Researcher: You werer playing a multiplayer story, when during the story did you first notice the other player? Participant 2: it was a while... Participant 1: well, i inferred there was another player, well, i inferred there was another character in the story who might not ahve been an active player, because there was somebody else, but it was probably, i reckon, about half way in when i saw the first instance of it, with something saying "the other player has made a choice Participant 2: Researcher: okay, erm, how did you react when you noticed that? Participant 2: i was intrigued Researcher: why is that? Participant 2: i don't know what their aim was, because it says there's two people, but i don't know whether it was good or bad or i should be working against them or with them or what the ultimate end i should be working towards was Researcher: okay Participant 2: it was interesting to see how it would play about Researcher: what about you ? Participant 1: erm, well, i just, i think maybe because i just took this as sort of an affirmation that i was definitely interacting, because i sort of had assumed I was up until that point, because it was another, there were some choices, there was another character, this was actually definite feedback that i was now into a section of the story where the interaction was taking place behind the curtains Researcher: okay, cool, so, was there any part of the story you can think of that particularlly sticks out in your mind after the fact? Participant 2: i got shot! Researcher: you got shot? interesting, so when you got shot, how did you react? Participant 2: i don't know, it was a bit of a shock, but... i don't know, it felt that then i was playing against someone Researcher: interesting, so when you were shot, did you think the other player had anything to do with it? Participant 2: i don't know, i'm not sure. it was er, it's hard to tell because it's not necessarily clear how... how much i was interacting with the other player, versus just the general storyline, how much input they had into that decision, so it's hard to tell, but it made me more cautious of what decisions i was making; Researcher: interesting, it made you more cautious. why? Participant 2: dunno, it made me feel like there was going to be a way i'll loose . so i felt like i had to be more careful. and it was more consequences than i had first thought Researcher: interesting Participant 2: if that makes sense Researcher: yeah, that makes sense. alright, so ... Participant 1: well.. Researcher: when.. no, go on Participant 1: No, I was thinking i was probably just, despite trying not to, in a sense i was trying to re-linearise the story, because I was assuming i was reading certain, sort of, bits out of sequence, for all sorts of reasons, so as I was trying to piece that together, erm... and I think funnily enough, i think shooting the other player was the thing where I pressed the screen just as it refreshed so i didn't know what i was actually pressing! Researcher: i was going to ask 'how difficult was the decision', but actually that sort of takes it out of that... Participant 1: i think that must have been it, because i don't recall, because the decision before that was something in the alley, the player was confronted by the other player, and i think the next.. there was that, and the final scene followed that, so. i found myself trying not, you know, to stop myself, you know, like always taking the top choice or always taking the bottom one, kind of thing. so, just to sort of.. i wasn't sure.. because in some of the choices early on, you knew you were making a choice, but you didn't know really, to what end, you just knew it was a choice. so basically you just had to pick one. in a sense, at that point, it didn't seem to have, it didn't seem to matter, unduely, which one... so it wasn't, pretty much... you know, pick a decision, anymore, and I think, i'm not sure, that by the end of the story i was, following, trying to follow, i didn't think i had yet acquired enough information to make me make a more considered choice, so to a certain extent, i was still taking a pick, because i couldn't quite track the choices back onto the story as I experienced it in the run through. Researcher: interesting, so, when you were making those choices earlier on, you said you didn't have enough information. what were you using to decide on those? Participant 1: well, it wasn't sort of... it was a qualitative judgement, it was more a sense of, you know, do you want to do X or why, and they , well I don't know and I'm not sure what effect this has, it's like you know, do I tell someone or don't I tell someone, but i don't know quite what i'm telling them yet, so... erm, in a sense, it's whether I... it's whether I'm trying to be a good person or bad person, it's in a sense the choice... that's probably one value choice you could make, because most of them, the one, the one if not two, three way choices, for all of them seemed to be do a good thing or a bad thing, in a very loose sense. Researcher: i can see that, yeah. so were you more inclined to choose the quote unquote good thing or