The Art of the Interactive Storyteller
Part 6...
Each medium tells its story differently. I will be gentle and suggest that many developers, especially those on the web, clearly don't understand this important point. TV is not the web. The Web is not TV. A newspaper is not radio. Video is not a newspaper. The internet's story telling capability is still evolving along with our understanding of the Internet. It is simply too new. As Josh pointed out, "We are still trying to figure out what the Web does best by looking at other media." I would suggest this may just be the wrong approach. Let me explain.
In 1999, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin wrote a book entitled, "Remediation: Understanding New Media." The point of the book is that all new media from print to the Web refashion prior forms of media. For example, photography essentially refashioned painting and digital photography is refashioning photography. Along with immediacy and hypermediacy, remediation is one of the three traits of the heredity of new media today.
Immediacy is the attempt to get the user to to forget the presence of the medium and believe that he or she is in the presence of the actual objects. If you have seen "Final Fantasy" this summer, you saw this in action. The film attempted, unsuccessfully I might add, to make you think you weren't watching a 3-D animation but an actual human being.
Hypermediacy goes in the opposite direction. It reminds the viewer of the medium. Multiple windows on a computer or web site are good examples of this.
Due to its sheer newness it is almost impossible for any one individual to claim mastery of the Internet as a medium. Jacob Neilson and his advocacy of an engineering approach to web design in his book "Designing Web Usability" comes close when the first sentence of the book is, "I am a usabilty expert, so my choice of medium is governed by what is most usable for a given communications goal and not what is in fashion at any given time." 18 Though usability is rightfully a huge issue among the web development community, it is not the design of sites that is driving the debate but the fact technology is overwhelming the story.
As Boltner and Grusin so succinctly put it, " The web today is eclectic and inclusive and continues to borrow from and remdiate almost any visual and verbal medium we can name." Film became video which became digital video and on the web it became streaming video. Just like TV only better.
The telephone became radio, which became broadcast audio, which became digital audio and on the web it became streaming audio. Just like radio, only better.
The web rivals everything from a letter written on paper from your lover to televison by promising greater immediacy and by putting any media it touches into a new context which encompasses that thing called cyberspace.
If the rules are constantly changing then the most powerful stories you can tell on the web may be non linear. They are those that change themselves to suit the situation. What the te web offers is something no storytelling medium has ever offered in the past: interactivity, intelligent systems and real-time globalization.
Here's a piece by Josh Ulm, called "Dreams".
What did you dream of last night? In this piece you saw the remediation of film to the computer and the concept of immediacy. What is most important with this piece is the non-linearity of the story. There are 16 clips that can be combined to form a huge number of individual stories. The user is being asked to tell the story with a difference. It is a lot like hiking a path in the woods but the first step involves choosing one of 16 paths that each have four branches with another sixteen paths.
Being confronted with that number of choices can be daunting but it is a story that reaches a greater number of eyeballs and ears because it changes across multiple dimensions. The viewpoint can change. The content can change and best of all, you can keep changing it until the story relates to you.
If there is one aspect of what we do that has the most potential to ultimately define the art of the Interactive Story Teller it is the word "interactivity".
Whether it be the way you interact with a machine or the way you listen to an Ojibwa story teller the key is the ability of the user or listener being able to relate to the story. Now what if you were able, as we did with Dreams, to play with the story or to customize it in such a way that it has a context that relates to you and not the person sitting next you? This is interactivity. It is an experience that is both personal and participatory.