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Participation
By Corvus | May 18, 2006
To open her podcast interview with Chris Crawford (link), Christy Dena reads the following quote of Rob Cover from his paper Reconfiguring of the Author Audience Relationship:
The rise of interactivity as a form of audience participation is by no means the latest trend in media history, nor something that disrupts a prize synergy between author/text/audience, but a strongly held and culturally based desire to participate in the creation and transformation of the text that has effectively been denied by previous technology of recorded media production and distribution.
She then asked Mr. Crawford whether he agreed with this. He alleged that he did and went to on explain how his storytelling system didn’t really address the issue of participation in the least, repeatedly focusing on interaction. All right, he didn’t specifically set out to achieve that goal, but it’s the message I got from it.
Chris Crawford is obviously an intelligent man. Several of the things he has to say on the topic of interactive storytelling I agree with. I disagree, however, with his approach and the philosophies behind his design. He repeatedly stressed that his engine did not allow for plot and said, “There is no story.”
What? An interactive storyworld in which there is no plot or story? What does that leave us with? Why it leaves us with a narrative designed to communicate nothing and lead nowhere.
He concluded the podcast by saying that he needed accomplished storytellers to test his engine. Oh, but wait. He then clarified that he didn’t want accomplished storytellers who were also successfull, as they were impossible to train. He wants angry storytellers who couldn’t make it as traditional storytellers (who were “rejected” to use his wording). Good artists, he said, had to have pain in their lives in order to create. I don’t completely disagree with that statement, but it seems to be the pinnacle of hubris to claim that successfull people haven’t had any pain in their lives. Particularly successfull storytellers, who are not, by and large, the most privileged and powerful members of our society (although, arguably, we ought to be).
All in all, his attitude came across exactly as it does in his writing: that Chris Crawford is a brilliant revolutionary and should you happen to disagree with him, then you clearly can’t comprehend his vision.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Crawford is working on a very interesting project, but it’s one that is attempting to turn the controls over to the computer algorithms under the hood. It sounds like a brilliant attempt to craft an interactive environment. But I wouldn’t call it a storyworld, as he does.
You see, I agree with Rob Cover. Interactivity is a form of audience participation, and if you stop at interactivity, you’re missing the point. At the beginning of the podcast, Crawford relates a cute and overly simplified overview of human communication, claiming that starting with standing on a rock and evolving over time to the amphitheater (an inverted rock, he quips), and on through to television, technology has progressively removed the receivers from the transmitters. Well, to use his analogy, I’d say that his engine sounds like it’s designed to knock the speaker off the rock and reduce their ability to speak. My goal is to elevate the listeners onto the rock and give them voice as well.
Nothing Crawford has said indicates to me that his engine is going to allow better storyteller/audience participation. In fact, it sounds like there’s going to be an enormous and complicated tool between them and once the story plot… device is set in motion, that’s the end of it.
You know, I have the same issue with his approach that I had with Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Any given bite sized chunk is crunchy and good, but when it’s all put together, it becomes a self-indulgent, overly long mush of bland flavors.
All right, I’m a bit worked up and I’m going to stop now that I’ve got my reaction out of the way. I’m going to comb over the notes I took and see if I can put together a point by point discussion in which I further support my decision to craft a participatory storytelling engine and critique what I feel to be the flaws in his approach. I meant this post to be more to the point of why interactivity is a tool of participation, but upon re-reading it, I see all I’ve done is stir the pot more. That’s all right, though. Pot roiling is a specialty of mine. Something fun usually rises to the top when I’m done.
May 18th, 2006 at 9:54 am
And this is one of the reasons I can’t quite get onboard with the current storyworld genre. I grok it’s evolutionary stance for player interactivity. I get that there are times when emergent “plot points” can create interesting narratives. I understand that there’s a holy grail of interaction which allows for players to have a really powerful immersive experience.
But, coming from a writer’s point of view … a lot of that is somewhat moot. It’s where I started with Randolph Carter … worry not about the mechanics of replicating a world but rather try and find mechanics to apply to an actual story A tangential and interactive story, perhaps, but a story that a writer could actually sit down and simply write.
To borrow from Red Dwarf, there is a big difference between Pride and Prejudice and Jane AustenWorld.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:08 am
I agree; it’s much easier to implement JaneAustenWorld than Pride and Prejudice.
This remains a passing goal of mine, actually – to adapt Austen to game form. (I’d consider the Brontes as an alternative, but Austen is probably easier and more appealing).
