September 11, 2013 • 40 mins
What is interactive storytelling? What are the challenges of interactive storytelling? Can technology let us tell the largest story ever told?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks the future and says, here's a little
story I got to tell about three bad podcasters. You
(00:20):
know so well. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm La, and I'm
Joe McCormick. Yep, And today we wanted to talk a
little bit about interactive storytelling. Interactive storytelling, you know what
pops into my mind when you say that, what's that? Joe?
My favorite kind of book, Choose your own adventure book?
The best books ever written? And I don't I don't
(00:42):
think so I would argue you pick that you picked
the wrong choice obviously, Lauren. Are you the one who
always go through you know, the safe door and immediately
get eaten by a wolf? And then you'd have to
go backtrack to where you last left off and then
take the other choice. I usually have like seven fingers
in the book when ever i'm reading it, so that
I can flip between different options. I was going to
(01:03):
say that I knew you were a placeholder. All right, Well,
let's let's actually explain. Want to choose your own Adventure
book is for those few people out there who may
not have experienced the true joy of literature. They're they're
a little older, some younger people might not actually Ryan
North just published to be or not to Be. That
is the adventure, which is a take on Hamlet. That
is a choose your own adventure story. So you can
(01:23):
play as Ophelia or Polonius. If you're playing as you're
playing as Hamlet, I guess you would just have, you know,
lots of choices, but you never bother to choose anything.
One thing that's funny we should take note of. We're
already using the word play when we're talking about reading
a book, and that will figure in. That's true. That's true.
So choose your own adventure? What is it? Choose your
own adventure book? Choose your own adventure book is a
(01:45):
book where you open up to the first page and
it says something like, you know, you get out of bed,
your uncle Ronnie comes in and says we're going out
whale hunting, and you go out on a and then
it offers you choices like do you want to go
out on the rickety boat with the whales that want
to kill you? Or do you want to stay in
your bed, and if you choose stay in your bed,
(02:06):
like a whale jumps out of your closet and bites
your arms off, right, or you get dysentery or something. Yeah,
the idea being that that you actually turned to whichever
page correlate choice. It's for rickety boat to turn to
page seventy for stay in your bed, turn to page
I didn't actually explain the mechanics yet, that's how it works,
and so you keep turning to the page. It tells
(02:27):
you to make your choice until you die in one
way or another, or you think that was possible. I
think basically these were books just designed to teach children
that no matter what, they're going to die, which is
my hamlet is such a terrific adaptation for that is
a great example of fatalist literature. I was no, no, no,
(02:48):
there are. There were plenty of choose your own adventures
that had a positive outcome for you, but they were
challenging to to arrive at, and often in my case,
I would end up working backward by finding the positive
ending and then just finding out what series of choices
would have led you to that, Because, as you point out,
(03:09):
Joe normally there's like, you know, chance that you are
going to die depending upon your choices. Okay, so if
I'm an indexer, then then you're the you're the system analyst. Joe,
what was your form of gameplay with with Choose your
Own Adventure books? I would I played by the rules.
I don't know what's wrong with y'all. I survived, Joe.
(03:32):
You're the one who believes that every choice leads to death.
So I have to admit most of them. Do I
encompassed all the choices? I I contain multitudes? Right, You're
you're the multiverse approach. Yes, so you have the parallel
universe thing going on. Okay, so this is interactive storytelling
and its most basic form. Right, so you've got you've
got a limited number of choices. It's not like you
(03:53):
can introduce new elements that are completely alien to the book.
Obviously you are. You are restricted to whatever has been written. Right.
You can think about the plot of the book sort
of is a branching tree where you started a trunk
where you know you have one branching decision and that
forks into two, and each of those decisions gives you
(04:15):
new options, and it keeps branching out until there are
many possible endings, right, and occasionally those branches will reform
into you know, you might be able to choose one
thing in one part of the book or another thing
in another part of the book, and end up on
the same page. Either way, Some of those, not all
of those branches, end up being their own distinct pathways.
In other words, sometimes they converge into a pathway again.
(04:36):
And this is an interesting way to think about storytelling
because most of the time we talk about storytelling, we're
talking about a a single linear narrative that's controlled from
the top down and told in one way, right, And
and a good story is really really captivating, right. I mean,
this is a way that we communicate not just entertaining ideas,
(04:58):
but also philosophies. Sometimes times it's how we tell history.
You look at oral history, those are all told in
the form of stories. And it's interesting also, I think
that storytelling is one of those things that we use
to try and create meaning in the experiences that we
accumulate over time. Now, in real life, we don't necessarily
have actual beginning, middle, and end to any you know,
(05:20):
series of experiences. They tend to bleed over it gets
really messy. But we like our stories to have a
much more contained kind of approach generally speaking, I mean
they are and in yeah, yeah, I'm mostly uh talking
about my own experience. Obviously, I don't have a lot
of experience with Eastern culture stories, which can be much
(05:42):
more abstract that you guys, have ever watched a lot
of Japanese film, then you will know that they do
not necessarily feel a need to stick to that react structure,
but it can be a little bit of of a
culture shock anyway. So at any rate, when you're talking
about interactive storytelling, now we're getting into this idea of
the person who is being told the stories truly impacting
the story in some way. No, we're not just passively
(06:03):
receiving it, right, You're creating input determines what you get subsequently. Right.
So with the case of the choose your own Adventure book,
that's quite limited obviously, but it means that you do
get a slightly different tale depending upon the choices you make.
But there are other examples of interactive storytelling that we
have right now, right, Yeah, we don't even have to
(06:25):
look too far into the future. How about video games?
How about them. I love them. Those those are kind
of big. Yeah, that's the thing. I love the interactive
story about the disembodied yellow head that eats magic pills
and then goes after ghosts. I thinks Thompson wrote it.
It haid that joke in the video. The thing um
about video games and interactive storytelling. Nobody would question the
(06:47):
interactive part. They're obviously interactive. Some people might question storytelling,
which is ridiculous. Well, well, some some video games have
more of a story than others. Sure, some some video
games are like Tetras, And while I have a rich
fan fiction database of Tetris related information, I understand most
people just see that as a puzzle game. But there
(07:09):
are other games that have It's that L shaped block,
isn't it? But which one? He has a twin clockwise
L shape with the counterclockwise L. SHO. You have to
read to find out, Joe. I'm not going to spoil
it for you. But anyway, there are other video games
that actually do have a narrative involved from the beginning
all the way through to the end. Uh. Now, you
(07:30):
could argue that video games can be as restricted as
a choose your own adventure book. For in some cases,
and in some cases it may be more so. Right,
there may be only one story you get from beginning
to end, and as you play the game, you unlock
the next element of that story, so, uh, you know,
you might continue through a game. I think The Last
(07:51):
of Us is a good example of this. The Last
of Us. We're not gonna spoil anything, but The Last
of Us is a a survival horror game and it's
ex dreamely well written. I would say the characters are
very well realized. There's a huge emotional impact, but you
don't actually affect the story that much depending upon your choices.
You do have some choice in the game, but it
(08:13):
doesn't I think, change how the ending is going to
play out. Wherever. There are other games where, depending upon
your choices, you'll get one of a series of endings
like a Silent Hill, to which I don't think either
of you guys have played, But but but but again,
a horror survival video game in which there there's a
bad ending and then a really bad ending, and then
(08:35):
a kind of thing and and so but but but
but Which one of those you get? It depends upon
a lot of kind of non traditional video game elements.
Of of what you as a character, we're thinking about
by by looking at during the game, like what you
paid attention to ends up becoming the result of the storyline.
(08:55):
That's interesting, which which is one of the reasons why
that's kind of called out as like, hey, that was
a good one. Yeah. Yeah, there are most of the
video games I'm familiar with, it's far more overt. It's
one of those things where a character says, do we
do A or do we do B? And at that
point you're thinking, this is going to affect everything from
this point forward. I better save first. I'm going on
(09:18):
a wiki to see what Okay, I'm I'm totally the
spoiler guy. I'll be like, okay, I gotta find out
if I if I choose to let this person die,
is that really going to haunt me later? I'm that guy.
I'm that guy. I wish I weren't that guy. Now again,
I just I just saved my game. I I'm just realizing. No,
this is why I have ninety eight game saves, or
(09:38):
as many as possible. I'm still doing. Yeah, you're doing
your choose your own advantage y o A your y
o A strategy on the video games whereas I can't
do that with my strategy for doing it exactly. You're
looking working backward right, but I'm looking at the next step.
