25/03/16-Interactive media_blog_week5

Interactive Narrative
Blog: 4
Week: 5
Game: The Wolf Among Us
Q: Do the choices you make in the game contribute to the sense of meaningful interactive moments?

'The Wolf Among Us' Provides the player with the interactivity style common to the telltale games. But how do the choices the player makes contribute to this interactivity. I though that because this game doesn't actually have the sort of interactivity from games with a lot of player control, but of sorts the choices the player makes still effects the interactive moments.
A later choice in the first chapter of the game is where you go first. Do you go to Mr Toad's apartment or Lawrence's apartment? If you choose Mr Toad's, Lawrence will die but if you choose Lawrence's you are given the opportunity to save him. This contributes to any interactive moment afterwards because as a player you feel these things are now happening because of the choice you just made. From 'Storyplaying' (Sebastian Domsch, 2013), "Choice situations can be either a-temporal or have a temporal dimension, which means that there might be a limited amount of time during which the options are available, or that - after a finite amount of time - not making any choices will produce an outcome that is different from the choice situation and that therefore constitutes a choice in itself." This passage is relevant to your choice if you select Lawrence's apartment. Because as you hide in the closet from the burglar you are given the option to charge out and save Lawrence or do nothing. If you do nothing the option available disappears and it is as if you have a made a choice. This also applies to the many combat scenes you encounter throughout the game. Choices appear on the screen but if you choose to do nothing the scene continues on in a different way compared to if you had chosen the option on screen.
Basically the options you see on screen from the dialogue, to the combat, and to the general run out of the closet choices, it feels like meaningful interactivity because of what the player can assume will happen from each choice. If the player can get a rough image in their minds of what will happen if they chose this or that it makes the interactivity meaningful.