the quote unquote bad thing Participant 1: i think i started out choosing the good things and started choosing the bad things, just to shake it up a bit, but.. Researcher: okay, when you were making those choices, did you think much about the other player and how it might affect them? Participant 1: erm, yes, i mean, i was trying to figure out whether, i mean i know it's sort of, a fairly small test, so i had this sort of basic assumption that the other character sort of was the other player, but i wasn't wholely certain as to whether the other character might be, in a sense, not directly interacting. in other words, might be present affecting the story but not necessarily the.. effectively, what the protagonist, not the protagonist, so todd and sarah were the two characters, so whether the two players were todd and sarah i wasn't entirely sure, it also could have been somebody else, erm, and, so, no, i was sort of muddling through it slightly Researcher: let's think about the, finale for a second there, that conversation you were having at the.. act 3. how much do you think you, how much do you feel you affected the other player during that conversation? Participant 2: i dunno. it's hard to say... Participant 1: was this the bit where you being prompted for the other person to answer? Researcher: the other player was , the character is thinking? Participant 1: yeah, yeah Researcher: yes, that bit Participant 2: was it the splitting the money bit? that bit? Researcher: the bit after splitting the money Participant 2: the bit after splitting the money? Researcher: the bit where you had a set of pages like 'Todd speaks' and 'Sarah speaks', those ones Participant 2: ah, okay. erm. Participant 1: well, I interpreted those messages as, effectively, the state machine waiting to catch up, between, getting like, you know, effectively the correct state from both players before moving forward, but that's probably being slightly overly diagnostic, as opposed to living in the moment of the story! but I mean, that's, well, because, you know, because otherwise, why wait. I think i went through... two pauses, so if it had been one, that might just have been the way the story was, the second just, because, i guess because i was slightly thinking behind the curtain, sort of thing... i may be, what's happening here is it's waiting to catch rather than I suppose, ooh, maybe the other person is having to think long and hard about this, i, you know Participant 2: i'm not sure, because there wasn't that many hints to wrap, interactions that we knew were going on between the two characters, it was hard to tell how the other person would respond, because you hadn't really built up, any sort of relationship it was like, well, i'm pressing this then hoping that the other person, if the other person is doing this, is going to do the nice thing or the bad thing because there hadn't been that much of like a prelude up to that bit where you'd built up an understanding of how the other player was going to play their character, so you don't really know that if I choose the good thing, the other person is going to do the bad thing and stab me in the back or do the good thing because im doing the good thing, it would be.. because it was quite sure, you hadn't sort of, built that image of this is the two players and they're playing this way, i'm playing this way, so if i do this they're more likely to do that, sort of thing. Researcher: is that something you thought at the time? or is this something you thought of after the fact? Participant 2: sort of, i thought i'd just sort of pick what I pick, like, i didn't really know what the other person was doing i just sort of tho.., i'll do the right thing and that's it, and then i was like , but I suppose looking back on it, it's sort of yeah, you haven't really built in that relationship so you didn't really consider it too much when making the decisions, you just sort of like... i think this is the right thing to do, or i want to do this thing instead Researcher: okay, so why did you choose the right thing? Participant 2: it felt like that i was, fully RPing , it just felt because, it felt setup in a way that it was like, the kid that was hard up on his luck got in with the bad crowd and it was the two of them working together, and something shady was going on between the organisation and them, so i was like, i should stick with the teammate and do the good thing to look after each other's backs, because the organisation is shady and... stabbing each other in the back, and you had the boss kill his wife or whatever so you don't want to do the bad things, you want to stick together and help each other out, but i did survive, maybe, for now. Researcher: so, do you have any more thoughts on that area? Participant 1: no, i probably, i mean, i think.. i think i've, with the starting point that, in the beginning, one didn't have enough story under one's belt to be able to engage at a deeper level, because you just didn't have enough backstory, it's just quite simply, not enough context to make a more nuanced decision, so you had a decision but it wasn't clear at that point, in