Want to craft an amazing interactive story?… don’t touch those e-learning “storyboards” just yet!
Planning your interactive story is not like improv. You can’t just ask, “So what happens next?” and then build out the next situation that pops into your head.
You’ve got to be intentional about it.
Why?
Well, I assume your goal is to move someone from one state of awareness, to a new state of awareness. From a place of not knowing, to a place of knowing.
This kind of outcome rarely happens by accident.
It is almost always a product of intentional design.
But don’t get fooled into thinking that traditional elearning (instructional design) storyboards will help you craft a meaningful story. In fact, they might just do the opposite. Those “storyboards” have very little to do with story development. You need to start with something better.
Enter the “beat sheet” to the rescue!
The beat sheet will help you be more intentional, and save you development time. Plus, it will help you to quickly determine if your interactive story is on the right path.
The beat sheet is the rough outline of all the decisions that your character will have to make to achieve their goal. It’s a list of the scenarios you’ll include in your interactive experience.
It’s structured in a way that helps you see your interactive experience from a bird’s eye view. The beat sheet can also be a great diagnostic tool to use with your team of experts — if it doesn’t flow for them now, it won’t when you’ve produced it and added all the bells, whistles and disco balls from the visual asset library.
Use the beat sheet to structure and plan your entire experience… and save precious time later on.
First off, let’s talk about the power of Interactive Stories and why they’re one of the most engaging ways for adults to learn.
- The power of interactive storytelling lies in their two main characteristics — storytelling and agency (or giving our audience the power to make choices)
- These two elements combined turn a passive storytelling experience, into one where the experience becomes something one “plays” multiple times.
- Story adds a cohesive element to a disparate set of events or experiences — to have them mean something more.
- Storytelling also adds a curiosity factor, an open loop, making our audience more likely to finish the experience — they’ll want to know how it all turns out.
Now that I’ve got you sold on why storytelling and agency are such a potent combination, let’s get into the how of “how to make this happen”.
And here I want to get into the nitty gritty of the Beat Sheet. Which is an essential component in the design of an interactive story.
So, first, what is a beat?
So this concept of beats comes from film making, but I’ll put it in the context of your day. I learned a lot from the way Pixar does their visual beat sheets, not just strategy, but their attitude about iterations and revisions.
Thinking in Beats: Cause & Effect Relationships
Imagine this scenario play out:
Wife comes home from work.
Husband: How was your day, honey?
Wife: It was an absolute whirlwind of a day dear…
Husband: Well, I want to hear all about it!
Wife: Okay, so when I showed up at work, everyone was standing outside the main doors… I thought it was a fire drill, but apparently there was a gas leak and…
We all decided to just go to the nearest restaurant to wait it out.
In the meantime, our suppliers had sent me about 4 email messages, and had been trying to get a hold of me and everyone else at the office. One of their delivery trucks had failed, and another driver called in sick, and our order was going to be delayed until they found a replacement (which could take until the rest of the day)…
If we weren’t all so freaked out by the gas leak and had to scramble to find a place to convene, we could have arranged for pick up.. But by the time everyone got up to speed, it was too late.
So the wife here, gave her husband a kind of play by play of the major events of the day.
Notice she didn’t mention details like how she got to work, the route she took, or that she got her coffee in the drive through, or what Susan wore that day… and there are several reasons for this, one is, those details don’t contribute meaningfully to the story, and second, she assumed, correctly, that her husband would probably be able to fill those details in.
More on this phenomenon later.
Now a beat is a major action that happens. And it’s also the reason why the next thing happens. Each beat drives the story forward.
So you can think of Beats as a flow of cause and effect activities.
In its simplest form you can think of beats like this:
Beat J happens,
therefore Beat F happens,
and because of this, Beat K happens.
What’s cool, is that in an interactive story, each cause and effect relationship can be influenced by the decision your audience makes, or as we call it they have agency. This removes the passive aspect of movie watching, and in its place adds an extra layer of ownership (and engagement) for our learner.
Now thinking back to the situation the wife shares, let’s identify the major beats:
Beat 1: Arrives at work to find everyone outside
Therefore…
Beat 2: Has to go to the restaurant to work
Because of this..
Beat 3: Everyone checks email later than usual
Because of this..
Beat 4: Finds out an emergency with the suppliers will delay the delivery of time sensitive product
As a result…
Beat 5: Too late to find replacement pickup
The major beats in your story are those important and pivotal events that lead us down a path. A path of cause and effect.
So when you’re crafting your interactive story, your beats change a little bit from just being a narrative. Because this is not a passive medium. Your beats will become the decisions that your characters make to solve a problem, or overcome a challenge… so the character eventually achieves their goal.
A Workplace Bullying Example
What’s magical about this process is your audience.
You see, there’s a few things that the mind of your audience is predisposed to do, especially when tuning into a story, that actually helps us in this development process.
And we will need all the help we can get — because even though our interactive stories are meant to help people make better decisions, the connection between those decisions, and the sequence of events may not always be so clear cut.
That’s why most learning designers struggle to find the narrative in their content… because it basically doesn’t exist.
Let me give you a perfect example of this….
I wanted to craft an interactive story that would help someone make better decisions when dealing with a bully at work.
I had discovered several situations where people mess up and could make mistakes:
- Being asked to look at something inappropriate while working.
- Being asked to stay late to finish work for someone else.
- Having someone touch you without your permission.
- Having someone ask you to do something you’re not necessarily comfortable with.
