragon King. Armor, weapons, and collectable trophies tell the stories of each hero's triumphs without words. Variable identity systems offer the player more defined choices. Sometimes this is done through the initial selection of a character or character class, where playing one over another gives a slightly different experience through story and/or mechanics. In other games, identity is continually variable through the choices and actions of the player. Kirby games offer the player different play styles based on which enemies he swallows, allowing for specialization choices mid-game as Kirby assumes the traits of what he has consumed. Similarly, Costume Quest allows for the specialization of the player's party by choosing members with Halloween costumes with unique abilities. More often, however, variable identity is realized in a sliding, moral scale. In Bethesda's Fallout 3, for example, player choices are awarded good and evil points, called karma. Karma grants the character a title on the good/neutral/evil scale, which in turn affects the way non-player characters react to that character. The Fable series has a similar system, which, in addition to tracking good and evil choices, also changes the character's appearance based on their moral and class build choices. 24 One might criticize such systems as an oversimplification of identity, but I would argue that the real loss of opportunity lies in the lack of transitional, personal consequences. The dichotomy of good versus evil is at least an established trope of the traditional, fantasy world. The fact that these characters don't seem to react when they make shocking, contradictory choices is more unsettling. When a Fallout 3 character chooses to save a town from a decaying atomic bomb, she is given good karma. When she helps a group of slavers exploit a band of children, she is given bad karma. This affects how NPCs address her but in no way affects her as a person. She does not justify one choice against another, nor does she suffer from moral, hair-pin turns. She can bounce between “good” and “evil” as much as she likes, with no apparent recognition of that behavior beyond the number value on the morality line. NPCs do not seem to even appreciate the spectrum of that line. They treat a mass murderer with the same set of dialogue as an adventurer that habitually steals supplies. Bad karma continues to build and is identified by how many times a bad act is committed, with little account for the specific actions themselves. The Witch strives to explore a new kind of character-building experience by borrowing from and combining elements of all three types of identity systems in a way that both complements and subverts its form as a storybook. 25 The most apparent of these systems is the component. The witch's character is constructed piecemeal by the words chosen for her by the player. These serve a function similar to that of collectible items in more standard adventure games and can become keys to unlock specific responses from the other characters on each page. Their secondary function is more akin to the clothing or armor of a roleplaying system. Words cover and protect the witch as much as they brand her. While words are the standard material in a book, the detachable words in The Witch are something unnatural, stolen from the mouths of NPCs in a way that would normally be destructive to the traditional book form. Figure 8: Word Stealing Of course, some elements of the story and the witch's personality remain decidedly fixed. For the first leg of the story, the player is stuck with the word "witch." This is the 26 narrative constraint of the witch's life and a reminder to the player that whatever else they wrap her in, those around the main character will still associate her identity with that powerful archetype. Another fixed aspect of the narrative lies in the text of the book. While the player has control of the words placed on the witch, the book still rules certain aspects of the narrative tone. These are related systems, but occasionally the book will respond to a player choice in a way that may be unpredictable. The witch's reactions, her core personality is pre-written into the experience. As an example, on one of the pages the player comes across two men arguing about how to hang lanterns on an old bridge. If the player chooses to mediate the dispute, on the return journey the witch expresses some measure of regret upon seeing the newly placed lanterns: The bridge was something new in this brightness. The shadows of the railing lined her path in crisscross ribbons of dark, and the familiar nicks and patterning of wood took on fresh shapes and shades. Was it still her father’s bridge? She hoped he would have liked the lanterns. This emotional response may not be the one the player intended or predicted, but it is a part of the fixed nature of the witch. This distanced experience is preceded by games like Bioware's Mass Effect where the player is not strictly the main character. Cinematic designer Armando Troisi is quoted to say Shepard “has his own reasons and motivations for doing things...As a result, the player fills a “voyeuristic” role—watching scenes and trying to influence them, not control them.” (Kumar). I would argue that the player's role in The Witch is something between observational and embodied. The player directly controls how others see their character, but indirectly controls who that character is. 27 The words the player manipulates in The Witch form impressions that cause a variable reaction from the storybook environment. Rather than use a binary or quadrant system of sliders, the consequences of a given scene are broken up in to a series of triggers. These triggers are tripped by the player's actions, but they are not gradations of each other. There are no evil, good, or neutral actions in these pages. Instead, the measure of the outcomes changes from page to page. The bridge page offers another example where triggers are closely correlated with the witch's relationships to the arguing NPCs. The page is listening to see if the player ignores their disagreement about how to light the bridge, fuels their feud by irritating or frightening them, or seeks to calm them down. Figure 9: Variable Bridge Workers While one might argue that these options seem to correlate with a traditional good, evil, or neutral understandings of the world, the narrative response is instead interested in how 28 active or passive the player wishes to be. When returning to the bridge, the player that ignores the conflict receives an unlit bridge, and consequently, a foreboding passage through a dark page. The player that actively angers the workers will see a bridge that has caught fire from being improperly lit. While the bridge is harmed, the player's passage is not much impeded, as even those glowing embers provide the protection of light. Any additional negative feedback only applies if the player has an emotional relationship to the object. Similarly, a player that actively soothes the workers likewise sees the bridge well lit (and not by accidental flames, but rather the proper lanterns). The strength of a subjective