a sense, you had a decision but why or whether it would make more sense to be one or the other. obviously as it went on a bit, a bit of story emerged. I think apart from the fact of the random decision i made at the end, i think was broadly probably following a, i was broadly following what i thought was a, roughly, you might say the 'good' path on the grounds that it was a bit of wait and see, so on the grounds that, you know, either go early ugly and click all the things that really sound like they're bad, just get stuck in. or, do we wait and see where the story goes, before taking a more deliberate decision to take a good or bad path. I say 'good' or 'bad' in that, in that as I say, the decisions seemed to be broadly along those lines, you can do something nice or do something less nice, i think. Researcher: okay. so, how much do you think, this is a question to both of you, how much do you think the other player controlled how the story ended? Participant 1: i couldn't begin to guess, to be honest. i mean, clearly, there were a couple of places where you were told, at some points, you were clearly told there had been an interaction. i didn't... i didn't take that as being the only... i thought that may have been a slight false ploy in that there may have been other decisions that were actually going on, also, at the same time trying not to over-guess it, as i didn't think that was helping as you really wanted us to react to what was there, erm, so, i wasn't sure, but i assume given the number of choices i had, there would probably be, unless the design was for one primary versus a secondary player, in terms of effect, that the other player would have as many choices as I had and most likely they would interrelate in some way, in terms of story branching. Researcher: okay, interesting, so... let's do a little bookkeeping, before this, before you played the story, how well did you know the other player? Participant 1: not at all Participant 2: not at all Researcher: obvious, I know, but it has to be on the record. so, in general, when you were playing, how often did you think or speculate about the other player? Participant 1: you mean the other human player as opposed to the character they were playing? Researcher: either/or. Participant 2: it's hard to tell, because you didn't really know how much the other player was interacting with you directly, it was unsure how much i would need to consider their input on my decisions, until later on in the game when it might be more clear you're waiting for the other person to say something, so it was more like it might be important that they're doing something, so i might need to, sort of, try and see whether they're being nice or not, to see what i need to do. Participant 1: also, i was conscious that there was another player in the game, and that the person behind that player happened to be someone i had not met before but had just met and who happened to be sat 30 feet away, but, given that i didn't know the other person i couldn't use that in any way to help me understand the story. in other words, the fact that there was a person rather than a machine behind it doesn't arguably alter much... it might have in a longer telling of the story, in a sense, i didn't know if it was a human or a machine i might have made choices more differently, but anyway it would have taken a number of choices, either way, to actually work out whether you were trying to cooperate or whether you were in competition, which are, in a sense, the two alternative paths of interaction. Researcher: that's quite interesting. so if you say, playing the hypothetical game, let's say that, a close friend or partner were playing, how do you think that would have affected your decisions? Participant 1: i think you might... my guess, not having done that, my assumption would be that.. you might have more nuance to your decisions, because you can add a human element into your experience of their decision making, what they liked or didn't. so you might think, oh right, yeah, no they always sort of, take the bad path, you know, for the sake of argument, or they always take the good path, it doesn't really matter, but you might have a view, or to which things erm, i suppose it gets more interesting you know, the more choices there were, so in other words, if it wasn't a binary choice or it might be the person who always clicks the top button. If there was sort of, more moral dilemmas, it would be interesting... the thing is, whether your decision making would be any better because you thought you knew the person, i wouldn't like to hazard a guess Participant 2: you don't know whether they're playing themselves, or whether they're playing a different version, or whether they're just doing it to spite you, seeing how much you can mess with them, you know Participant 1: you may know them, or if you were stood in front of each other, this is probably what they would say, but of course it's a game, so... Participant 2: especially if you didn't know whether it was competitive or cooperative, you didn't know am I going towards some end where I need to win, or I'm supposed to do