Human Within Developer Talks Making Choices Matter

Signal Space Lab's Human Within straddles the line between virtual reality games and interactive fiction, smoothly shifting from one format to another in a unique way that has yet to be seen on the platform. Its traditional virtual reality moments contain most of the game's interactivity, while the 360-degree live-action scenes host some thought-provoking decision-making.

In an interview with The Best War Games, creative director Avi Winkler spoke strongly about the importance of meaningful decisions in Human Within and interactive media as a whole. He also revealed how the logistical challenges of live-action filming unexpectedly benefited player choices. Winkler then described how players will weigh these decisions in Human Within.

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Human Within's Choices Are Quality-Over-Quantity

Owing to its interactive fiction side, Human Within runs a bit shorter than popular VR games that seek to engage players over long stretches. Instead, Human Within presents more as a feature-length film with a strong narrative focus from beginning to end. Due to this comparatively short length, Winkler explains that the team had to be selective about the decisions players face:

While Human Within is a long-form interactive experience in the VR sense, it's not a 15-to-20-hour experience. It's about an hour to an hour and a half per playthrough. The time can vary depending on how long it takes you to solve puzzles, which scenes you watch, and what ending you get.

Because of the duration of Human Within, we have to be very selective regarding the choice opportunities in the story and the fact that it's live-action. That all impacts the shooting schedule and production process. Filming a branching narrative in live action is a huge endeavor, so we are very selective about the opportunities. As a result, your choices significantly influence which ending you ultimately get.

Practicality was another factor the team had to consider when developing Human Within. Including too many branching decisions and too many game endings would make an already ambitious project impossible to manage. Filming schedules, script writing, and other production elements would be bogged down by excessive content. On the flip side, managing this limitation proved to be beneficial to Signal Space Lab: Winkler notes that being selective by necessity ensured that Human Within was packed with drastically influential decisions. It's a quality-over-quantity approach that kills two birds with one stone.

Human Within Isn't About Good and Evil Choices

When it comes to those decisions, The Best War Games asked if Human Within would separate choices into directions like 'good' or 'evil' or as Mass Effect's dialogue system describes it, 'paragon' and 'renegade.' In response, Winkler describes Human Within's decisions as divided between selfish and compassionate options. To revisit the Mass Effect comparison, the approach resembles Mass Effect: Andromeda's dialogue. The choices are based more on emotion and the player's outlook rather than being a strictly binary morality system.

Not good versus evil, it's not quite like that. Everyone in the world is unique and makes choices in their life based on a variety of circumstances. The choices in Human Within are based on selfish versus compassionate options.

While these choices impact the events that follow their underlying themes, they also reflect the choices that are made behind the advancements of technology. “Is technology always created for the betterment of humanity, or are there sometimes ulterior motives behind their development?”

How player decisions influence Human Within's unfolding story is also worth mentioning. Its 360-degree live-action scenes take place in the past, letting the player determine their backstory and establish a history to address in the 'present time' sequences. Instead of choices being limited to immediate situations, players face decisions that fundamentally reshape their future. Thanks to an intriguing narrative theme that enables a unique combination of interactive elements, Human Within is a promising VR game worth looking into.

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