(10:02):
I don't look at the very end of the game.
And well, I play by the rules and I just
make my decision and see what happens. See, that's the thing.
Obviously we all know what would happen if we all
had time travel devices at this point. Joe wouldn't use his.
I would constantly be going ahead thinking no, don't want
to make that choice, go back and try another one.
And Lauren would just be doing the multiverse approach. I would.
(10:24):
I would have a terrific library if everything that could
possibly happen, that's horrifying. It's really interesting, though, because we're
actually seeing more about our psyches here, We're learning about
each other, which is the terrific thing about storytelling. This, this, folks,
is why, in a minor tangent that I'm not sure
how it's going to connect to our next point, is
I think that the heart of storytelling, This is why
(10:45):
finding stuff out about ourselves and how you know, the
way that we consume stories clearly has a lot to
do with who we are and and and the creation
of stories is the same thing. It's all about the
human experience. Sure. Sure, And so you know, Joe, you
have a point here in our outline that we're looking at.
I mean you you brought up the point about video games,
(11:06):
while they are becoming a very powerful storytelling medium, they're
not necessarily viewed that way by the larger public. Yeah. Well,
and there might be good reasons for that. Sure, I
want to float a few ideas in that. I agree
with you that I played The Last of Us and
I thought that was just a beautiful game, and it
had really good writing, good dialogue, strong characters, emotional depth.
(11:28):
I felt things about what was happening. Um. And so
that's real. I mean, I can totally acknowledge that. But
at the same time, there is something I think kind
of inherently different between the way we play most games,
even those games that do have strong storytelling, and the
way we experience a novel or a movie, where a
(11:49):
novel or a movie has a plot that executes and
you're you're following it and you're thinking about it, um,
and you're engaging with it in that way. But games
typically have a different kind of mechanic, like as you
progress through the story of a game. Even like the
Last of Us one with good writing, you're still there
are these mechanics. There's there's competitive action, there's repetitive action.
(12:14):
It's very task oriented. You know, you have a goal
you're trying to achieve. Usually they're trying to create a
sense of flow by having you do these actions over
and over. And that kind of thing doesn't really, as
far as I can tell, have a role in traditional storytelling,
right unless you're watching something like Parts of the Caribbean
where they go to the same set pieces eighteen times
(12:36):
in a row because they hadn't finished righting the script
before they started shooting the movie. But that's a rant
for another time. Um. Well not not all video games
necessarily have that puzzle or repetitive task play element to them,
And usually those are the ones that gamers wind up
not being too fond of it. They come in with
bad reviews. Um. They for example, the entire Final Fantasy
(12:59):
series after say ten, Um, depending on who you talk to,
someone's going to say like that was just an interactive
movie that was completely crap. I have heard this term
interactive movie. Um, how is this different than just say,
like a game with good graphics. Well okay, so so
(13:19):
back when, back when laser discs. If we can come
back to laser discs. I don't personally have much experience
with with with those, but let's go ahead, go ahead.
I'll chime in if I need to. I once watched
a laser disc of Congo. Oh my goodness, um shun um.
(13:41):
When people started finding out or when the technology kind
of kind of allowed people to create chapter stories within
a visual digital medium, um, that's when some storytellers started
thinking like, hey, this is cool. I can create a
sort of choose your own adventure within this digital medium
(14:01):
and that's terrific um and and it got I mean,
there were a few games that I think people considered
good ones that had um a interactive element combined with
full motion video that people didn't hate. That's yeah, They're
very few in between. I think full motion video. The
problem with full motion video was that once we learned
(14:22):
how we could do it in a in a storage
medium that wasn't going to take up a car's worth
of space, everyone put it into everything. There was a
short and the reason why I was short was so awful.
There was a short era in video games, computer games,
and then in the early nineties, yeah, where full motion
video was in everything from Missed to Zork to know,
(14:44):
all sorts of games that never needed it before. And
then in many cases it was used purely as a
gimmick because they had the ability to do this, and
it was not executed in a way that that benefited
the game that was anything that a player would really welcome.
It was mostly seen as a distraction and sometimes just
(15:05):
as really embarrassing. So it was not that it was
a bad tool. I just think it was poorly applied
in those early days and that kind of ended up
making a um well, it kind of made it, you know,
a dark mark against that style of video games from
when when I said full motion video just then Jonathan
(15:25):
developed the sudden eye twitch. That was pretty okay. Let
me tell you sometime about the Tim Curry game where
you play as Frankenstein's Monster and Tim Curry is Frankenstein.
At one point he refers to your face looking like
and I quote pork butt, not Frankenfurter, just to be clear.
But it has Tim Curry in it, so that sounds beautiful.
(15:47):
You know what else, hast video what? Okay, I'm gold
a full circle, getting back to the interactive movies thing
what you mentioned with laser disc. The first thing that
pops into my mind is one of the earliest laser
disc based arcade games, which was Dragon's Layer, Right, Yeah,
and I think that that is basically the only thing
that critics and gamers agree was not awful. The car
(16:09):
the animation was was nice. The story was very basic,
and some would argue heavily misogynist, but it was the
story of you know, you're playing the character of the
heroic knight who's trying to rescue the damsel in distress
who has been captured by a dragon. But really that
gameplay was very limited. Essentially, it meant that when the
(16:30):
screen flashed, you were supposed to either move the joystick
in one of four directions or you pressed the sword button,
and you had to learn the sequence by just playing
it over and over and over again to learn which
way you were supposed to do this. I mean, depending
upon which version of the game you played and sum
it would flash in a way that would indicate what
you were supposed to do. But more often than not,
(16:50):
the version as I saw, was just screen with flash.
You had to figure it out and it was trial
and error, so it wasn't the most satisfying of game elements.
So you were saying, p liked this. I thought people
did not like this game people enjoyed. Well. I remember
when the Okay I was alive, when this game was
in arcades, all right, So I remember going to arcades
and seeing a huge line or a group around. In fact,
(17:13):
that this was an arcade game that was so popular
that many cabinets had two screens. They had a screen
mounted on top of the first screen, so you could
stand further back and see what was going on by
looking at the top screen because everyone was crowded around
the bottom one. So it was popular because the animation
style was so fluid and different from everything else we
were used to in arcades. However, when it came to
(17:34):
the gameplay elements, people were not necessarily so enthralled, but
they did want to see how the story ends. Okay.
But so that brings me back to the question, Sure,
it's interactive, but is it really storytelling or is it
I mean, beyond the most basic sense, is it good storytelling?
But I think it was such a gimmick that, you know,
people were so excited about the technology that they were like,
(17:55):
let's use this technology and not let's use this technology
to create yate a story that makes sense or to
incorporate game play that's not frustrating or you know that's
for example, I was a huge crazy X Files fan
was when I was in middle school or high school
around the same time that this was going on. Sorry, Jonathan,
and um and so and so. I owned the like
(18:17):
eight disc X Files video game that came out at
some point that incorporated full motion video and UM and
was basically so terrible, Like the the gameplay itself was
so terrible that I stopped because I couldn't like, it
was so glitchy that I just could not physically do
what the game wanted me to do. And right, So,
I mean, the the challenges of creating a truly compelling
(18:40):
interactive storytelling experience if you're going to gamify it is
that you have to create a game that works, and
you have to create a compelling story. It's it's two
big challenges. So you could go the last of us route,
where you have a very compelling story with with good gameplay,
but it also is you know, when you look at it,
when you look at yeah, and the player has very
little impact on how that story actually plays out, assuming
(19:03):
that you are successful in what you do, right, I mean,
you sure you get to see every time you die,
you get to see a different way that you died,
But for for successfully completing the game, you get one outcome. Uh.
Then there are other games, of course that depending upon
what you do, you will get different outcomes. Like the
Fallout series, you get very different outcomes depending upon the
(19:24):
choices you make in the course of the game. So
that that gives the player a sense that the player
is actually contributing to the story, not just consuming the story.