response to player action is in its seamless connection with the pre-written elements of the narrative. Each page can have its own set of judgments to highlight or complement the tone of that particular scene. This can make it more difficult for the player to predict the segments of the return journey, which may make the act of replaying the story more rewarding. This same quality may be a weakness of this system. If a player wishes to think of these page responses as good and bad- or good and better- they might be frustrated trying to map a linear model. To this player, the story may feel arbitrary or unpredictable; that their character is changed by variables they do not understand. It is through these triggers that the environment of the story responds to player action, but how does the character respond to her changing identity? With each word dropped and picked up, the story attempts to address the witch's change. When one characteristic is 29 switched out again and again, the story itself becomes confused. The following are a sequence of responses given when the player repeatedly switches the same word elements on and off the witch: She was becoming an actor now. She took what she could and left pieces of herself on the dusty ground. Who was she? She was beginning to forget… She was falling. She was losing herself. The witch strays from an understanding of herself. There are no immediate, mechanical consequences to this choice- experimentation with the system should not be punished- but the story makes an effort to point out that something is changing, and possibly being harmed. The character's integrity of identity is ultimately in the player's hands, but it is a concept the project attempts to bring attention to. Conclusion The Witch takes many of its structural, narrative, and aesthetic cues from children's storybooks and specifically fairy tales. It is the intersection of this traditional, physical media and digital, interactive storytelling that allows for the creation and exploration of a new system of identity building. By borrowing thematically from the past, leveraging our understanding of age-old archetypes, and combining character creation systems from the present, The Witch becomes something novel in the realm of explorative personality. 30 Bibliography "30th Aniversary Time Line." Choose Your Own Adventure Company. Chooseco LLC, Web. 22 Mar. 2011. <http://www.cyoa.com/public/30thanniversary/index.html>. Back, M., J. Cohen, R. Gold, M. Gorbet, S.Harrison, and S Minneman. . "Speeder Reader: An Experiment in the Future of Reading." Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001. ACM Press. 2001. PDF. Banet-Rivet, Adien, Squirrel Eiserloh, Link Hughs, and Ketherine Isbister. "Group Report: In Search of Better Narrative in Games." Project Horseshoe. Fat Labs Inc, 05 Feb 2011. Web. 22 Mar 2011. Bovenschen, Silvia, Jeannine Blackwell, Johanna Moore, and Beth Weckmueller. "The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature." New German Critique. 15 (1978): 82-119. Print. Cadre, Adam. 9:05. 2000. Campell, Joeseph. Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd ed. Navato, California: New World Library, 2008. Cause of Death. EA Mobile, 2010. Costume Quest. THQ, 2010. Croft, Lee B. "People in Threes Going up in Smoke and Other Triplicities in Russian Literature and Culture." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. 59.2 (2005): 29-47. Danet, Brenda, and Bryna Bogoch. ""Whoever Alters This, May God Turn His Face from Him on the Day of Judgment": Curses in Anglo-Saxon Legal Documents." Journal of American Folklore. 105.416 (1992): 132-165. Dragon Age: Origins. Electronic Arts, 2009. Fable. Microsoft Game Studios, 2004. Fallout 3. Bethesda Softworks, 2008. 31 "Fluid Fiction." XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading. N.p., Web. 22 Mar 2011. <http://www.onomy.com/redweb/fluid_fiction.html>. Grew, Rachel. “Sphinxes, Witches and Little Girls” Creating Humanity, Discovering Monstrosity: Myths & Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Inter-Disciplinary Press. Web. 22 March 2011. <http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id- press/ebooks/creating-monstrosity-discovering-humanity> Holowka, Alec. Paper Moon. 2009. "The Institute for the Future of the Book" The Institute for the Future of the Book, Web. 22 Mar. 2011. <http://www.futureofthebook.org/>. Kapell, Dave. Magnetic Poetry, 1993. Kirby's Dream Land 2. Nintendo, 1995. Kumar, Mathew. "GDC: Mass Effect 2's Subjective Story." Edge Magazine 18 Mar. 2010: Web. 22 Mar 2011. <http://www.next-gen.biz/features/gdc-mass-effect- 2%E2%80%99s-subjective-story>. Mass Effect. Microsoft Game Studios, 2007. Paper Mario. Nintendo, 2000. The Pedlar Lady. Moving Tales, 2010. Propp,Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. L . Scott, ed. L. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Scribblenauts. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2009. Stafford, Jean. "The Psychological Novel." Kenyon Review. 10.2 (1948): 214-227. Wardetzky, Kristin. "The Structure and Interpretation of Fairy Tales Composed by Children." Journal of American Folklore. 103.408 (1990): 157-176. 32 Witch Hunt: NooBoo Mary. Nobstudio, Web. 22 Mar. 2011. <http://www.nobstudio.com/games/play/witch-hunt-nooboo-mary> World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment, 2004.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Witch is a single-player, narrative game on the Apple iPad where one plays a girl labeled by her neighbors as a witch. By manipulating the language said by other characters in the game, the player shapes how the witch protagonist is viewed and, in turn, how the nature of the storybook changes over time. By standing at a crossroads of physical and digital media, The Witch project strives to leverage and challenge the conventions of traditional, children’s fairy tales in order to construct a new kind of interactive, identity-building system. This set of mechanics uniquely uses traits from three categories of such systems prevalent in interactive media: component, variable, and fixed.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Swensen, Elizabeth (author)

Core Title The witch: Identity construction and the fairy tale in interactive narrative

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/25/2011

Defense Date 03/25/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag fairy tale,game,identity,interactive narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,storybook,witch

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anderson, Steve (committee chair), Bilson, Danny (committee member), Fullerton, Tracy (committee member), Gibson, Jeremy (committee member)

Creator Email elizabeth.swensen@gmail.com,swenyo@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3767

Unique identifier UC1435628

Identifier etd-Swensen-4317 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-441702 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3767 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Swensen-4317.pdf

Dmrecord 441702

Document Type Thesis

Rights Swensen, Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu