Team Size: 1
Timeframe: 1 week
Prompt: Prototype what a potential “interactive Avatar episode” might look like
Date Completed: December 2020
One of my dreams while working at Noggin (2020-23) was to someday get access to Nickelodeon’s flagship series (and one of my personal favorite TV shows) Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA). During my time there, Noggin specifically didn’t have the rights to the show’s IP, but I developed a prototype for what a potential “interactive episode” of ATLA might look like, utilizing the season 2 episode “The Tales of Ba Sing Se” as an example, and later pitched the concept to the learning team in 2021-22.
In short, the concept was basically that you take a given episode of ATLA and allow the player to decide which plotlines and characters to follow. You make sure that the key, narratively dramatic moments can be seen in any playthrough, but otherwise allow the player to craft their own experience. Basically a kind of choose-your-own-adventure. In the case of this prototype, the experience allows you to choose to either follow Katara & Toph, or Aang, on one occasion; and then a back-and-forth choice of either following Momo or Zuko at the end of the experience.
However, though the player has the option to follow Sokka midway through Iroh’s plotline, the experience always will introduce Iroh’s song to the player as a sing-along interaction, and then always will bring the player back to the re-contextualization of this song with the reveal of Iroh and his son, the key narrative beat of the entire episode.
The above interaction is also an example of the power that a potential interactive episode can bring. The player is asked to actively participate in singing and understanding the lyrics of Iroh’s song, and then Iroh sings the song alone in the episode’s narrative gut-punch, it would be believed that the player would feel this emotional hit even deeper as result of participating prior.
This interaction is also an example of several smaller interactions sprinkled in throughout the episode (in addition to the ability of macro-level choice). Many of these interaction are short, touch-interactions that allow the player to move objects around as if they were the characters. These interactions don’t have an input on the larger viewing of the story, but are just a nice example of tactile feedback.
There are also a handful of more complicated interactions spread out across the episode, including Sokka’s plotline where the episode allows you to craft your own haikus. Then, the interaction transitions to Sokka freestyling right before he canonically messes up. So, the intent of this is that you are constructing these poems with Sokka, and then he gets overconfident and starts to feel that he can do it himself, and then messes up. Another example of incorporating the player emotional experience into the known canon.
The other two “complex” interactions involve you tracing out narratively cognizant lines for Aang and Zuko, respectively. In Aang’s case, the experience asks you to trace out the direction of rocks for his newly constructed zoo; in Zuko’s case, you trace out the direction of his firebending to light the fountain around him and his date.
And then, there are the shortform “choice” interactions, in which you are asked, taking the role of the respective POV character, what kind of decision you want to make. As Toph, you can choose to either retaliate against the girls who are bullying you, or not. As Momo, you can choose to dance in attempt to distract the panthers that are pursuing you, or not.
Because of canon, these decisions automatically lead to the same destination, but, in taking a page out of the Telltale Games model, simply allowing the player the illusion of choice makes the experience more directly engaging.
All in all, in addition to the smaller touch/drag interactions sprinkled in throughout the episode, you’d have one key interaction to represent each POV character, with Iroh getting the sing-along, Toph and Momo getting decisions to make, and Aang, Sokka, and Zuko getting more complex interactions.
And then, you get a final choice as to who to end the episode on:
Such a blueprint could theoretically and absolutely be duplicated across a number of ATLA episodes, with different kinds of smaller interactions depending on the content of the given episode (i.e. rotation interactions, shuffle interactions, etc.), even though on the macro-level “Tales of Ba Sing Se” probably lends itself the best to such a format.
I also added one last quirk of chapters and the ability to freeplay what you want to watch, so that if you wanted to, you could disregard the interactions and simply watch the episode as intended.
My hope was that one day Noggin would indeed get access to the show’s IP and I’d be positioned to build off of something like this. Although this ultimately never happened, I remain proud of the work and the potential it carried.
Matthew Floyd 