Digital Bards: Interactive Media and the Evolution of Storytelling

This was a talk given as a Distinguished Speaker at the University of Alabama Huntsville in October of 2016.

Digital Bards: Interactive Media and the Evolution of Storytelling

Print media was itself a revolution of earlier oral storytelling practices, and today we see digital media and videogames in particular challenging traditional notions of what storytelling even is. New paradigms have been developed over the last few decades of game development many of which have not filtered back into academia, and new interactive structures are causing debate within games themselves as well. In this talk we will discuss how games have approached storytelling in a variety of frameworks ranging from linear narratives to telling massively multiplayer stories for tens of thousands of interactive participants simultaneously, and we’ll look to the future that is rapidly taking form on a tablet or phone near you. Writing will never be the same — again.

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Let me tell you a story, if I may.
The story I am going to tell you, ranges widely. I hope you don’t mind if we venture into a bit of legal history, a dash of graph theory, a diversion into musicology, a very brief discussion of audio engineering, and so on.
It’s a story about long ago, when we huddled, rather like you are huddling here with me, in this auditorium around this lectern which I shall shortly chop up and burn to make a campfire. Trace the shape of storytelling… oral forms, and what they implied about authority and dialogue Rhyme as a way to provide structure and memory Storyteller as authority but give and take and responsiveness Think of telling a story to your children
The fixity of writing allowed a very different structure… one used by the church, for example to define orthodoxy. Early print culture was about authority cemented.
But of course, over time what it permitted was many voices, as technology democratized who got to make an unassailable narrative.
That implicit authority of print was important in many ways. It reflects a process of containerization that was gradually set into law starting with the Statute of Anne and the birth of copyright. Copyright laws because with the advent of the printing press, it was easy for someone to take something someone else had written, copy it and print it up and sell it as their own, and profit in a way that gave no revenues to the original publisher (or the author).
Originally, the Stationers’ Company had a monopoly on copyright; whoever entered the title of a publication in the guild’s ledger first was held to have the exclusive right to make printed copies. Later, the Statute of Anne said that in fact it was the author who controlled the rights to make copies, and ever since, authors have negotiated away said permission in order to allow publishers to publish their work.
In the case of the book published back in 1710 when the Statute of Anne went into effect, all the way up through the last book you bought, what copyright controls is who gets to make a buck. The book is a container. Under the Doctrine of First Sale, which was first enshrined in US law back in 1908, you can resell the container (or in fact, sell the container for the first time), and the original author of the copyrighted work has no say whatsoever over what happens to it. There’s little question that the copyrighted work within the container essentially boosts the value of the container; try selling a blank book for the same price as a first edition of Dante’s Inferno. However, you cannot profit by taking the copyrighted work and doing something else with it, say by issuing an audio recording, or creating a new edition of the copyrighted work and printing and selling that instead. The doctrine of first sale is about reselling the original containers, not making new ones.
There’s two big exceptions: phonorecords
And software. The exceptions are about leasing, lending, and renting the container objects, not sale. And these exceptions, frankly, have zero to do with logic and everything to do with who had better lobbyists in Washington DC at the time. (Ever wonder why you can rent movies at Blockbuster, but not audio recordings?) In the muddled case of software, publishers rely on EULAs and shrinkwrap agreements, not copyright.
Why is this relevant? Well, quite a lot of stuff is getting containerized digitally these days. I use container as a word because of what it says about the relative value of what is transmitted versus what form it is fixed in. When value of containers is high, we see an apogee of powerful voices telling us what to think.
Think of illuminated manuscripts, the gorgeous printed books of the 19thc, and, eventually, the lushly produced music of the 20th and 21st c.
In contrast, small voices have historically not been able to afford container polish. Zines,
mix tapes, three chords and the truth. These have been the tools of outsider voices.
t us consider another box: story versus narrative, plot versus myth. When we reread old myths and fairy tales up through early forms of the novel we are often struck by the way in which the plots are erratic, poorly structured, etc. They are shaggy dog stories, they are picaresques.