Regarding Crawford, it does seem that his perspective is ‘agree with me or be powerfully wrong’. This is a common attitude among those who express the Rational temperament most strongly (cruise sci fi newsgroups for its most clear expression!) But at least he’s just a game designer/simulationist and not a scientist or politician whose philosophical beligerence will block other people from achieving their goals. I mean, what does it matter if Chris Crawford thinks you are wrong? What does it matter if you think Chris Crawford is wrong? What does it matter if I think twinkies should not be considered food?
Such things can be dismissed with a deep breath or a stiff drink. Life goes on regardless.
It’s important to remember that you and I are more interested in collaborative storytelling; Crawford’s bailiwick is simulation. It’s just unfortunate that the respective terminologies have collided creating the illusion we’re talking about the same thing!
Best wishes!
May 18th, 2006 at 10:49 am
It only matters in that I feel the noise he generates potentially blocks understanding, among portions of my audience, of some of my points. The noise I generate in response is merely an attempt to clarify my position.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Ah, it’s a communication issue, I see. Isn’t the case that you were the one who hooked your audience into the signal in this case? If you hadn’t posted about it, I would have been oblivious.
Regardless, I now understand your position.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
I can’t bring myself to listen to it. I’ve felt so good about myself lately.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Chris: I know of at least a couple of regulars whom I am certain have heard it. *kniw*
May 18th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
I’m choosing to remain oblivious.
It’s a gift.
May 18th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
I’ve made a realization recently that seems obvious, but nevertheless is incredibly powerful. Agency is a conserved quality. You can have lots of local agency (what I imagine you think of as participation) and little global agency (what Crawford sees as interactivity, for instance, a conversation that really goes somewhere), or vice versa. Storytron constricts local ageny according to the author’s scripting, but to the effect of having lots of impact over the overall all telling of the story (he means theres no story in sense of very little embedded narrative, we’re talking a paragraph of exposition). I’m not sure what you’re up to, but for Magic Circle (and possible Swords To Satanists, the sequel, which I’m considering doing on another platform since making this realization) I want to have a constrained global narrative with lots of local agency, the participatory play you describe.
May 19th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
>I have the same issue with his approach that I had with Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Any given bite sized chunk is crunchy and good, but when it’s all put together, it becomes a self-indulgent, overly long mush of bland flavors.
Well put. I think Crawford is overrated. He jumped the shark long ago.
May 26th, 2006 at 7:35 am
Hello Corvus et al, I know Chris’ application is slightly different but I think the notion of a storyworld approach to writing is quite important. I’m seeing it in so many formats: virtual worlds, franchises, cross-mediaentertainment, interactive drama. The difference, for me, is that the author approaches creating a storyworld: the characters, setting, rules of the world (abstract and programmed), history and so on. Events are also thought of, but as parts of a storyworld, over time, in different locations. The world is not constituted by the events, following one after another, but as incidential, inhabiting the world. Events do not maketh the world. I find this an important distinction because of my work in cross-media entertainment. These types of stories are constructed using what I call ‘polymorphic narrative’. The events are distributed over time and space, in different media, different formats. And sometimes, the events are up to the “audience”/interactors etc. A stage needs to be set, however, before-hand. A storyworld approach, to me, means putting the creation of a rich world above that of the events; within that storyworld is the capacity to have numerous iterations initiated by any range of producers from those originally there, commissioned, encouraged and not.
Just wanted to share how I see storyworlds…I’m interested in your response.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:05 am
On one level, I’m shooting for much the same thing Chris is. My goals for the Honeycomb Engine are to allow for the creation of dynamic, reactive, and mutable worlds in which stories can be set. Regardless, I feel many of his comments to be self-contradictory and therefore unclear. His insistence that there are no plots and no stories in his storyworld, for example, indicate to me that he’s creating a verb-sandbox, not a storyworld.
We will not revolutionize stories by tearing down the storytellers, but by providing them with tools that elevate them into new realms of storytelling.
Let me post more on this later when I’m not rushing to get my car’s oil changed.
May 28th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
I’ve realized, in parrallel to your comments, that you’re indeed right Corvus. The early example storyworld from the Erasmatron 1 technology of the late 90s showed incredible “emergence” in its automate behavior; its seems like Storytron will similarly be a swath of sprawling global agency, but without much of the immersion that you, and to an extend I, feel is needed.