So when we're really talking about interactive storytelling in the
future of it, we're talking about maybe some sort of
not necessarily a video game, but that's the one of
the easiest formats we can talk about, but some form
(19:46):
of entertainment where the person who is consuming it is
also contributing to it in a meaningful way. Right. Basically,
we want to look at the term and think that
it's really robust in both of the these words. It's
really interactive in a strong way, and it's really good storytelling, right,
And we really haven't, in my view, come across something
(20:09):
yet that's really strongly both at the same time. UM
I would say that some some LARPers, some live action
role players would argue with that, um and and say that,
you know, I'm not saying this is a personal I
but um but but I know many people who would
argue that that they have played live action role playing
games in which their characters have been able to help
(20:31):
create the storyline and and change the storyline actually developed right.
Role playing games in general, live action role playing games
in particular. These are These are forms of entertainment where,
depending upon who is running the game, you may be
able to impact the actual story in a really meaningful way.
As in let's say a character a player a player
(20:54):
has is playing a character, and that character makes a
choice that is completely within the realms of that game.
It makes sense for the character, it makes sense within
the context of the rules, etcetera. And the game master
or masters, the people who are running the game, had
no way of predictions that this was. They didn't think
(21:14):
about it, but it makes perfect sense. They if they're
good and they're flexible, they can incorporate that and even
make that into something that builds onto future games where
the things that you know they might even scrap plans
that they had for the next three or four sessions, saying,
you know, what we had was really good and maybe
we can still use in the future, but this is
too to Let's let's continue this and see where this goes,
(21:38):
and in that case it does become a collaborative storytelling experience.
Um from my own personal experience. Besides the role playing game,
the example I gave earlier was the idea of improv
games where you have improvisers on stage who are it's
it goes beyond the improv games that you've seen, where
it's you know, trying to go through the alphabet letter
at a time, and every sentence more like it's two
(22:01):
or three improvisers who are trying to create a scene
that has a narrative arc of some sort. And in fact,
there are terms that any person who's taken improv would
be able to rattle off, things like the platform, which
is your basic premise, the tilt, which is where you
introduce some form of conflict, the resolution, which may or
may not be a happy resolution. Often it's a comically
(22:24):
unhappy resolution. But this is a form of collaborative storytelling
where there was nothing before except maybe a suggestion from
the audience, and I want to offer a slight qualification
to that. While I see what you're saying, definitely, pretty
much all of the improv I've seen was played for
short term comedic effect. Like it, it may have been
(22:47):
very a lot of fun to watch, but they create
a funny scene, but it doesn't really have like a
strong narrative art creating. It's not like someone's going to
going to record that and hold it up as as
high to ature next to Sure, I don't think it,
but I don't think a good story in high literature
are necessarily the same thing. In fact, I would argue
(23:07):
that a lot of high literature to me does lacks
lacks what I would consider a good story, and I
think that a lot of good stories don't necessarily qualify
as high literature. But I will say I agree there's
a lot of the improv I've seen is really let's
try and make the audience laugh as loudly and frequently
as possible, and it may just mean introducing bizarre characters
(23:29):
in an unlikely setting. But there are other forms. There's
long form improv, which is designed to last over the
course of perhaps right an entire season of shows where
where things that characters do carry over from one quote
unquote episode to the next. Oh yeah, I'll I'll hook
you up. So there's a local theater here in Atlanta
(23:51):
that does that occasionally, where they'll do a an improvised
soap opera and every episode is the next episode of
the soap opera. So decision that characters make in previous
episodes carry over. And so you really do have a
collaborative storytelling now, you know, your quality of story depends
heavily on the quality of the storytellers. Yeah, and also
(24:13):
in those situations, um, there's probably I would guess, a
limited role of interactivity for the audience, like they might contribute,
you know, word or something. In the case of the
soap opera one, the audience is merely an audience, So
the interaction is really going on amongst a small group
of storytellers, not the storytellers and the intended audience. So yeah,
(24:34):
that's a different kind of interactive storytelling. The idea of
collaborative storytelling also interesting. Yes, yes, it's not. You know, obviously,
if we were to do a truly interactive collaborative story
in that mode and you were to open it up
to the entire audience. It would be very difficult to manage,
very very clearly. It would be more like lapin I
(24:55):
guess right, well sure hypothetically, I mean, you know, you
you've still you've still got um similar really a small
group of controllers and a large group of people who
have a pretty you know, depending pretty limited input on
what's going on. But yeah, but I think it's interesting
that all of these examples that were coming up with
of um of widely collaborative storytelling are are very very physical, um,
(25:18):
you know, very non technical exactly. Sure, well, you know,
creating the technology is not necessarily the problem. And uh, Joe,
you linked to a great article for us to read,
the Gamma Sutra article by Ernest Adams, which was all
about designing interactive stories and doing interactive storytelling and and
(25:39):
Adams points out that there are a lot of considerations
you have to take into account before you try and
create some sort of uh. In his case, he's telling
mostly about video games, but it doesn't have to necessarily
be a game, but an interactive story session. For example,
if you were just to create an open world environment
and then give players free reign to do whatever they
(26:00):
want and gave them no input whatsoever as to what
is important or not important. You might not see very
much happen, or it might not be a story particularly. Yeah,
it may just be chaos. There might not be enough
there to drive players to do anything beyond whatever basic
capabilities they have because of the game. Story is more
(26:20):
than just behavior, you know. Story implies some kind of
significance or meaning that things have a cumulative meaningfulness. I
guess I'm beginning to end and there's some form of
persistence there that that something that happens matters for things
that follow, right, Otherwise you just have things happening and
(26:41):
there's no connectivity. Yeah, you want you on an arc
and a climax and resolution. So yeah, there's these are
These are things that are the basics of storytelling. But
anyone who has tried their hand at storytelling can tell
you they're not necessarily easy to master. I mean these
are that's whether so few really fantastic stick storytellers out there. Um,
(27:02):
you know, there are plenty of people who like to
tell a story, and you probably know a few who
are good at telling really entertaining ones. But someone who
who really like transcends that and becomes the person who
is known as the storyteller. That's a that's a tough
skilled master. Uh. Just take a fiction writing workshop sometime
to see how hard it is to create a good story.
(27:24):
I mean, even if you are the only person working
on it and there's nobody else there to get in
your way and mess up what you're trying to do,
it's still really hard to write a good story. Sum
when you're introducing the random variables of massive collaboration or
the interactivity with even just one audience member or player
(27:45):
at a time, You're introducing so many variables and all
of the possibilities of the ways your story could not
go well, just balloon, it just goes huge. Yeah. Yeah,
there's there also a problem with them, with with the
with the writer's ego. I think wherein sharing something that
(28:05):
you have created can get really really internally messy for you,
like because because you know it's it's you probably have
an idea of where you want that idea to go,
and if the next person down the line doesn't take
it in that direction, it can it can be frustrating.
This is something that it becomes clear in some of
the previous examples we talked about like role playing games.
So role playing games the way that Lauren was talking
(28:28):
about them, the way I was talking about them earlier.
If you have a game master who is not flexible,
it doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad. They just can't
handle these diversions from a plot that they have in mind,
whether it's a pre bought module of an adventure or
it's something that they have written up themselves. And you
can tell these kind of game masters because they will
(28:49):
steer players back onto onto the right course, or they'll
just deny the players outright from being able to do
things right right. It's the kind of thing like like
well I want to open that door, you can ant
open that door. I open it anyway, you die right right,
or or it's just like nope, doors gone, what like, yeah,
this is what happens when you give me was actually
(29:11):
a gelatinous cue. Nice Joe, So you have played all right?
So but yeah, these are these are examples of how
storytelling and collaborative storytelling is such a challenging thing because
it really it involves sharing control of the story. It
involves listening, it involves reacting, it involves building, it involves persistence,
(29:35):
It involves trying to create a narrative arc of some sort,
especially if we're talking about the Western tradition of storytelling.
These are all very tricky things to incorporate in a
way where a lot of people can participate. UH. Simultaneously,
I want to talk about UM. One idea I had
that I thought would be an interesting way to approach
(29:56):
interactive storytelling, which would be to take the sort of
open world gaming approach that you see in games like
Grand Theft, Auto or something where if you haven't played
these games, they don't have a linear storyline where you
have to go certain places and do things in a
certain order. Well, at certain points they might, but generally
(30:18):
you're free to roam. You can go all over the place,
and you can you can do things in whatever order
you want. You can look wherever you want to look.
