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Participatory Clarification
By Corvus | October 8, 2007
Jeremy provided me with some feedback on my last terms post that will, I hope, help me clarify my point.
As Jeremy suggests, participation does not trump interaction. Nor is participation an interaction with depth. Participation is context. Participation is something you are involved in. Participation implies, I feel, a more complex involvement in something over time than mere interaction.
This is why I say that we already have interactive storytelling. I interact with Zork. I interact with Fallout. My interactions with Grace and Trip of Facade confuse the hell out of them. More specifically, interactive storytelling allows one the opportunity to interact with the story. I really feel that simple interpretation of interactive storytelling is the most accurate and that we’re already there. Can we do it better? Absolutely we should and many people are pushing in that direction.
Participatory storytelling, however, allows one to participate in the telling of the story. If participation implies context and a complex involvement over time, then that is what we’re missing in our attempts to create personal and dynamic stories with our games.
I was also asked some questions about the Honeycomb Engine on Friday and the answers to those questions belong in this clarification as well. The HoneyComb Engine is not going to be one tool with clearly defined boundaries. Rather, it is going to be a collection of software tools that explore the potential of participatory storytelling. What I hope to do with the platform is to digitally replicate the various forms of live participatory storytelling that I do–from table top RP’ing to the experimental theater pieces I’ve written and performed.
The first component I’m actively working on, RPbb, is simply a web based interface that allows a community to use the Drachurae Cycle system to define objects and regulate… interactions. Several key components and the manner in which I’m assembling RPbb will hopefully facilitate the sort of participatory storytelling that I’m pursuing. By the time it’s done, there will be two component of the HoneyComb Engine available for use in other projects, a web based front end and the data backend. I hope to have BETA invites available by the end of January, so keep an eye out for that announcement.
Thanks for the feedback, Jeremy. If I’m still not being clear, everyone be sure to let me know in the comments!
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