Michael Ford
Interactive Narrative
My goal with Interactive Narrative, like all my work, is to fully immerse the audience in new worlds and experiences. I believe that any narrative setting, no matter how mundane or fantastical, should feel "lived in," full of its own local histories, cultures, and the many small stories that make up everyday life.
In this narrative exercise, I set out to perform a deep dive into the history, culture, and economic systems of a specific location in my homebrewed world. I performed extensive research on real-world desert-dwelling communities to see how they've grown and developed in response to their hostile environments.
For this homebrewed DnD 5e adventure, I designed a dungeon with over 20 unique rooms for players to explore, around a dozen NPCs of varying depth for players to interact with, several new enemies to fight, and even a few vehicles to take control of if the opportunity presents itself.
The Domain Player Handbook is a collection of the various races, classes, and weapons that I homebrewed for a DnD 5e campaign, and was created to introduce players to the world and allow them to create characters that would be able to interact with the setting in interesting ways.
For this game/experiment hybrid, I designed a game that presented the player with a variety of moral dilemmas, tracked their responses, and compared their scores with real-world results from the Big 5 personality test. In doing this, I allow players to confront the reasons behind their actions and decisions, even those taken within the world of a video game.