I wonder if there's a there's a future where people
might create movies that are like this, meaning they're interactive,
not so much in that the audience can change what's happening,
(30:39):
but the audience is free to roam sort of throughout
the movie. So if the audience member UH doesn't like
following a certain character as the protagonist, the audience member
could select a different character and to see the same story.
But I'm more interested in following this character instead of
that one. So let's say it's a a heist movie. Yeah,
(31:01):
that's the example I used in the script. Sure, so
you could follow either one of the potential criminals, or
you could follow the person upon whom the heist is
going to be committed, or you could follow the law
enforcement that is trying to respond to and counteract this
um or. You know. Obviously, this would make creating any
sort of film much more complicated. It would get more
(31:22):
complicated as you added characters, because you have to have
an entire story told from that person's point of view,
at least from the point when they come into the
story to the point where they leave, so that you
would be able to allow people to jump from one
to the other. There's nothing that says we couldn't do that.
It would require a lot more work, and I would
imagine this would be something I hesitate to use the
(31:43):
word easier, but I can imagine this being something more
likely to be seen in a computer generated movie, as
opposed to we're shooting live actors, which would just mean
we have to shoot the same scene from like eight
different points of view, although I mean, I would argue
that many movies are already being from eight different points
of view, and that the work, the technical work of
rendering a scene out is just as expensive, almost as
(32:06):
as filming the actors that many times, I would imagine.
So it's just it's a lot easier to work with
camera placement in a three day like a computer generated environment. Yeah.
Another aspect of this potential open world movie would be,
so instead of following different characters, what if you could
interact with different localities. So let's say I want to
(32:27):
park the camera right here. Maybe it's a movie that's
like a disaster movie. You know, here's the day that
aliens attack New York City. I thought you said it
was a disaster movie. Nice. Um, So here's the day
in New York. Here's the day aliens attack Jonathan Strickland's house.
That would be a disaster hand you can, you can
(32:48):
park the camera and lots of different so and one
way you're looking at what's going on inside the house.
Another way you're looking at what's going on in this place.
You know, as the police gather outside and do not
help Jonathan. Um, you know that's fair. I'm on several lists.
My original example worked better if it was a citywide
(33:10):
you can you can focus on lots of different places.
I totally I totally want an interactive movie that you
can um uh switch directorial styles like like like have
like this is aliens attack Johnson's house by way of
Hitchcock and then continue. Would never be able to tell
(33:31):
when things were happening, like is this before the alien
attack or after the alien attack? What's with the gimp? Yeah,
here's my question, Okay, go for it. Um So all
of this is interesting to talk about, but will it
ever really catch on? Because I feel like interactive storytelling
has not caught on in a mainstream way except unless
(33:53):
you include gaming, and even that's not necessarily mainstream. I
think it's more mainstream now than it has been. The
one thing that the video game population has grown up
with video games, and so it's become more of a
mainstream thing. Let's table video games and just talk about
these other types of interactive storytelling. I would imagine that
(34:14):
for the most part, if we were to talk about
some sort of movie experience, for example, where you you
would go to a movie theater, let's let's just do
this this kind of thing. You got a movie theater
and everyone has a little controller yeah where they can
they can shoot, make choices throughout the film, and then
the film goes with whatever the majority rule is. That's
the thing I can I can imagine that happening. Like
(34:36):
I can also imagine after every choice you hear like
half the audience go oh, come on yeah. But but anyway,
it's I can imagine it happening. In fact, it has happened.
There are films that have have tried this sort of thing.
I think they were massively unpopular. That's the thing is
that it's it's such a gimmick, right, Even if you
were to do it really, really well, I can't imagine
that being um something that would be a norm. I
(35:00):
can imagine it being once in a while, you dear,
especially if if some well known filmmaker took it upon
him or herself to create this kind of film that
might make big news and be popular for a while.
But I think that having a personal experience of that
rather than a group experience, would be better. I mean,
you know, if if I was sitting there with my
own personal headset and going through a movie with an
(35:22):
ad option that would be that would be fine. I
think it'd be fun if it were on online and
then you could and there are video games that are
like this, uh their online video games where you can
make your choices, and then not only would it play out,
but at the end of the movie, it would tell
you how many other people made the same choice you made. So,
in other words, you could find out did you make
(35:42):
the same choice that the majority of the audience did?
Did you did you take the path less traveled? Uh?
Did you eat the marshmallow? Yeah? Did you take the
red pill or the blue pill? Did you deny the
existence of the matrix sequels or did you embrace them
like the person who is wrong? But yeah, I think
that part of the problem with part of the problem
with all of this right now is that the technology
(36:02):
is still kind of clumsy, and that as as the
technology improves, maybe it'll get more popular. But I don't know.
I mean, at the same time, you know, if you
if you take the the current functional working examples of
things like improv and LARPing, not that many people larp.
Other nerds look down on laper's. I don't like talking
about my limited lamp experience in public because people go, oh, oh,
(36:27):
never mind, it's gonna make a joke. But I'm not
going to. I'm just gonna back away. Wait, you're actually
one of those people. Uh So here's the thing. I yes,
I agree that it's it's a niche thing. I think
that even if like the technology, I'm not so concerned about.
I think the technology could be we could, We could
do it right now. The problem is writing a good
story to have it work. The technological problem is not
(36:51):
a hardware problem. It's a design problem. Right, And and
that's and you know, and also just you know, what,
what are people looking to get out of a story? Are?
Do most people want to do the work that it
takes to participate in an interactive story? Right? That's also
a good question. I mean, I think for some people
it would be a curiosity that they would be willing
(37:11):
to try out once. But you know, would that ever
translate into something that's truly successful if you were to
compare it to say, other traditional films, I don't know.
Maybe it would mean if you wrote a really good
one and you had lots of different choices and they
were different enough so that the film was a satisfying
experience no matter which series of choices were made. Maybe
(37:33):
you'd have like the next big enormous blockbuster in your
hands as everyone goes again and again in order to
see what the other outcome would be. All Right, everybody
already seen what happens if you hit ay, everybody hit
B and then you find out, you know, when you
punch the guy, the movie gets twice as awesome. So
I mean, you'd have to have someone really good at
(37:53):
creating a story to develop that. And even then, like
we said, it's just going back to that video game
model where the interaction is still limited. You're you're given
a couple of choices, and it does impact the way
the story unfolds, but ultimately you're not creating the story. Yeah,
and with like the open world movie idea I was
talking about before, it um it would It's not that
(38:15):
we lack the technology to make that either. But what
we said I think I think you said it Lauren correctly,
is that you know you would have to take like
two hundred hours of footage or something or Moore, Well,
I mean, it's just like, let's just think of it
as just like a simulation of real life. You know,
you could go and sit down and on a park bench,
and on one day you might see the most amusing
(38:37):
series of characters walk by and overhear conversations and think
it's fantastic, and maybe you even see something that is
well outside the norm, maybe there's like a police chase
or something that goes by. You get something really exciting.
And then the other day, on the next day, on
the same park bench, you sit down and it's just,
you know, just a quiet, normal day. The same sort
of thing could happen in one of these you know,
(38:58):
these environments, unless you were to engineer things to happen
so that everyone remains Uh, I'm going to use the
word you love Joe engaged consistently over time. You know,
this is I love this conversation. That's a great one.
I love this idea of interactive storytelling. And there's so
much more we could talk about, but we really need
(39:18):
to wrap this up. Guys, for those of you out
there who are storytellers or who just love a really
good story, way in on this, come over to FW
thinking dot com. Let us know what you think. Tell
us if you've got an experience in a collaborative story.
Maybe we didn't even talk about. You know, some of
the traditional approaches like round round robin story telling, where
(39:38):
a person starts writing a piece of fiction and passes
it on to someone else who then takes it up
with the same trying to use the same voice and
continue the story using their own imagination, and then passing
it on to someone else. I've seen stories like that
that turned out to be great most of the time.
After about three passes, it just takes a wild turn
(39:59):
and you're thinking you already had a narrative in your mind,
you were determined to apply it to a pre existing story,
and or it turns into something like Christopher Tolkien taking
over for his father's work or something like that. We'll
talk more about then our next episode. Uh spoiler alert
for you guys. All right, so we're wrapping this up.
Go to fw thinking dot com joining on the conversation.
