[arg_discuss] Fwd: [writers] Traditional vs. Player-Driven Storiesin Media

[Brian Clark]

Welcome back, you were missed!

I know it's easy to be a critic, but ...

"Throughout human history, few things have played as significant a role as
stories. Be they lessons on life, attempts to explain the origin of the
universe, tales of personal exploits, or fanciful yarns meant to do nothing
more than entertain, stories have always been, and will always be, an
important part of everyday life." 

Everything he just described is really a description of the oral and
experiential traditions, not mediated storytelling ... that's the
retrogressive target of interactive storytelling, but then he jumps right
to:

"As time has passed, new mediums for storytelling have emerged, along with
new ideas on the very nature of stories themselves."

Um. As time passed, people tried to turn storytelling into a form of object
creation, and those forms of mediated storytelling began to grow alongside
the traditional performance & interactive storytelling mechanisms. Since
people danced around campfires and painted on cave walls, performance and
media storytelling have both existed.

"Some writers and designers say that, in this age of interactive media,
interactive, or player-driven, storytelling is the new wave which will sweep
away the traditional storytelling methods of the past; while other writers
and designers see those beliefs as nothing more than foolish speculation."

And yet others might think the author has missed the retrogressive point of
all this in setting up his rhetorical dichotomy -- traditional storytelling
methods of the past are exactly what's being rediscovered and finally
practiced in dead media objects. In the same way Disney didn't put parents
out of the bedtime storytelling business, interactive storytelling isn't
going to kill the novel. Douglas Adams described it as "the printing press
turned stories into dead things." Interactive brings the dead things back to
life, and when you do ... they begin to act more like performance arts than
media arts. 

I continue to be surprised, though, at how many interactive media thesis and
dissertations don't bother to look at the performance arts fields on their
own campuses to find that the puzzles of interactive story aren't exactly
unexplored territory.




-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org] On
Behalf Of Andrea Phillips
Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 12:26 PM
To: Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG
Subject: [arg_discuss] Fwd: [writers] Traditional vs. Player-Driven
Storiesin Media

For those of you not on both lists. There's certainly a lot of
crossover interest. ^_^


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Josiah Lebowitz <jtl9000 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 12:09 AM
Subject: [writers] Traditional vs. Player-Driven Stories in Media
To: Game Writers SIG Mailing List <Writers at igda.org>


Hi all,
  Earlier this year, I passed out a survey on this list as part of the
research for my master's thesis on storytelling methods in media.  As
promised, now that my thesis is complete, I've made it available for
anyone who would like to take a look.  It's titled Do Modern Stories
Need Interactivity? A Comparison of Storytelling Methods in Media and
is about traditional vs. player-driven stories in media, with a
particular focus on video games.  If you're interested, you can read
it at:
http://www.pebbleversion.com/html/DoModernStoriesNeedInteractivity.pdf
  I hope everyone finds it interesting.
Josiah Lebowitz
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-- 
Andrea Phillips
http://www.aaphillips.com
AIM: Andrh1a * Skype: Andrhia
Words * Culture * Interaction
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