Betwixt: The Story of You is a little app that came about because I got tired of mental wellness chatbots with the emotional register of Clippy. I’m also a big fan of Myst, fantasy and interactive storytelling, and I always wanted to see how far you can push it before you break the users’ immersion.
Betwixt started as a humble Facebook chatbot and is now an iOS app in which you go through a strange world called the In-Between and end up learning about yourself. I had the sense not to write the content myself, but to collaborate with an award-winning fiction author (Nebula finalist) and a therapist, and we took guidance from doctors at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a behaviour scientist at the Games for Emotional and Mental Health Lab.
One thing we’ve learned is that interactive conversation and storytelling is really hard. It’s also a lot of fun, otherwise I wouldn’t have signed up for it. We wanted to create an experience that felt personal and responsive to people’s needs, as well as allow them to co-create the world and have the agency to express themselves. The approach we’re using is a combination of branching narrative and flexible conversational logic - e.g. you can pick from a number of pre-given responses (and we try to make them varied and representative) or write your own, and our aim is to never make you feel like we’re forcing choices on you.
There’re still a lot of challenges to get this right and I’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’ve done so far, and how it can be better. There’s no such thing as too much feedback :)
Betwixt started as a humble Facebook chatbot and is now an iOS app in which you go through a strange world called the In-Between and end up learning about yourself. I had the sense not to write the content myself, but to collaborate with an award-winning fiction author (Nebula finalist) and a therapist, and we took guidance from doctors at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a behaviour scientist at the Games for Emotional and Mental Health Lab.
One thing we’ve learned is that interactive conversation and storytelling is really hard. It’s also a lot of fun, otherwise I wouldn’t have signed up for it. We wanted to create an experience that felt personal and responsive to people’s needs, as well as allow them to co-create the world and have the agency to express themselves. The approach we’re using is a combination of branching narrative and flexible conversational logic - e.g. you can pick from a number of pre-given responses (and we try to make them varied and representative) or write your own, and our aim is to never make you feel like we’re forcing choices on you.
There’re still a lot of challenges to get this right and I’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’ve done so far, and how it can be better. There’s no such thing as too much feedback :)