- Being asked to join social events after work.
Now all of these represent events and decisions that someone might need to make. They are not a story, they are not connected… but here is the brain magic that I was talking about earlier.
Let me show you how our magical brain will help me turn these disconnected scenarios into an engaging, meaningful experience.
How Your Audience Wants to Help You Tell Your Story
Awesome thing #1: Gestalt Effect
Our brains fill in cause and effect in our story. Our brain likes to even make connections where there is none! Ha! But, for us, as storytellers, this means that if you don’t make the leap from one situation to another too huge, the audience will naturally fill in the gaps to make the story flow and “make sense”.
Awesome thing #2: Storytelling is a Scaffold for Remembering
Storytelling elements help us not only care about the outcome of these separate events — how will this end? But they also increase our chances of remembering them. By about 22 times!
The final beat sheet for my interactive story about bullying at the workplace (Broken Co-Worker) went like this:
Emma is the bully and Sam is the protagonist in my interactive story.
Beat 1: Emma offers Sam a shoulder massage.
Beat 2: Emma asks Sam to look at her vacation pictures on FB.
Beat 3: Emma asks Sam to open up a pickle jar for her.
Beat 4: Emma suggests Sam join her for drinks after work.
Beat 5: Emma asks Sam to stay late to help her with a project.
Beat 6: Emma asks Sam to walk her to her parked car.
Now, as you see, these are not connected events… and the chances of all of these situations coming in one day are pretty rare.
But, this is an interactive story, not real life…
Our aim is not to replicate real life perfectly.
Our interactive stories are there to help our audience gain insight, have an ‘aha’ moment, and help them practice making difficult decisions in a safe place… all this by experiencing a character’s struggles and wins.
Our aim is to be strategic and intentional.
We do this by using the story frameworks and structure that human brains are naturally tuned into, to help make the lesson stick.
The goal of my interactive story Broken Co-Worker is to help raise Sam’s (the hero in my story) Emotional Intelligence (his EQ). So even when provoked Sam can be more thoughtful than reactive. If the situation we put Sam in is not helping him make better choices in relation to this goal… then that beat is going to end up on the cutting room floor.
So, as I look at each of the beats, I ask myself… “does this beat (and the decision associated with it) align with the goal of my interactive story?”
The answer must be “yes”.
A Tool for Creating Constraints and Refinement
That’s not to say that this pruning process ends here at the beat sheet. We constantly refine to get the story, the language, the decisions, consequences, and the interactions as succinct and impactful as possible.
Sometimes that means leaving things out for our audience to imagine.
This pruning process continues all the way through each working prototype to the final version (this entire process is software agnostic, but in my coaching program we can teach you how to launch your interactive story using Articulate Storyline).
So remember, the mind will fill in gaps, fill in relationships between events…IF you don’t make it stretch too much.
For example, Beat 6: which is Emma asking Sam to walk her to her car, can’t be anywhere else but at the end. If I put it early on in the story, people would be like “the rest of these beats don’t make sense because they just left work?!” and break them out of the flow of the story.
Also, I decided the situations would all take place on the same day. Because of how challenging and engrossing the situations are, no one questions how relentlessly Emma pursues and terrorizes Sam literally every minute of this day.
Time disappears in this realm.
We just care about having a “logical” sequence of events.
This sequence of events is the spine, the backbone, of your story.
If you’re designing an interactive story to teach people something, these beats and their order is also something you refine with your subject matter expert. And you do this right after you define your target audience.
Even if the beats, the events where someone has to make a decision, seem like separate pieces, how you sequence them makes a difference, as you saw in the Broken Co-worker example above.
A Process To Structure the Beats
Another great example of beats is in Martin Percy’s Real Talk About Suicide.
The difference in his interactive video experience beats is that the decisions/major events follow a framework, a thought out sequence of steps. Steps that are already a part of a process.
For example, here might be a sequence of events or suicide prevention protocols that could map well onto a beat sheet.
1. Ask the question “Are you thinking about suicide?”
2. Listen to what they have to say.
3. Be there, even if they tell you it’s no big deal, or dismiss it.
4. Keep them safe, ask about their plans..
5. Help them connect with support.
So, if the decisions your audience needs to make are already a part of a process, you’re basically half way there. You’ve got your beats mapped out for you (with a few tweaks here and there).
The next step is to make sure that you focus on the decisions that have the most impact. Which decisions cause the most failure? end in terrible consequences? have the most emotion wrapped around them? are the most difficult to execute?
Remember, your audience will fill in the gaps, so there’s no need to make them take part in all the minutiae of getting from one beat to the next. Help them focus on the major decisions that need to be made, so they can learn quickly from (or at least experience) the consequences that result.
Crafting your beat sheet first will help you:
- Eliminate decisions that are not necessary for the major lesson of the story. The bird’s eye view helps you keep this to the essentials.
- Balance your story with several key decisions, instead of filling in unnecessary choices that simply eat up precious time and brain energy of your audience.
- Have a better plan for when you move into production.
- Release your attachment to your “great” ideas… each beat is still just a bullet point on a page, so you can move, delete, and all without major effort (or ego invested) on developing it.
- Create constraints that will craft a more meaningful and useful experience.
- Test out your sequence of events — consider this your first prototype, your first pitch.
Now it’s your turn!
I’ve just unloaded the concept of a beat sheet on you. What questions do you have? Where does the process get muddy?
Or better yet…. Where are you planning to integrate storytelling?
