Branching Narrative for Training
Best Practices
Branching Narrative games are games that follow some kind of story or situation where players' choices affect the story's path or course or outcome in some way. These kinds of games are great in training employees on a variety of situations. That is because these games create a fun and safe space to learn, practice, fail, and ultimately master critical soft skills.
And these formats aren't just for games, Bandersnatch premiered two years ago on Netflix and was one of the most talked about shows. It has a very simple interaction, just 2 choices you can make via your tv remote and can get amazingly different story outcomes. There is something inherently fun about exploring a world through choices that you make. These games allow you to be different people, assume different personalities and experience the world through the lense of others.
So here are a few best practices I wanted to share for Instructional designers when they think about crafting Branching Narratives for their own training.
Choices should be meaningful
Ask yourself: Does this choice make sense in my situation, would I actually do this? Is one answer clearly wrong or off? Is there a reason for it? Is there any meaningful difference? What are you as an instructor trying to find out? Is the edicate or process more important for learners to know? Knowing what you want to teach will help guide the choices you want to provide.
Don't have more than 4 or 5 choices, doing so can lead to choice paralysis. This is when I am faced with a lot of choices and it seems hard to make a decision. We've all faced this in one way or another whether its deciding what to watch on a streaming service or what product to by when there are tons of options and various reviews.
Keep text short and keep dialog believable.
Having a lot of text on options can lead to fatigue for learners. You can have longer dialog, but the choice text should be kept short. Dialog needs to be believable, a person should sound like they are talking to you, not reading from a script.
Allow learners to explore. Let them go down wrong paths.
Don’t just end the simulation abruptly if the user makes a mistake. The magic of branching narratives is that it provides a safe place to fail, so let them fail. Sometimes people are curious and want to do the wrong thing to see what happens, to play the bully if they are nice in real life. This is what is inherently fun about these experiences and what can be so effective about them as learning tools. Let them explore these options and in doing so, you can increase the fun and the replayability of your training materials.
Of course this means you'll need to build out various ends, what can happen when things go wrong, not just focus on the correct way to do things.
Telling you if you made a mistake right after your choice takes you out of the experience and doesn't let you contextualize why it was wrong. This is the game telling a learner instead of showing and is much less effective in teaching. Use the narrative to communicate the mistake by having the story reveal the consequences, reduce choices or possibilities and let the player continue. At the end explain why that choice wasn’t optimal and why it lead to a different end result that wasn't the best outcome. This gives learners context and allows them a much deeper understanding of their incorrect choice.
Choices don’t always have to be major tests in knowledge.
Use choices to show the time passing or a story/situation continuing. Not all choices have to be correct or lead to a major branch split. Remember to use the format: the branching narrative, to communicate the situation.
Avoid the Uncanny Valley
The Uncanny Valley is a dip in emotional response we have when we encounter an entity that is not quite but almost human.
A great example of this was The Polar Express movie. The characters looked so realistic and yet, something seemed a bit off. As a result of being so close to realism but not quite there yet, the characters instead of looking lifelike and cute looked a bit like cyborgs or robots. As a lesson learned, most kid CG movies Like Pixar's Coco are more exaggerated, more cartoon like, less realistic.
.jpeg)
Be mindful that if trying to make something lifelike either keep it to actual film or photos of people or use less realistic graphics to avoid this. Don’t be afraid to use animated or abstracted characters. Many films and games that use animation can have just as much an emotional impact as real life imagery.
Why is this important?
When you are using branching narrative to test and teach soft skills or human relationships, the uncanny valley can subconsciously subvert learners. They won't have the same emotional responses and that can affect their decision making process during the game or simulation providing bad data or incorrect assessment.
Users are smart!
Your users are smarter than you know. Avoid adding unnecessary navigational text such as "Read the selection then choose from an answer below." Not only does it add additional unneeded text to the screen but it can come off as condescending to players who might have a bad experience with your training materials and become disengaged as a result. If you need text in order to explain how to navigate a branching narrative game, then rethink your UI design.
Find the learning objectives and common mistakes.
Map possible outcomes using flowcharts. This allows you to see what is happening. I usually color code answers based on categories or optimal states. Then I imagine what the responses or outcomes are for each major decision branch until the situation resolves.
Avoid the pine tree pattern.
You want to avoid what I call pinetree pattern where suboptimal choices just lead to the ending and only correct ones leads you to a game. The problem with this is that you don't provide ways for players to explore the consequences and you dont allow to turn things around if they can be.
Reduce content by finding conjoining spots
These could be protocols that need to happen, or next events. Something that no matter what you did would need to happen or take place. This can help you consolidate content using variables to keep track of past choices for future consequences.