better than them. Participant 1: that's true, i didn't know, i didn't actually, because I, I didn't know what my motivation was, i was sort of trying i was probably concentrating on trying to work that out, that's all I was thinking about the other player, because to a certain extent, till I knew what i was trying to do, erm, that would help inform me as to the decision I'm making in the interaction. but it's difficult, you know it's difficult to do that compressed into a short reading Researcher: interesting, so, you said earlier [p1] that if there was more of a moral dilemma... can you elaborate on that? Participant 1: well, i mean, something with, that was, so the decisions that we were offered, were sort of a binary choice, so you, if you couldn't engage with it, you could say 'sod it, i'll pick the top one' sort of thing, if there had been 3 or 4 choices, the you, you sort, you could still pick it but I, i had a suspicion that would probably have driven me to think through it a bit more, that probably would have given me more engangement, a simple binary decision rather encourages you to sort of whizz through it, because you know. Because, it's A, B... alright, let's go B, or I'll just click all the bad ones or ill just click all the goods ones, whereas if there's more choices you've got to make sure you've actually understood the choices Researcher: right Participant 1: if you're trying to engage with the story Researcher: okay, that makes sense! Alright, so last few questions. So, how do you think having the other player there affected your experience as a whole? did it affect your experience as a whole? Participant 2: i don't know... because it was, at first you didn't really realise what the other player was doing to impact your game, because i wasn't really sure if we were just doing the same thing but just seperately , until it started saying 'oh, but the other player did this', and like, waiting for the other player, like, 'oh, we are playing against each other, we are like, interacting with each other'. Participant 1: I think it's different when it's short... Participant 2: ..because you didn't know what the other player was doing, it was like well, if I choose this, does it really matter what they're going to choose, so do I need to think about it? Participant 1: yeah, in the short, in the shortness of the experience, of the experiment, i think probably, what i'm hearing, it sounds as though we were both slightly doing the same thing, so we were in a sense, trying to figure out our motivations as actors in this, such that probably, that was slightly overlaying all of our consideration of the other things, so i mean, positing that into a slightly larger framework, into a slightly larger experience, where perhaps you didn't know whether the other actors were people or not people, erm, that might have actually been more tempting, because in this case you definitely knew there was another human, somewhere in, which was probably, likely the other main participant in the story, so you can get that much quite quickly. what you couldn't then figure out was whether we're supposed to be acting together, are we... actually effectively in opposition, even if we don't want to be, i.e it's a zero sum game, erm, but probably it was just that in the comparatively limited framework that was available, probably, i suspect we didn't just explore that enough. Researcher: ah, okay, do you have any more thoughts on that [p2]? Participant 2: yeah, it's just that, it didn't really, you couldn't really judge the impact of your decisions until like, sort of, the shooting bit was sort of, the big main, okay, so we can really impact each other, but that was sort of like the big, like, sort of decision so you didn't really realise how much of an impact your decisions would have until then there was one, and then it was sort of over. so if there was sort of, more of those, so it is really having a big impact, so i maybe should be more careful with what i'm choosing Participant 1: because at the outset, we've of course been told there were choices in it, and there's some interplay, so, but i, again i had a with that point, so I knew that my choice fed into in effect the state engine and the machine, what i didn't, what i couldn't gauge was the degree to which i actually had some real agency Participant 2: yeah, you didn't know whether you were, just choosing options and it would still converge down to one decision, so it didn't really matter what you picked early on, it was just sort of a later game decision, or whether you really actually, were changing things Participant 1: were you actually pushing them down the stairs, or were you choosing the colour of the curtains? You just couldn't tell, and that's not a good or bad thing, but i just don't think you could really tell Participant 2: so you just sort of, play as a game, just sort of did what you wanted to, and just sort of said whatever happens, happens Researcher: okay, so just quickly, the last question, erm, have you experience many interactive narratives before, what sort of experience do you have with any kind of interactive storytelling, or