By Marcus Herrera
In stark contrast to a fairy tale with a happy ending, Charles Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood ends abruptly with the big bad wolf devouring the grandmother and Little Red. Unlike many renditions where Little Red escapes with her own cunning or is saved, she is simply eaten and the story ends with nothing more than a moral of “stranger danger”. The last words are literally a “moral” that treats its audience as children who need to be warned about trusting people. Just as there are many versions of the classic tale, there are equally as many different ways that this story could have been told. Since fairy tales originally were an oral tradition, the audience could change the story during a retelling if they did not agree with it. Because of this, telling fairy tales was and would be more interesting when they adapted to their audience. Perrault’s written version of The Little Red Riding Hood is narratively unsatisfactory, not only for its condescending and static ending, but because it prevents participation from the audience. For the modern audience, fairy tales can and should be adapted to a similarly fluid medium like games where player choice can directly affect the narrative to enhance the consumer’s experience.
For video games, increasing the player’s control over the narrative has proven to likewise increase enjoyment. In general, studies have found that people playing RPG (role-playing games) tend to make moral decisions congruent with those they would make in real life and would experience emotions in interactions with in-game characters similar to normal interpersonal interactions (Moser, 623). Of course, no two people think the same, so why should stories be catered to one over another? In order for a story to be maximally satisfying it must either appeal to a particular group or adapt from person to person. One way that video games have been able to adapt to individual players is through a branching narrative where the story is not always the same experience. A study by Christopher Moser and Xiaowen Fang followed a group playing a game called Mass Effect 2 where a single story quest had many decision points that could affect the overall narrative. The study found that the hypothesis of “Branching Narrative Feedback in an RPG Leads to Increased Enjoyment and Engagement” was partially supported (631). This makes sense because there are essentially infinite decision points in one’s life. Rather than being confined to a static and potentially unsatisfying end like in Perrault’s version of Little Red, players in a branching narrative have more freedom and choice to influence the game. As such, what matters to the players is that they have a sense of control over the story and world through decision points. As mentioned earlier, if someone heard a fairy tale they did not like in the past, they could just change it, but fairy tales in printed form took that power away from modern audiences. If the power to affect the narrative was reintroduced to fairy tales, this study shows that enjoyment should increase with perceived control over the story.
Another study looking into the idea that more fluid stories are more appealing is a paper titled “Adaptive Branching Quests Based on Automated Planning and Story Arcs.” The study discusses using AI to procedurally generate quests. What is particularly special about the AI-generated method is that it takes into account past player actions to best determine what would be an engaging quest (de Lima et al). In a strange way, adaptive stories are evolving to be more like the oral traditions of our past, where change was a normal part of the medium. In addition, the generated quests are not unlike multiple variations of a fairy tale, where the focus of the narrative can be on different elements depending on the person telling or experiencing it.
As for how to adapt fairy tales, I believe a visual novel format would enhance the narrative of the story. A visual novel is a type of game where the player reads through the story with interactivity and other visual or auditory assets as afforded by the medium. While it can be combined with other gaming genres, at its most basic, it is a story in electronic format. Because of this, a fairy tale plotted into a visual novel would not be difficult to adapt and would also increase immersion with the ability to make more decisions that affect the fairy tale itself.
While it can be said that adapting fairy tales into a medium where one must experience it multiple times to truly appreciate it might be boring, I believe this is short sighted. An example to the contrary is a visual novel called “I Was a Teenage Exocolonist,” a sci-fi coming of age story where you are a child growing up on the first colony on another planet. The story lasts ten in-game years from when your character is 10 years old to 20 years old. As expected, many challenges arise throughout those years. A core narrative tool that makes this story more interesting is that your player character has memories from previous playthroughs of the story which allows them to make more informed decisions, just like the player would with meta knowledge. This means that as the player “learns” the outcome of various actions in-game, so too does the player character learn those same consequences. An example of this is how your parents can die due to famine and disease during the game. While it is possible to save them on your first play through, it is incredibly difficult without direction or paying close attention to contextual clues. When I played the game, I was actually able to prevent them from dying and while it was very heartwarming, the emotional impact of the story was slightly lessened. For me, saving my character’s parents was a linear storyline and while they were saved, I did not first experience the consequence of losing them.