We want to hear from you, and we will talk
(40:21):
to you again, really sion. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,
(40:42):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks the future and says, here's a little
story I got to tell about three bad podcasters. You
(00:20):
know so well. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm La, and I'm
Joe McCormick. Yep, And today we wanted to talk a
little bit about interactive storytelling. Interactive storytelling, you know what
pops into my mind when you say that, what's that? Joe?
My favorite kind of book, Choose your own adventure book?
The best books ever written? And I don't I don't
(00:42):
think so I would argue you pick that you picked
the wrong choice obviously, Lauren. Are you the one who
always go through you know, the safe door and immediately
get eaten by a wolf? And then you'd have to
go backtrack to where you last left off and then
take the other choice. I usually have like seven fingers
in the book when ever i'm reading it, so that
I can flip between different options. I was going to
(01:03):
say that I knew you were a placeholder. All right, Well,
let's let's actually explain. Want to choose your own Adventure
book is for those few people out there who may
not have experienced the true joy of literature. They're they're
a little older, some younger people might not actually Ryan
North just published to be or not to Be. That
is the adventure, which is a take on Hamlet. That
is a choose your own adventure story. So you can
(01:23):
play as Ophelia or Polonius. If you're playing as you're
playing as Hamlet, I guess you would just have, you know,
lots of choices, but you never bother to choose anything.
One thing that's funny we should take note of. We're
already using the word play when we're talking about reading
a book, and that will figure in. That's true. That's true.
So choose your own adventure? What is it? Choose your
own adventure book? Choose your own adventure book is a
(01:45):
book where you open up to the first page and
it says something like, you know, you get out of bed,
your uncle Ronnie comes in and says we're going out
whale hunting, and you go out on a and then
it offers you choices like do you want to go
out on the rickety boat with the whales that want
to kill you? Or do you want to stay in
your bed, and if you choose stay in your bed,
(02:06):
like a whale jumps out of your closet and bites
your arms off, right, or you get dysentery or something. Yeah,
the idea being that that you actually turned to whichever
page correlate choice. It's for rickety boat to turn to
page seventy for stay in your bed, turn to page
I didn't actually explain the mechanics yet, that's how it works,
and so you keep turning to the page. It tells
(02:27):
you to make your choice until you die in one
way or another, or you think that was possible. I
think basically these were books just designed to teach children
that no matter what, they're going to die, which is
my hamlet is such a terrific adaptation for that is
a great example of fatalist literature. I was no, no, no,
(02:48):
there are. There were plenty of choose your own adventures
that had a positive outcome for you, but they were
challenging to to arrive at, and often in my case,
I would end up working backward by finding the positive
ending and then just finding out what series of choices
would have led you to that, Because, as you point out,
(03:09):
Joe normally there's like, you know, chance that you are
going to die depending upon your choices. Okay, so if
I'm an indexer, then then you're the you're the system analyst. Joe,
what was your form of gameplay with with Choose your
Own Adventure books? I would I played by the rules.
I don't know what's wrong with y'all. I survived, Joe.
(03:32):
You're the one who believes that every choice leads to death.
So I have to admit most of them. Do I
encompassed all the choices? I I contain multitudes? Right, You're
you're the multiverse approach. Yes, so you have the parallel
universe thing going on. Okay, so this is interactive storytelling
and its most basic form. Right, so you've got you've
got a limited number of choices. It's not like you
(03:53):
can introduce new elements that are completely alien to the book.
Obviously you are. You are restricted to whatever has been written. Right.
You can think about the plot of the book sort
of is a branching tree where you started a trunk
where you know you have one branching decision and that
forks into two, and each of those decisions gives you
(04:15):
new options, and it keeps branching out until there are
many possible endings, right, and occasionally those branches will reform
into you know, you might be able to choose one
thing in one part of the book or another thing
in another part of the book, and end up on
the same page. Either way, Some of those, not all
of those branches, end up being their own distinct pathways.
In other words, sometimes they converge into a pathway again.
(04:36):
And this is an interesting way to think about storytelling
because most of the time we talk about storytelling, we're
talking about a a single linear narrative that's controlled from
the top down and told in one way, right, And
and a good story is really really captivating, right. I mean,
this is a way that we communicate not just entertaining ideas,
(04:58):
but also philosophies. Sometimes times it's how we tell history.
You look at oral history, those are all told in
the form of stories. And it's interesting also, I think
that storytelling is one of those things that we use
to try and create meaning in the experiences that we
accumulate over time. Now, in real life, we don't necessarily
have actual beginning, middle, and end to any you know,
(05:20):
series of experiences. They tend to bleed over it gets
really messy. But we like our stories to have a
much more contained kind of approach generally speaking, I mean
they are and in yeah, yeah, I'm mostly uh talking
about my own experience. Obviously, I don't have a lot
of experience with Eastern culture stories, which can be much
(05:42):
more abstract that you guys, have ever watched a lot
of Japanese film, then you will know that they do
not necessarily feel a need to stick to that react structure,
but it can be a little bit of of a
culture shock anyway. So at any rate, when you're talking
about interactive storytelling, now we're getting into this idea of
the person who is being told the stories truly impacting
the story in some way. No, we're not just passively
(06:03):
receiving it, right, You're creating input determines what you get subsequently. Right.
So with the case of the choose your own Adventure book,
that's quite limited obviously, but it means that you do
get a slightly different tale depending upon the choices you make.
But there are other examples of interactive storytelling that we
have right now, right, Yeah, we don't even have to
(06:25):
look too far into the future. How about video games?
How about them. I love them. Those those are kind
of big. Yeah, that's the thing. I love the interactive
story about the disembodied yellow head that eats magic pills
and then goes after ghosts. I thinks Thompson wrote it.
It haid that joke in the video. The thing um
about video games and interactive storytelling. Nobody would question the
(06:47):
interactive part. They're obviously interactive. Some people might question storytelling,
which is ridiculous. Well, well, some some video games have
more of a story than others. Sure, some some video
games are like Tetras, And while I have a rich
fan fiction database of Tetris related information, I understand most
people just see that as a puzzle game. But there
(07:09):
are other games that have It's that L shaped block,
isn't it? But which one? He has a twin clockwise
L shape with the counterclockwise L. SHO. You have to
read to find out, Joe. I'm not going to spoil
it for you. But anyway, there are other video games
that actually do have a narrative involved from the beginning
all the way through to the end. Uh. Now, you
(07:30):
could argue that video games can be as restricted as
a choose your own adventure book. For in some cases,
and in some cases it may be more so. Right,
there may be only one story you get from beginning
to end, and as you play the game, you unlock
the next element of that story, so, uh, you know,
you might continue through a game. I think The Last
(07:51):
of Us is a good example of this. The Last
of Us. We're not gonna spoil anything, but The Last
of Us is a a survival horror game and it's
ex dreamely well written. I would say the characters are
very well realized. There's a huge emotional impact, but you
don't actually affect the story that much depending upon your choices.
You do have some choice in the game, but it
(08:13):
doesn't I think, change how the ending is going to
play out. Wherever. There are other games where, depending upon
your choices, you'll get one of a series of endings
like a Silent Hill, to which I don't think either
of you guys have played, But but but but again,
a horror survival video game in which there there's a
bad ending and then a really bad ending, and then
(08:35):
a kind of thing and and so but but but
but Which one of those you get? It depends upon
a lot of kind of non traditional video game elements.
Of of what you as a character, we're thinking about
by by looking at during the game, like what you
paid attention to ends up becoming the result of the storyline.
(08:55):
That's interesting, which which is one of the reasons why
that's kind of called out as like, hey, that was
a good one. Yeah. Yeah, there are most of the
video games I'm familiar with, it's far more overt. It's
one of those things where a character says, do we
do A or do we do B? And at that
point you're thinking, this is going to affect everything from
this point forward. I better save first. I'm going on
(09:18):
a wiki to see what Okay, I'm I'm totally the
spoiler guy. I'll be like, okay, I gotta find out
if I if I choose to let this person die,
is that really going to haunt me later? I'm that guy.
I'm that guy. I wish I weren't that guy. Now again,
I just I just saved my game. I I'm just realizing. No,
this is why I have ninety eight game saves, or
(09:38):
as many as possible. I'm still doing. Yeah, you're doing
your choose your own advantage y o A your y
o A strategy on the video games whereas I can't
do that with my strategy for doing it exactly. You're
looking working backward right, but I'm looking at the next step.
