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The Growth of My Storytelling Theory
By Corvus | August 21, 2008
I’ve been dropping little details here and there about how my storytelling model is progressing, but I haven’t stopped and just talked about it for a while. After yesterday’s post in which I touched on it a bit, I thought it might be good if I did so now.
You’ll notice a lot of similarities between this and my whitepaper on Games and Storytelling, but my scope is now a bit wider. I always intended for my storytelling model to apply to more than video games. I want it to work for books, film, theater, poetry readings, and forms of media not yet conceived. I’ve removed (hopefully) some ambiguity from my terminology, and I’ve incorporated more top-level elements into my theory, into which some of the content from the whitepaper has moved and expended. The end result will be a book, rather than a whitepaper, and hopefully be applicable to more than the video game industry.
Participatory Storytelling: Story, Play & Community is my working title and the book is being built upon the work of linguists, critics, communication theorists, and psychologists. Obviously, it also reflects my own experiences with improvisational performance, critical analysis, the creative process, etc. It’s an ambitious project and I’m more than a little intimidated by it.
One of my issues with the whitepaper is that it did not address specific creative skills and techniques you could use to more effectively tell stories and grant the audience more agency. The book will speak more directly to storytellers and address this topic, as well as provide a high-level view of the theories behind it all.
So…. let me jump into some bite-sized chunks from the forthcoming book.
The act of Storytelling can be broken down into four primary stages.
The Storyteller: The storyteller is the who and the what. This is where it all begins–the big picture. The storyteller exists independent of a medium, or an audience. The storyteller has an idea to communicate. There may be a plot, or a theme, or a system of carefully thought out metaphors, but there is always an idea and a desire to communicate it. Often, but certainly not always, the storyteller is an artist. The storyteller can be a single person, a creative team, a studio, or even a corporation.
The Story: The story is the how. The story is the medium chosen by the storyteller. The story can be as simple as a conversation about work, or as complicated as a multi-million dollar video game that’s been eleven years in the making. It can be a lavish stage production, a sculpture, a museum exhibit, a song, a whitepaper, a movie, a novel, a television series, an animation, a building, a YouTube video, or a blog post. The story is built by a craftsperson, or multiple craftspersons. Pretty much everything I’ve written in the past about narrative applies to story.
The Telling: The telling is the where. You’ve written a novel–will you put it in a drawer and show it only to your lover one day, self publish, or find an agent to sell it to a publisher? You’ve written a play–will it be on Broadway, off-Broadway, or performed by friends at the local community center? You’ve designed a game–will it be console or PC–disk, downloadable, or playable online? I once considered the telling to be part of the story, but I’ve realized that there are enough specific things to say about it that it deserves its own spotlight.
The Audience: The audience is the why. The audience is the single most important part of the entire storytelling process. If it weren’t for the audience, we wouldn’t be storytellers–only living storehouses of our experience. It is entirely the audience’s experience of the telling, their fabula, that determines the success of the story. Very little else matters in the short term, however much that might sting the storyteller’s ego. The right audience will elevate a poorly crafted story and inexpert telling into something greater than the components of its parts–if the idea they believe the storyteller was trying to communicate resonates with them.
So where do play and community fit into this picture? The levels of play and community in the model are determined by the relationship between the four storytelling elements. You’re likely imagining the model described above as a very traditional communication model with the flow moving in one direction, from storyteller to audience. In the participatory model, the audience is given opportunities to play–that is, express their fabula in such a way as to alter the telling and, ideally, the story. If the storyteller remains engaged in the process, they will then react to the alterations in the story and make changes of their own, which effects the telling, providing the audience with a new experience. This creates a dynamic and growing storytelling environment that establishes, you guessed it–community.
And that’s the current cut of my jib. The book will go into more detail as to why this is an important goal outside the realm of video games and provide specific examples of how this might work, has worked, and hasn’t worked, etc.
Now it’s your turn–you are, after all, my community. Play a little in the comments and let your fabula have an impact on my story and the telling of it.
Tagged:participatory-storytelling. | 11 Comments »
August 21st, 2008 at 9:18 am
Nice!
That’s quite an undertaking you’ve thrown yourself into. Best of luck!
As always, I’d be more than happy to bitch and argue with you about it if or when the time comes for that.
-Tim
August 21st, 2008 at 9:21 am
Awesome. Thanks, Tim!
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:52 am
I’m definitely interested in this, and I’m glad you’re taking it on.
This whole concept of participatory storytelling, as it relates to games and game design, is one of those things that I’ve read about and pondered many times, but in the end I’ve just been unable to wrap my brain entirely around it. I want to understand it. Most of the concepts are relatively straightforward, but it always ends up being too vague for me to firmly grasp.
It’s almost like those 3D stereograms, the color patterns that contain 3D images. You know there’s something there, but you can’t see it; you can stare and stare at it but only after you’ve looked at it longer than you thought necessary does an image finally come into focus. I’ve been staring at interactive storytelling for some time now, and I’m pretty sure something is there, but it’s just not coming into focus.
For instance: “If the storyteller remains engaged in the process, they will then react to the alterations in the story and make changes of their own, which effects the telling, providing the audience with a new experience.”
How does a videogame (with developers as storytellers) accomplish this?
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:55 am
I’ve been thinking about your original Games and Storytelling whitepaper recently, and specifically how it relates to the Mechanics Design Aesthetics framework for analysis and design of games.
My thoughts and conclusions are fairly long winded and have been posted on my own blog.
Hmm… that was a bit of blatant self promotion there, sorry.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:57 am
[...] Design… Story..? Corvus Elrod at Man Bytes Blog has recently posted about the development of his storytelling model, first proposed in the Games and Storytelling whitepaper (.pdf file). [...]
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:12 am
That’s awesome, Justin. I’ve long felt the MDA and my model are very compatible and keep meaning to sit down and write a point by point analysis of each model’s lacks and overlaps.
And after reading your post, I’m happy to say that you’ve just saved me the effort and a lot of time!
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 am
Thought of you last weekend corvus. we went to the rennassaince faire and were sitting down to eat. a bunch of actors-playing-actors came up and started reciting the tale of robin hood, co-opting people into the storytelling. a little kid was picked for the sherrif of nottingham and would say “wah ha ha,” when tapped on the shoulder, bored out of his mind. it soon became more about how the audience would say their lines than the actual robin hood tale. interactive storytelling at its funnest.
i think most games can take something from this. audience participation is equally important to an interactive narrative as is designer input. elevate the value of *interactive* audience participation in narrative or take the developer’s monopoly on creativity down a notch and we’d have an even (two-way) playing field.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:57 am
@Alex Fun!
I always drafted the toughest looking guy in my audiences to play the giant’s wife in my Ren Fest stage play version of Robin Hood & the Beanstalk. A kid was always invited up to play the giant at the end of the show and would chase me around the stage in slow motion.
“No! Slower! Slower! You’re not supposed to catch me, I’m the hero!”
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 am
I may rewrite that show to let the entire audience be Robin Hood at some point, with several hand picked representatives brought on stage to play him in each scene while I play all the villains.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
In fact, now that I look at that on the digital page, I am absolutely going to rewrite the show that way–up and and including an audience vote on how each scene should end. A three scene-branching dialog 20 minutes stage show with the audience as hero.
Yum.
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Yeah, joan was little john, it was pretty funny
I can imagine a kid chasing you around stage; I love to see that spontaneity come together (or not hehe).