even story-based games? Participant 2: not a huge amount, a bit of telltale... not much Researcher: [p1]? Participant 1: not much, erm, what's the last thing... probably a bit of sunless sea, otherwise way way back, myst and.. and not really, not a vast amount. not for any other reason, other than that i haven't, erm, i've been too busy bloody studying! Researcher: i'm surprised you haven't read more of 's hypertext fiction, actually Participant 1: sorry, I've read some of that! the trouble is i tend to be his proofer, so i'm actually reading it... for proofing it and seeing whether the logic's working, as opposed to reading the story, erm, like i certainly found listening to a traversal when we were out in very interesting, because I've read that hypertext, two days previously, stood at the terminal reading it, but actually having the author read this through and at the end of each lexia you talk about it, was actually massively more interseting than just reading the story Researcher: okay, so, to round this out, i'll actually explain how the interaction in this worked. so, whenever you had all of the memory points, and you had a, initial setup for the memory, and then a binary choice. so every time you read a memory point, and every time you made one of those choices, each of those nodes would be visible to the other person. so each of those nodes would appear, that's true for all of those memory points Participant 1: yeah, so i saw them appearing, just by happenstance, literally i saw something appearing as i'd already done something, so i could see that appearing in real timer: during the finale, during that act 3, when you had the conversaiton and then accidentally shot him, as it happens, that was, the conversation, you were taking it in turns to say lines of the conversation, so very much, request-response over and over again, and you were forced to wait while the other person was thinking. unfortunately, you didn't get to see this bit, which is when you had read a certain amount of conversation, some choices would unlock that you could make in addition to the conversation that would determine how the scenario ended Participant 1: yeah Participant 2: ah, okay Researcher: so there was actually, all of those request-response, all of that conversation was interaction between both and players and all of those flashbacks, those memory points were also interaction. So in general, to me, it sounds like you're saying what wasn't clear as the way that that interaction worked Participant 1: i don't think, well, i don't know, i don't think that in a sense, that particularly mattered, i didn't worry that I didn't, i wasn't worried that i couldn't see the logic tree behind the curtain, it was more that actually, simply, trying to figure out what am I doing, because we didn't have much backstory, or a task, so, er, it, i hear echo'd the opposite thing, what i was saying, i was one of the two characters in this and i was trying to work out am i the good person, the bad person, is this collaborative or is this competitive... which was, in a sense, a limit of the agency arguably that you had, so trying to work out what you were trying to do, within that, but that was partly just because that was quite short and compressed, i suppose a wider point would be is, i don't know what effect it would make if you ran this sort of thing having said to either or both of the people beforehand, in other words, you gave them a motivation, give a different angle on this, because it, of course, what we've echo'd is that we probably spent a goodly part of the study in a sense trying to figure out what we were doing. It sort of didn't work, but we probably using it in a way that... maybe it was intended. Researcher: that's very interesting to me, because as a story, it was designed to be neither cooperative nor competitive. there were 5 different outcomes, all of them different. some are arguably better or worse than other ones, but it depends very much what you're going for. to me, it's really interesting you both sort of put it in that 'are we trying to cooperate', 'are we trying to compete', light Participant 1: well, it's sort of like the playground, nobody wants to start out being cooperative and then get sandbagged, you know, because they got the wrong choice. So, you're sort of... well, and also, its a race until you know it isn't, because if you find you get through a and it's all been picked clean or you've missed something, erm, so there is an element of just trying to find a sort of, you know, who am i, where am i, obviously if it had been longer, that's going to be there at the start, and then in a longer game/interaction, you'll get past that, because you get to a decision you just decide and.. even if you're decision is 'i don't know', you can say okay, well this is what i'm doing and this is the way i'm going to do it. and so, i think all this perhaps proves is it took us a while to actually figure out what we wanted to be doing. that's not a bad reflection on the game per-say. Researcher: well, thank you very much to both of you. this has now run over 30 minutes, so, thank you very much!