For her Narrascope 2022 presentation, Hélène Sellier discussed how she approached the challenge of creating authentic choices for difficult situations:
Sellier and her colleagues at The Seed Crew wanted to design a narrative that provided more nuanced choices than simple options to “accept” or “reject.” This led them to examine the cognitive emotional, behavioral, and somatic reactions to events that are perceived as painful, worrying, or threatening.
Research by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman provided a starting point by identifying two main styles of coping: active and passive.
“The active coping strategy consists in controlling or modifying the situation by taking action on what causes stress,” Sellier said, and “passive coping strategies consist in denying or avoiding the origin of the problem and diverting our attention somewhere else.”
These ideas make it easier to keep an audience engaged with a narrative — by shifting the framing from accept/reject to active/passive, people can choose how to respond, but none of their choices provide an opportunity to completely reject the situation.
Within this new frame, Sellier and her colleagues also wanted to provide a wider range of choices. Ideally, their narrative would offer three to five options, but they also wanted to avoid implying that some choices were morally better or worse than the others.
Sellier explained that Jakobson’s functions of language ultimately provided a way to create a larger range of dialogue options that still felt authentic. Sorting Jakobson’s six functions into active and passive responses created four final options: passionate, rational, conciliatory, and flippant.
The result is a set of categories that apply to a broader range of narrative situations. “We wanted the model to become compatible with neutral events,” Sellier said. “We do not want to single out discriminatory situations from other moments of the story.”
Seed Crew applied this framework to RecovR, an episodic narrative game that addresses diversity and inclusion issues like sexism, ableism, and racism. They have chosen a difficult task in trying ot create choices that feel authentic for these situations, but their work is grounded in published research and thoughtful approaches to game design.
