Corvus Elrod is a storyteller and improvisational performer with over twenty years of professional experience. Whether plying his trade on a theater stage, a festival green, or a city street corner, he has searched for ways to craft stories that are ever more meaningful to his audience. Because he believes that telling substantive stories about ourselves is vital to the survival of our culture, Corvus has consistently worked to help people learn how to tell their own stories–not in a traditional educational environment, but through the process of storytelling itself.
In 1990, Corvus began running role playing game sessions using a storyworld and game mechanics of his own creation. Over the years, he has significantly revised his system and technique, giving players greater and greater control over the gaming experience and the direction of the plot. This has led to powerfully personal, emotional game sessions for both Corvus and his players, whom he considers fellow storytellers.
As his approaches to performance and game design drew ever closer together, Corvus experimented with utilizing improvisational performance techniques in his game design and incorporating game mechanics into his performances. He eventually realized that not only was it possible for the audience to become an integral part of the storytelling process when it was treated like a game, but that it was possible to communicate meaning via the game mechanics themselves.
As an IT professional, Corvus worked with clients in a variety of environments to help them better understand, and more effectively use, their technology. Relying on his storytelling skills, he specialized in teaching others how to tell better stories about their use of technology. This approach proved to be invaluable in maintaining healthy hardware and software systems. Searching for a technology community whose ideals reflected his own, Corvus began using free and open source software. Here he found a community that was focused on telling their own meaningful stories about technology, just as he was interested in helping people do with their entire lives.
This confluence of technology, story, and game design led Corvus to an exploration of video games as a narrative medium. Here he found considerable evidence that game mechanics are indeed powerful storytelling tools, even when used unwittingly towards that purpose. While writing and speaking about the storytelling potential of video games, Corvus began developing a participatory storytelling model, a critical framework for examining the capacity of any media to share the storytelling experience with its audience.
Now, working with the enthusiast, academic, and professional communities in the video game industry, Corvus is further clarifying and formalizing his participatory storytelling model. He is currently in the process of designing a free and open source software platform called the HoneyComb Engine that will serve to demonstrate his theories and further his goals to offer more and more people the opportunity to become more effective storytellers.