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Erica’s Creator Jack Attridge on Storytelling, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida and new PS4 gameplay | PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch News, Reviews and Features - Daily Star 

Sony's mobile phone gaming experiment Playlink has had a pretty decent response since it was first unveiled last year at E3.

The games released thus far, whilst not spectacular, have all proved to be small but perfectly formed interactive titles capable of pleasing a wide variety of audiences, ages and group sizes.

For those who don't know, Playlink titles allow players to use their mobile phone as a touchscreen controller on the TV screen.

However, there's one game that has stood out among all others since Playlink was first unveiled and that's Erica, the live-action title first unveiled at Paris Games Week last year.

The game (don't call it an FMV) is from the creative mind of Jack Attridge, once widely seen as Peter Molyneux's protege at 22cans.

However, Attridge left in 2015 to create his own legacy with his novel idea to combine filmmaking techniques with radical new gameplay.

Over the course of E3 Daily Star had the chance to sit down with Attridge to find out how the project was coming.

And Attridge was kind enough to tell us how Molyneux and Shuhei Yoshida helped get the project over the line, the various storytelling techniques used by the team and also how it tackles branching narratives, game overs and replayability. From the point at which you left Peter Molyneux at 22cans, where did the idea of Erica kind of conceptualise?

The general idea for something like this was way back a decade or so ago. It was mulling in the back of my mind. The idea of live action in games isn't isn't like a fresh one. Its just I never felt like it was done to a level that Erica is doing it.

Where it doesn't feel like a film with elements of interactivity it feels like as fluid and interactive as most narrative games you can play in general you know where you're interacting every 15 seconds rather than every five minutes.

So, getting away from FMV territory?

Yeah! FMV has got its fanbase but I think traditionally FMV is about pressing buttons on top of a video, which can give you an entertaining game. But for me I wanted it to be about interacting with the world itself. Where you're interacting with people themselves or wiping dust off an old book, pulling focus in the frame.

For me, that sort of level of interactivity isn't representative of FMV's traditionally.

Obviously, we're using the same cameras as David Fincher would use as well. But doing it to that sort of fidelity with that knowledge of games like we have today and married with the quality of filmmaking we have today to make them all sort of like working as one in the same.

How many sets do you have for Erica?

So we ended up hiring like a couple of like massive manors in Slough. And in the locations, we've reappropriated them for lots of different things for the game because most of the story ends up taking place in one location.

Can you tell us anything new about the story?

I'm not sure how much, but some of it takes place in a women's mental institution. It's a very timeless story, we never narrow it down to a certain period or anything, it just kind of feels like somewhere in the 20th century. But it's kind of stylistically gone for something less specific.

Presumably, that makes it much easier when you're changing the set constantly?

Yes, well we've got fantastic Art Directors and they did phenomenal concept art for every location and then they've gone in and actually built it and they've built it with props and all these unique rules that we have about our design philosophies for the game.

Actually, that's where I think live action games have always been really unable to come into their own. It's because it's really a commitment to the marriage between film and video games in a way that requires a deep knowledge of both. There needs to be a styling from the game side and then thinking about how can we express it better in live action than anywhere else.

I remember back in Paris Games Week last year you saying that you had to effectively rip up everything you knew from your past work. So where do you begin when you start on that footing? Do you begin with the film side of it, the games side, or is it somewhere in between?

So my background is that I didn't study games to get to games. I studied film to get into games. Back when I started, game degrees weren't really coming into their own, because no one was old enough to retire from the games industry and teach. By time I would have graduated the next generation of consoles were out, so it would have been redundant.

So I already had a bit of a knowledge of how film worked and had worked on films and stuff. When it came to designing the final story it was very much sort of seeing what was out there and thinking 'what can we get from the live action aesthetic?' 'what does it give us?' The answer is that nuance. It opens things up to a new audience.

In what way?

Well, when I tried to get my mum or my sister play video games, or even my father, the thing that alienated them was that fidelity. You know because they used to watch TV or film.

So then from there it kind of became about breaking it down, what is it about live action that isn't working or isn't interactive in these things and saying how can I create tactile and as involving an experience as possible.

“In Erica, it's not about winning or losing. It's not about a game over. It's just using the nature and art of interactivity to tell a better story.”

Jack Attridge

On top of that, it literally came from like watching my mom play games in some ways, just seeing how she wasn't educated with the 30 years of game conventions and tropes that we use to educate players now.

We make a game and we're just like OK here's a twin analogue stick thing. And you would say OK I know how it works. But not everyone does. And so when we look at say one of the first interactions in the game, it's opening a zippo. We don't have to tell people how to use it. When they look at a zippo they say okay 'well there's a lid it's on a hinge and just by dragging it opens' and then the next thing is you see the flint of the zipper and you wonder which way that goes. And you flick it and it just ignites.