(10:02):
I don't look at the very end of the game.
And well, I play by the rules and I just
make my decision and see what happens. See, that's the thing.
Obviously we all know what would happen if we all
had time travel devices at this point. Joe wouldn't use his.
I would constantly be going ahead thinking no, don't want
to make that choice, go back and try another one.
And Lauren would just be doing the multiverse approach. I would.
(10:24):
I would have a terrific library if everything that could
possibly happen, that's horrifying. It's really interesting, though, because we're
actually seeing more about our psyches here, We're learning about
each other, which is the terrific thing about storytelling. This, this, folks,
is why, in a minor tangent that I'm not sure
how it's going to connect to our next point, is
I think that the heart of storytelling, This is why
(10:45):
finding stuff out about ourselves and how you know, the
way that we consume stories clearly has a lot to
do with who we are and and and the creation
of stories is the same thing. It's all about the
human experience. Sure. Sure, And so you know, Joe, you
have a point here in our outline that we're looking at.
I mean you you brought up the point about video games,
(11:06):
while they are becoming a very powerful storytelling medium, they're
not necessarily viewed that way by the larger public. Yeah. Well,
and there might be good reasons for that. Sure, I
want to float a few ideas in that. I agree
with you that I played The Last of Us and
I thought that was just a beautiful game, and it
had really good writing, good dialogue, strong characters, emotional depth.
(11:28):
I felt things about what was happening. Um. And so
that's real. I mean, I can totally acknowledge that. But
at the same time, there is something I think kind
of inherently different between the way we play most games,
even those games that do have strong storytelling, and the
way we experience a novel or a movie, where a
(11:49):
novel or a movie has a plot that executes and
you're you're following it and you're thinking about it, um,
and you're engaging with it in that way. But games
typically have a different kind of mechanic, like as you
progress through the story of a game. Even like the
Last of Us one with good writing, you're still there
are these mechanics. There's there's competitive action, there's repetitive action.
(12:14):
It's very task oriented. You know, you have a goal
you're trying to achieve. Usually they're trying to create a
sense of flow by having you do these actions over
and over. And that kind of thing doesn't really, as
far as I can tell, have a role in traditional storytelling,
right unless you're watching something like Parts of the Caribbean
where they go to the same set pieces eighteen times
(12:36):
in a row because they hadn't finished righting the script
before they started shooting the movie. But that's a rant
for another time. Um. Well not not all video games
necessarily have that puzzle or repetitive task play element to them,
And usually those are the ones that gamers wind up
not being too fond of it. They come in with
bad reviews. Um. They for example, the entire Final Fantasy
(12:59):
series after say ten, Um, depending on who you talk to,
someone's going to say like that was just an interactive
movie that was completely crap. I have heard this term
interactive movie. Um, how is this different than just say,
like a game with good graphics. Well okay, so so
(13:19):
back when, back when laser discs. If we can come
back to laser discs. I don't personally have much experience
with with with those, but let's go ahead, go ahead.
I'll chime in if I need to. I once watched
a laser disc of Congo. Oh my goodness, um shun um.
(13:41):
When people started finding out or when the technology kind
of kind of allowed people to create chapter stories within
a visual digital medium, um, that's when some storytellers started
thinking like, hey, this is cool. I can create a
sort of choose your own adventure within this digital medium
(14:01):
and that's terrific um and and it got I mean,
there were a few games that I think people considered
good ones that had um a interactive element combined with
full motion video that people didn't hate. That's yeah, They're
very few in between. I think full motion video. The
problem with full motion video was that once we learned
(14:22):
how we could do it in a in a storage
medium that wasn't going to take up a car's worth
of space, everyone put it into everything. There was a
short and the reason why I was short was so awful.
There was a short era in video games, computer games,
and then in the early nineties, yeah, where full motion
video was in everything from Missed to Zork to know,
(14:44):
all sorts of games that never needed it before. And
then in many cases it was used purely as a
gimmick because they had the ability to do this, and
it was not executed in a way that that benefited
the game that was anything that a player would really welcome.
It was mostly seen as a distraction and sometimes just
(15:05):
as really embarrassing. So it was not that it was
a bad tool. I just think it was poorly applied
in those early days and that kind of ended up
making a um well, it kind of made it, you know,
a dark mark against that style of video games from
when when I said full motion video just then Jonathan
(15:25):
developed the sudden eye twitch. That was pretty okay. Let
me tell you sometime about the Tim Curry game where
you play as Frankenstein's Monster and Tim Curry is Frankenstein.
At one point he refers to your face looking like
and I quote pork butt, not Frankenfurter, just to be clear.
But it has Tim Curry in it, so that sounds beautiful.
(15:47):
You know what else, hast video what? Okay, I'm gold
a full circle, getting back to the interactive movies thing
what you mentioned with laser disc. The first thing that
pops into my mind is one of the earliest laser
disc based arcade games, which was Dragon's Layer, Right, Yeah,
and I think that that is basically the only thing
that critics and gamers agree was not awful. The car
(16:09):
the animation was was nice. The story was very basic,
and some would argue heavily misogynist, but it was the
story of you know, you're playing the character of the
heroic knight who's trying to rescue the damsel in distress
who has been captured by a dragon. But really that
gameplay was very limited. Essentially, it meant that when the
(16:30):
screen flashed, you were supposed to either move the joystick
in one of four directions or you pressed the sword button,
and you had to learn the sequence by just playing
it over and over and over again to learn which
way you were supposed to do this. I mean, depending
upon which version of the game you played and sum
it would flash in a way that would indicate what
you were supposed to do. But more often than not,
(16:50):
the version as I saw, was just screen with flash.
You had to figure it out and it was trial
and error, so it wasn't the most satisfying of game elements.
So you were saying, p liked this. I thought people
did not like this game people enjoyed. Well. I remember
when the Okay I was alive, when this game was
in arcades, all right, So I remember going to arcades
and seeing a huge line or a group around. In fact,
(17:13):
that this was an arcade game that was so popular
that many cabinets had two screens. They had a screen
mounted on top of the first screen, so you could
stand further back and see what was going on by
looking at the top screen because everyone was crowded around
the bottom one. So it was popular because the animation
style was so fluid and different from everything else we
were used to in arcades. However, when it came to
(17:34):
the gameplay elements, people were not necessarily so enthralled, but
they did want to see how the story ends. Okay.
But so that brings me back to the question, Sure,
it's interactive, but is it really storytelling or is it
I mean, beyond the most basic sense, is it good storytelling?
But I think it was such a gimmick that, you know,
people were so excited about the technology that they were like,
(17:55):
let's use this technology and not let's use this technology
to create yate a story that makes sense or to
incorporate game play that's not frustrating or you know that's
for example, I was a huge crazy X Files fan
was when I was in middle school or high school
around the same time that this was going on. Sorry, Jonathan,
and um and so and so. I owned the like
(18:17):
eight disc X Files video game that came out at
some point that incorporated full motion video and UM and
was basically so terrible, Like the the gameplay itself was
so terrible that I stopped because I couldn't like, it
was so glitchy that I just could not physically do
what the game wanted me to do. And right, So,
I mean, the the challenges of creating a truly compelling
(18:40):
interactive storytelling experience if you're going to gamify it is
that you have to create a game that works, and
you have to create a compelling story. It's it's two
big challenges. So you could go the last of us route,
where you have a very compelling story with with good gameplay,
but it also is you know, when you look at it,
when you look at yeah, and the player has very
little impact on how that story actually plays out, assuming
(19:03):
that you are successful in what you do, right, I mean,
you sure you get to see every time you die,
you get to see a different way that you died,
But for for successfully completing the game, you get one outcome. Uh.
Then there are other games, of course that depending upon
what you do, you will get different outcomes. Like the
Fallout series, you get very different outcomes depending upon the
(19:24):
choices you make in the course of the game. So
that that gives the player a sense that the player
is actually contributing to the story, not just consuming the story.