The suggested, or perhaps intended, experience through game design is to first learn a painful, terrible lesson and then fix it on the next playthrough for a different and more rewarding ending. While my experience of avoiding the loss was satisfactory, it was less impactful. A similar narrative structure would work well with fairy tales, especially since many fairy tales have morals or lessons that are “taught” through the story and visual novels could build on those lessons to offer meaningful paths.
The fairy tale I chose to analyze with this approach was Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood. Out of the versions I have read, this version ends the most abruptly, with Little Red being eaten and with no woodsman, deception, or other means to escape. While I did not attempt to make an entire visual novel myself, a storyboard showing the branching story illustrates my point. The storyboard captures some key points that would-be-writers need to keep in mind when adapting a fairy tale and also highlights what is so limiting about Charles Perrault’s written version of the tale. These things that I am looking out for are primarily the endings and the key decision points that Perrault takes out of the audience’s control and that significantly alter the ending.
As for what type of story the Little Red Riding Hood visual novel could be, a book titled “Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels” details several potential types. A method that I avoided with the story tree is a “gauntlet” story structure. In a gauntlet structure, there are more diverging paths but they get prematurely “cut off” and are all the results of the character dying or other bad endings (Finley, 68). This structure seemed too similar to the original Perrault version where there is only one path that the reader can do nothing to change. Instead, a different structure was more appealing and consistent with the oral history of fairy tales. Broadly speaking, there are two main “endings” for Red Riding Hood in that she lives or dies. This type of story structure where there are branches that converge on just a few ending points is called a foldback structure. Despite the few endings however, the decisions made still have to matter in some way through relationships with characters of other variables otherwise “…it can make players feel their choices are meaningless because all branches “eventually lead to the same conclusion (Finley, 68).” Therefore, the decision points of the fairy tale cannot be at random points, but at key moments that lead to a new development. The following is an image of the branching story structure that I made.
I started by creating the initial “#Perrault” branch and noting the key decisions that Little Red made along the way. After that, I used either my knowledge of other adaptations of Little Red Riding Hood like the Grimm’s version to make other paths or added paths based on the logical consequences of an action such as lying to the Wolf. An important thing I wanted to include were paths and decisions based off of the original material. For example, Perrault’s version mentions that the Wolf “…wanted to eat her right there on the spot…” but “…he didn’t dare because some woodcutters were in the forest (Perrault, 16).” In an interactive story this sort of knowledge could be used to create different paths while not having it come out of seemingly nowhere. Finally, I added a few decision points that diverged depending on whether or not the player passed a certain “checkpoint”. If this or any other story were to be adapted to a game, there would need to be additional entertaining game elements that you can play and thus, potentially fail, leading to another branching path.
Although I heavily talk about fairy tales being adapted to games, that is not the only avenue for modern fairy tales. More traditional mediums like choose your own adventure books can be used for similar effect while still staying as a written work. However, given the way modern audiences approach literature in digital books, comics, and video games, the potential for offering more choice and emotional engagement in fairy tales is expanding. What is most important is that the modern version keeps the reader engaged and able to actively interact. Whatever method is used to achieve this, as long as fairy tales continue to adapt, they have a well-deserved and long held place for the modern audience.
Bibliography
de Lima, Edirlei Soares, et al. “Adaptive Branching Quests Based on Automated Planning and Story Arcs.” 2021 20TH BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER GAMES AND DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT (SBGAMES 2021), IEEE, 2021, pp. 9–18, https://doi.org/10.1109/SBGames54170.2021.00012.
Finley, Toiya Kristen. Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels. 1st ed., CRC Press, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003199724.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. Steam, 2022
Moser, Christopher, and Xiaowen Fang. “Narrative Control and Player Experience in Role Playing Games: Decision Points and Branching Narrative Feedback.” Human-Computer Interaction. Applications and Services, Springer International Publishing, pp. 622–33, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07227-2_59.
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Editions). Available from: Yuzu, (2nd Edition). W. W. Norton, 2017.
