[MoriartyL]

How far can a storyteller go in limiting interactivity to maintain a solid narrative, before the player feels that he is not in sufficient control of the story? And when more interactivity is allowed, how is it possible to guarantee that regardless of the player's actions the story will be satisfying?

[David Cage]

You just defined the main challenge of interactive storytelling, find the right balance between freedom and storytelling. Freedom is not what is important in an interactive experience. All games have boundaries, the magic is to make them invisible to the player. Setting the right boundaries and making them as invisible as possible is the real challenge.

In Fahrenheit, I decided to give very strict contraints to the player to maintain the pacing of the experience. The player never really chooses where he wants to go and his space is strictly limited. To my biggest surprise, no one complained about it seemed natural to most players.

At the same time, we offered a lot of possible actions per square feets and some events triggered by time, which gave another interesting layer.

Having said that, as the Interactive Drama format used by Indigo Prophecy is still young and not mature, I still felt I had to make compromises with the story to offer enough interactivity. I think this will be greatly improved in the future, now that the format is created.

The real difficulty is also to think about story and interactivity at the same time, rather than making one before the other. This was one of the most interesting aspects of Fahrenheit and I think it is definitely the way to go in the future.