So when we're really talking about interactive storytelling in the
future of it, we're talking about maybe some sort of
not necessarily a video game, but that's the one of
the easiest formats we can talk about, but some form
(19:46):
of entertainment where the person who is consuming it is
also contributing to it in a meaningful way. Right. Basically,
we want to look at the term and think that
it's really robust in both of the these words. It's
really interactive in a strong way, and it's really good storytelling, right,
And we really haven't, in my view, come across something
(20:09):
yet that's really strongly both at the same time. UM
I would say that some some LARPers, some live action
role players would argue with that, um and and say that,
you know, I'm not saying this is a personal I
but um but but I know many people who would
argue that that they have played live action role playing
games in which their characters have been able to help
(20:31):
create the storyline and and change the storyline actually developed right.
Role playing games in general, live action role playing games
in particular. These are These are forms of entertainment where,
depending upon who is running the game, you may be
able to impact the actual story in a really meaningful way.
As in let's say a character a player a player
(20:54):
has is playing a character, and that character makes a
choice that is completely within the realms of that game.
It makes sense for the character, it makes sense within
the context of the rules, etcetera. And the game master
or masters, the people who are running the game, had
no way of predictions that this was. They didn't think
(21:14):
about it, but it makes perfect sense. They if they're
good and they're flexible, they can incorporate that and even
make that into something that builds onto future games where
the things that you know they might even scrap plans
that they had for the next three or four sessions, saying,
you know, what we had was really good and maybe
we can still use in the future, but this is
too to Let's let's continue this and see where this goes,
(21:38):
and in that case it does become a collaborative storytelling experience.
Um from my own personal experience. Besides the role playing game,
the example I gave earlier was the idea of improv
games where you have improvisers on stage who are it's
it goes beyond the improv games that you've seen, where
it's you know, trying to go through the alphabet letter
at a time, and every sentence more like it's two
(22:01):
or three improvisers who are trying to create a scene
that has a narrative arc of some sort. And in fact,
there are terms that any person who's taken improv would
be able to rattle off, things like the platform, which
is your basic premise, the tilt, which is where you
introduce some form of conflict, the resolution, which may or
may not be a happy resolution. Often it's a comically
(22:24):
unhappy resolution. But this is a form of collaborative storytelling
where there was nothing before except maybe a suggestion from
the audience, and I want to offer a slight qualification
to that. While I see what you're saying, definitely, pretty
much all of the improv I've seen was played for
short term comedic effect. Like it, it may have been
(22:47):
very a lot of fun to watch, but they create
a funny scene, but it doesn't really have like a
strong narrative art creating. It's not like someone's going to
going to record that and hold it up as as
high to ature next to Sure, I don't think it,
but I don't think a good story in high literature
are necessarily the same thing. In fact, I would argue
(23:07):
that a lot of high literature to me does lacks
lacks what I would consider a good story, and I
think that a lot of good stories don't necessarily qualify
as high literature. But I will say I agree there's
a lot of the improv I've seen is really let's
try and make the audience laugh as loudly and frequently
as possible, and it may just mean introducing bizarre characters
(23:29):
in an unlikely setting. But there are other forms. There's
long form improv, which is designed to last over the
course of perhaps right an entire season of shows where
where things that characters do carry over from one quote
unquote episode to the next. Oh yeah, I'll I'll hook
you up. So there's a local theater here in Atlanta
(23:51):
that does that occasionally, where they'll do a an improvised
soap opera and every episode is the next episode of
the soap opera. So decision that characters make in previous
episodes carry over. And so you really do have a
collaborative storytelling now, you know, your quality of story depends
heavily on the quality of the storytellers. Yeah, and also
(24:13):
in those situations, um, there's probably I would guess, a
limited role of interactivity for the audience, like they might contribute,
you know, word or something. In the case of the
soap opera one, the audience is merely an audience, So
the interaction is really going on amongst a small group
of storytellers, not the storytellers and the intended audience. So yeah,
(24:34):
that's a different kind of interactive storytelling. The idea of
collaborative storytelling also interesting. Yes, yes, it's not. You know, obviously,
if we were to do a truly interactive collaborative story
in that mode and you were to open it up
to the entire audience. It would be very difficult to manage,
very very clearly. It would be more like lapin I
(24:55):
guess right, well sure hypothetically, I mean, you know, you
you've still you've still got um similar really a small
group of controllers and a large group of people who
have a pretty you know, depending pretty limited input on
what's going on. But yeah, but I think it's interesting
that all of these examples that were coming up with
of um of widely collaborative storytelling are are very very physical, um,
(25:18):
you know, very non technical exactly. Sure, well, you know,
creating the technology is not necessarily the problem. And uh, Joe,
you linked to a great article for us to read,
the Gamma Sutra article by Ernest Adams, which was all
about designing interactive stories and doing interactive storytelling and and
(25:39):
Adams points out that there are a lot of considerations
you have to take into account before you try and
create some sort of uh. In his case, he's telling
mostly about video games, but it doesn't have to necessarily
be a game, but an interactive story session. For example,
if you were just to create an open world environment
and then give players free reign to do whatever they
(26:00):
want and gave them no input whatsoever as to what
is important or not important. You might not see very
much happen, or it might not be a story particularly. Yeah,
it may just be chaos. There might not be enough
there to drive players to do anything beyond whatever basic
capabilities they have because of the game. Story is more
(26:20):
than just behavior, you know. Story implies some kind of
significance or meaning that things have a cumulative meaningfulness. I
guess I'm beginning to end and there's some form of
persistence there that that something that happens matters for things
that follow, right, Otherwise you just have things happening and
(26:41):
there's no connectivity. Yeah, you want you on an arc
and a climax and resolution. So yeah, there's these are
These are things that are the basics of storytelling. But
anyone who has tried their hand at storytelling can tell
you they're not necessarily easy to master. I mean these
are that's whether so few really fantastic stick storytellers out there. Um,
(27:02):
you know, there are plenty of people who like to
tell a story, and you probably know a few who
are good at telling really entertaining ones. But someone who
who really like transcends that and becomes the person who
is known as the storyteller. That's a that's a tough
skilled master. Uh. Just take a fiction writing workshop sometime
to see how hard it is to create a good story.
(27:24):
I mean, even if you are the only person working
on it and there's nobody else there to get in
your way and mess up what you're trying to do,
it's still really hard to write a good story. Sum
when you're introducing the random variables of massive collaboration or
the interactivity with even just one audience member or player
(27:45):
at a time, You're introducing so many variables and all
of the possibilities of the ways your story could not
go well, just balloon, it just goes huge. Yeah. Yeah,
there's there also a problem with them, with with the
with the writer's ego. I think wherein sharing something that
(28:05):
you have created can get really really internally messy for you,
like because because you know it's it's you probably have
an idea of where you want that idea to go,
and if the next person down the line doesn't take
it in that direction, it can it can be frustrating.
This is something that it becomes clear in some of
the previous examples we talked about like role playing games.
So role playing games the way that Lauren was talking
(28:28):
about them, the way I was talking about them earlier.
If you have a game master who is not flexible,
it doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad. They just can't
handle these diversions from a plot that they have in mind,
whether it's a pre bought module of an adventure or
it's something that they have written up themselves. And you
can tell these kind of game masters because they will
(28:49):
steer players back onto onto the right course, or they'll
just deny the players outright from being able to do
things right right. It's the kind of thing like like
well I want to open that door, you can ant
open that door. I open it anyway, you die right right,
or or it's just like nope, doors gone, what like, yeah,
this is what happens when you give me was actually
(29:11):
a gelatinous cue. Nice Joe, So you have played all right?
So but yeah, these are these are examples of how
storytelling and collaborative storytelling is such a challenging thing because
it really it involves sharing control of the story. It
involves listening, it involves reacting, it involves building, it involves persistence,
(29:35):
It involves trying to create a narrative arc of some sort,
especially if we're talking about the Western tradition of storytelling.
These are all very tricky things to incorporate in a
way where a lot of people can participate. UH. Simultaneously,
I want to talk about UM. One idea I had
that I thought would be an interesting way to approach
(29:56):
interactive storytelling, which would be to take the sort of
open world gaming approach that you see in games like
Grand Theft, Auto or something where if you haven't played
these games, they don't have a linear storyline where you
have to go certain places and do things in a
certain order. Well, at certain points they might, but generally
(30:18):
you're free to roam. You can go all over the place,
and you can you can do things in whatever order
you want. You can look wherever you want to look.