So is Erica a series of decisions and is there a game over at any point within the context of it? Or does it just keep branching and deepening as you move forward?

That's kind of ties into your last question and the way in terms of like, what are we doing to reinvent things or how do we kind of consider that stuff.

For instance, the game over was sort of a thing of the 80s. You had a game over because it was designed for you to put more money in the slot.

And for us, in Erica, it's not about winning or losing. It's not about a game over. It's just using the nature and art of interactivity to tell a better story.

Well, actually, there's maybe one potential place you could lose? But really my thing is like for the story to work the story has to be conclusive, it has to have an end game and like an ultimatum.

There's always a resolution and everyone's story is wrapped up and that was something we were very obsessive about.

This is why it takes like two years to write something like this because you can't just settle for film rules or game rules, it has to like service all these different things.

I'd read that Shuhei Yoshida has been very supportive and amazing to work with. Could you tell us what he's brought to the table to help realise your vision for Erica.

Well, I think the first thing that happened was that we made the prototype just as we were leaving 22Cans and we were looking around the industry talking with investors and stuff like that.

And then Peter Molyneux called me up to ask how it's going, I told him we're talking to investors but we're small time and stuff and he told his friend Ian Livingstone about it.

They both asked us to present it and five minutes in they both wanted to invest. Somewhere down the line I showed a friend of mine at Sony and he mentioned it to Sony and they asked us to come in and they were really receptive. But they said you got to convince Shuhei.


I went over to GDC and showed Shuhei personally and he was very poker-faced; he doesn't like to give away his hand, but obviously, it seemed to have gone really, really well.

I guess I've always loved that about PlayStation. You look at the range of first party titles and they take massive risks on things. Like it's amazing that a game like Dreams exists. Absolutely amazing.

Anyway, Sony and Shuhei were really receptive to the idea of making something that's accessible to people who would play SuperMassive games or Quantic Dream or TellTale. And making sure that all those gamers loved what Erica is, but also making sure that we didn't lose focus for those who couldn't navigate that - because they don't maybe have the control and gameplay education - could still play it.

So in terms of the length, because you're filming everything this obviously can't be a 20/30 hour game. What kind of length are you looking at? Is this something that people can sit down for an evening to play as a group or do you need two or three sessions?

So for me interestingly, the first thing was again thinking about how we rethink games. And I don't know about you but as I get older I get way less time to play 50 hours of a game.

Two kids. Definitely.

I know! I don't even have kids, but it's still pretty hard to play games to that length. Somehow I found 50 hours to play God of War but that was a special one-off. Anyway, we looked at games like Monument Vally, Florence, The Room, Journey, Inside. They're all like these great bite-sized experiences. They're short and sweet and focused and concentrated. There's no filler. That's the aim.

So, we were like okay what we're doing is kinda risky. It's it's not like a humongous production, but we still needed to film things like three times because of that branching narrative. That's not a new thing, but I feel like Erica has a pretty darn good branching narrative. And when you do branch it's not just like you go over there and see something interesting it's like it radically changing your perspective of these characters and everything.

So when we get to the ending it's not like accumulating your choices to give you ending it's accumulating what you've seen for you to decide what you want to do at that crunch moment. How does that work with regards to replayability? Especially coming off the back of something like Detroit: Become Human where you have so many of these micro decisions. Whats the scale? And how does that work, especially when you're going for that bite-sized feel.

So one of the things we were really big on was that the player needs to be interactive every 15/20 seconds because if they start playing and they watch like a big old cutscene and they lean back and have some prosecco or whatever - I don't know why it's prosecco, I'm thinking about my mum - But I've seen her try to play some of these games before and then she forgets she's playing a game because its knocked her out of the loop.

So we were like, we have to be interacting every 15/20 seconds and we want our choices to be meaningful. We try not to be vague about choices at the same time we don't want to say bring up like big UI telling you what's going to happen or the consequences. But on the other side, we don't want it to be so invisible that you couldn't even tell its a branching narrative.

So that very much came into how we write it. A lot of this is just the context of writing a good story which marries with good game design empowered by the like technology that we've built from the ground up.

Who are the writing team? Seems only right to ask since they seem such an integral part of the game.

So yeah. So we've got this awesome in-house team at Flavourworks. Essentially it started with an idea that I had but I didn't want to be the sole writer of it because I feel like it's its own unique discipline.

So we got a writer on the team, Connor Potts, and then we found Faye Windsor Smith who's a phenomenal game designer.

Basically there's like this really fantastic design writing dynamic where it really does feel like a tug of war between all three, but to make sure that the writing is as uncompromised as possible and that its constantly serving gameplay. It really requires this triangle of the three of us.

These games aren't made by one person. Especially when you try to make a film, which is an impossible task and a game at the same time ... and then make it branching ... and then trying to do things outside of the conventional methods.

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