LeThis is not because the folk of those days were less sophisticated, though certainly the form of the modern plot wasn’t fully developed in the early novel; Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Jonathan Swift, weren’t really following the dictates of
Save the Cat (for those who don’t know, this is a book purporting to offe the perfect movie structure, down to the minute.most Hollywood blockbusters follow it rather slavishly these days).
We can think of plot as predetermined story structure… a skeleton of incidents with causal or symbolic relationships But narrative is what the storyteller thrives by; the process of mythmaking is less concerned with a preset structure
Dependingon the theorist, we may see story, plot, and narrative given different twists and definiteions, but let me offer up this notion: that the difference is largely about authorial ownership and who gets to go first in the storymaking process. Does an author select, create, and order events, and a reader decides their meaning; or does a reader select the events and their connection?
In cases where there is a skeletal structure first, a plot, we can term this authorial control… the reader is undergoing a process of immersion, willing suspension of disbelief, we might even call it imposition or brainwashing
The structure of a plot does not admit of contradiction, generally, and we even have terms that indicate how authoritative this is supposed to be: unreliable narrator, for example.
In cases where we have events first and we shape a myth out of them, we explain it to ourselves, we might term that the process of mythmaking. The resultant stories are diffuse and oft-disconnected Both about lessons, but one is about lecturing, the other about negotiating an understanding
This is not to say that the folks who love plot have always been entirely comfortable with their power. There’s a line to trace, particularly from impressionists into modernists, a decided break from prior We can think of art as that which embraces ambiguity; the contrast between the writing f a Dickens
and, say, a Woolf, is quite distinct. Where one attempts to portray ambiguity in their plot, the other simply builds it into the structure, as in Jacob’s Room, a novel where the protagonist is already gone
From there it’s a short hop to Borges, who argues every plot is always happening;
to Pound or Eliot, for whom every word was ambiguous because it was always a hyperlink into the depths of the entire canon;
to Stein, who implicitly argues that even the structure of word on word can give way;
to Cage, whose chance writings basically state that Stein didn’t go far enough
In storytelling, we struggle with the desire to still get across our plot. One thinks of Rayuela, where the control is simply is giving us larger pieces of story to rearrange. This reintroduces the ability for us as reader to find narrative meaning, something which we maybe lost right around Stein. In a sense, we pull away from the tiny atomic bits of text and the very formalist point being made about the fungibility, unknowability, towards giving the reader some of that power back
So the progression was – authorial surrender, followed by the careful granting of power back to the reader. We can think of this as a struggle over the notion of interactivity. The game theorist Marie-Laure ryan makes a distinction between the common form of interactivity, which might be called “exploratory”; and what she calls “ontological interactivity,” wherein the reader’s actions actually change things
or heck, even J M Barrie
or Ayn Rand’s efforts at fourth wall breaking, are an attempt to restore that agency that listeners had in those live scenarios Ayn Rand, of all people, with her play Night of January 16th. In this courtroom drama, some audience members join the jury and vote on whether the accused in guilty. The play has multiple endings.
But that’ an uneasy place to sit. Remember containerization. The very structures in which we hold stories are designed towards fixity. Consider film, with its tyranny of the advancing frame
In this, the history of music is illustrative Music has undergone two significant revolution akin to that of the press… one indeed caused by the press.
The first was the transition from folk process, a dynamic method of transmission, whereby structural qualities were what allowed a story to be transmitted from medieval melody to Child ballad to Appalachian mountain song to Lomax collection and thence to the American folk vernacular. Here we see some of the cousins of “Scarborough Fair” – “Do you know the way to Selin” “You must make me a fine Holland shirt” – “A cambric shirt with not one stitch of needle work”
These stories remained intact not because of the container in which they were fixed, but because of the rhyming structure and the power of the incidental mythmaking they represented. The result was a tree, not an object. \Until sheet music.
Sheet music placed a central gatekeeper on the proper form. For music, this meant that there was a silent, factual gatekeeper present. Melody and harmony were no longer to be changed by performers But that was nothing compared to what happened with the record.