I wonder if there's a there's a future where people
might create movies that are like this, meaning they're interactive,
not so much in that the audience can change what's happening,
(30:39):
but the audience is free to roam sort of throughout
the movie. So if the audience member UH doesn't like
following a certain character as the protagonist, the audience member
could select a different character and to see the same story.
But I'm more interested in following this character instead of
that one. So let's say it's a a heist movie. Yeah,
(31:01):
that's the example I used in the script. Sure, so
you could follow either one of the potential criminals, or
you could follow the person upon whom the heist is
going to be committed, or you could follow the law
enforcement that is trying to respond to and counteract this
um or. You know. Obviously, this would make creating any
sort of film much more complicated. It would get more
(31:22):
complicated as you added characters, because you have to have
an entire story told from that person's point of view,
at least from the point when they come into the
story to the point where they leave, so that you
would be able to allow people to jump from one
to the other. There's nothing that says we couldn't do that.
It would require a lot more work, and I would
imagine this would be something I hesitate to use the
(31:43):
word easier, but I can imagine this being something more
likely to be seen in a computer generated movie, as
opposed to we're shooting live actors, which would just mean
we have to shoot the same scene from like eight
different points of view, although I mean, I would argue
that many movies are already being from eight different points
of view, and that the work, the technical work of
rendering a scene out is just as expensive, almost as
(32:06):
as filming the actors that many times, I would imagine.
So it's just it's a lot easier to work with
camera placement in a three day like a computer generated environment. Yeah.
Another aspect of this potential open world movie would be,
so instead of following different characters, what if you could
interact with different localities. So let's say I want to
(32:27):
park the camera right here. Maybe it's a movie that's
like a disaster movie. You know, here's the day that
aliens attack New York City. I thought you said it
was a disaster movie. Nice. Um, So here's the day
in New York. Here's the day aliens attack Jonathan Strickland's house.
That would be a disaster hand you can, you can
(32:48):
park the camera and lots of different so and one
way you're looking at what's going on inside the house.
Another way you're looking at what's going on in this place.
You know, as the police gather outside and do not
help Jonathan. Um, you know that's fair. I'm on several lists.
My original example worked better if it was a citywide
(33:10):
you can you can focus on lots of different places.
I totally I totally want an interactive movie that you
can um uh switch directorial styles like like like have
like this is aliens attack Johnson's house by way of
Hitchcock and then continue. Would never be able to tell
(33:31):
when things were happening, like is this before the alien
attack or after the alien attack? What's with the gimp? Yeah,
here's my question, Okay, go for it. Um So all
of this is interesting to talk about, but will it
ever really catch on? Because I feel like interactive storytelling
has not caught on in a mainstream way except unless
(33:53):
you include gaming, and even that's not necessarily mainstream. I
think it's more mainstream now than it has been. The
one thing that the video game population has grown up
with video games, and so it's become more of a
mainstream thing. Let's table video games and just talk about
these other types of interactive storytelling. I would imagine that
(34:14):
for the most part, if we were to talk about
some sort of movie experience, for example, where you you
would go to a movie theater, let's let's just do
this this kind of thing. You got a movie theater
and everyone has a little controller yeah where they can
they can shoot, make choices throughout the film, and then
the film goes with whatever the majority rule is. That's
the thing I can I can imagine that happening. Like
(34:36):
I can also imagine after every choice you hear like
half the audience go oh, come on yeah. But but anyway,
it's I can imagine it happening. In fact, it has happened.
There are films that have have tried this sort of thing.
I think they were massively unpopular. That's the thing is
that it's it's such a gimmick, right, Even if you
were to do it really, really well, I can't imagine
that being um something that would be a norm. I
(35:00):
can imagine it being once in a while, you dear,
especially if if some well known filmmaker took it upon
him or herself to create this kind of film that
might make big news and be popular for a while.
But I think that having a personal experience of that
rather than a group experience, would be better. I mean,
you know, if if I was sitting there with my
own personal headset and going through a movie with an
(35:22):
ad option that would be that would be fine. I
think it'd be fun if it were on online and
then you could and there are video games that are
like this, uh their online video games where you can
make your choices, and then not only would it play out,
but at the end of the movie, it would tell
you how many other people made the same choice you made. So,
in other words, you could find out did you make
(35:42):
the same choice that the majority of the audience did?
Did you did you take the path less traveled? Uh?
Did you eat the marshmallow? Yeah? Did you take the
red pill or the blue pill? Did you deny the
existence of the matrix sequels or did you embrace them
like the person who is wrong? But yeah, I think
that part of the problem with part of the problem
with all of this right now is that the technology
(36:02):
is still kind of clumsy, and that as as the
technology improves, maybe it'll get more popular. But I don't know.
I mean, at the same time, you know, if you
if you take the the current functional working examples of
things like improv and LARPing, not that many people larp.
Other nerds look down on laper's. I don't like talking
about my limited lamp experience in public because people go, oh, oh,
(36:27):
never mind, it's gonna make a joke. But I'm not
going to. I'm just gonna back away. Wait, you're actually
one of those people. Uh So here's the thing. I yes,
I agree that it's it's a niche thing. I think
that even if like the technology, I'm not so concerned about.
I think the technology could be we could, We could
do it right now. The problem is writing a good
story to have it work. The technological problem is not
(36:51):
a hardware problem. It's a design problem. Right, And and
that's and you know, and also just you know, what,
what are people looking to get out of a story? Are?
Do most people want to do the work that it
takes to participate in an interactive story? Right? That's also
a good question. I mean, I think for some people
it would be a curiosity that they would be willing
(37:11):
to try out once. But you know, would that ever
translate into something that's truly successful if you were to
compare it to say, other traditional films, I don't know.
Maybe it would mean if you wrote a really good
one and you had lots of different choices and they
were different enough so that the film was a satisfying
experience no matter which series of choices were made. Maybe
(37:33):
you'd have like the next big enormous blockbuster in your
hands as everyone goes again and again in order to
see what the other outcome would be. All Right, everybody
already seen what happens if you hit ay, everybody hit
B and then you find out, you know, when you
punch the guy, the movie gets twice as awesome. So
I mean, you'd have to have someone really good at
(37:53):
creating a story to develop that. And even then, like
we said, it's just going back to that video game
model where the interaction is still limited. You're you're given
a couple of choices, and it does impact the way
the story unfolds, but ultimately you're not creating the story. Yeah,
and with like the open world movie idea I was
talking about before, it um it would It's not that
(38:15):
we lack the technology to make that either. But what
we said I think I think you said it Lauren correctly,
is that you know you would have to take like
two hundred hours of footage or something or Moore, Well,
I mean, it's just like, let's just think of it
as just like a simulation of real life. You know,
you could go and sit down and on a park bench,
and on one day you might see the most amusing
(38:37):
series of characters walk by and overhear conversations and think
it's fantastic, and maybe you even see something that is
well outside the norm, maybe there's like a police chase
or something that goes by. You get something really exciting.
And then the other day, on the next day, on
the same park bench, you sit down and it's just,
you know, just a quiet, normal day. The same sort
of thing could happen in one of these you know,
(38:58):
these environments, unless you were to engineer things to happen
so that everyone remains Uh, I'm going to use the
word you love Joe engaged consistently over time. You know,
this is I love this conversation. That's a great one.
I love this idea of interactive storytelling. And there's so
much more we could talk about, but we really need
(39:18):
to wrap this up. Guys, for those of you out
there who are storytellers or who just love a really
good story, way in on this, come over to FW
thinking dot com. Let us know what you think. Tell
us if you've got an experience in a collaborative story.
Maybe we didn't even talk about. You know, some of
the traditional approaches like round round robin story telling, where
(39:38):
a person starts writing a piece of fiction and passes
it on to someone else who then takes it up
with the same trying to use the same voice and
continue the story using their own imagination, and then passing
it on to someone else. I've seen stories like that
that turned out to be great most of the time.
After about three passes, it just takes a wild turn
(39:59):
and you're thinking you already had a narrative in your mind,
you were determined to apply it to a pre existing story,
and or it turns into something like Christopher Tolkien taking
over for his father's work or something like that. We'll
talk more about then our next episode. Uh spoiler alert
for you guys. All right, so we're wrapping this up.
Go to fw thinking dot com joining on the conversation.
We want to hear from you, and we will talk
(40:21):
to you again, really sion. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,
(40:42):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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