Today we can look back on sheet music as a form of fixity that offers great flexibility to the interpreter – the reproducer. It suggests but cannot enforce an instrument. In the case of guitar (and its predecessor in the American parlor, the banjo), it cannot enforce a fingering, and therefore a timbre. It cannot enforce musical dynamics, a fortissimo, a pianissimo, the precise degree of staccato.
But the recording changed all that. Now the container took true primacy, slowly at first, and then more and more as a science of music production and engineering came into being.
Today we have loudness wars, which are about fitting the perceived dynamics of a piece of recorded music into a narrow enough decibel band through the use f compression. The result is music that demands to be heard, cutting through other ambient noise. You likely haven’t heard truly quiet music in a long time. This example is Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” Most ears don’t perceive the fact that you are being manipulated in this way. The process of containerization does this. These is now a true layer of imposition, of control, layered atop every piece of media we consume. Music producers, who shape the sonic qualities of the sound wave, are now in a position of primacy over the song’s melodicist and lyricst, because the container matters more than the content.
Does this look like normal skin tone or a proper spectrum to you? Probably not,
and yet here we are with this being the palette of most film, because we have found that the contrast of blue and orange is simply punchier, something that exploits the physics of our eyesight.
You’re probably expecting me to talk about video games at some point, aren’t you. Games a bit like sheet music. But really, they’re more like a musical instrument.
The thing is that games do not arise out of a narrative tradition. The oldest games have served very different purposes. A game of Senet or Ur is more likely to have been a form of mythologizing, of creating a systemic understanding of say, the afterlife.
Every player of Ur, or chess, or indeed of Monopoly or League of Legends, is working within a machine, one which generates chess stories, or Monopoly stories.
Long gao, a poet said that poetry without rhyme was like tennis without a net. Now, far be it from me to claim that free verse and its many children are without structure – they simply use structure that is more difficult to perceive to the layman – but the underlying point has some interesting merit to it. If earlier folk forms of storytelling worked in part because they had implicit structure – like various formal structures in verse – and if the efforts to surrender authorship from the Modernist period on fomward were effectively about structural qualities of the work… well, games are, in their final analysis, about structure, about systemic constraints.
The earliest games were often ones of chance, whereby people grappled with the realities of th world and with fate. Random number generators such as dice were seen as manifestations of the gods. The progress along a path to exit was seen as a crude simulation of life, and its aftermath in an afterlife.
In these early game structures there is an element of acceptance, of a submission to class structures and one’s place in the world, deeply reflective of the ways in which societies themselves were stratified. If one applies a class consciousness lens to chess, one cannot help but see pawns as conscripted peasants pulled awaom from subsistence level farms merely because they were peons on their master’s estates – indeed, in Romance languages, the pawn is actually the word peon. One imagines that their poor wives and elderly and children and crops are just the squares on the boards, lands left untillable and bloodied, crops destroyed, lives too insignificant to even merit a piece on the board.
This sort of structural modeling of a very real world has always been a hallmark of games. The tafl family of games in Nordic and Celtic countries is a modeling of the jarl and his men.
The mancala or oware family of games in Africa, a modeling of crops and rotation. Indeed, the oware variant even enforces a cultural notion that you may in the game but not by a lot, lest others starve.
Games have always been a form of practice, then, on the player’s part – but also on a narrative level. Created as they were through the folk process they challenged the notion of the authorial centrality of what we might call media or print culture. You can tell any story you want, as long as it follows he rules, In that way, a game is like a sonnet. It enforces very rigid structure, but leaves the scope to the player, like the sonnet leaves the scope to the poet. Chess is a sonnet-making machine, and to write a sonnet is to play a particular sort of game.
A brief discursion into how we think of games is probably worth engaging in. Games, broadly speaking, are made of rules. It typicall sets forth a goal of some sort, and
Talk about game structure, yadda yadda, like always
Then talk briefly about play, set the context
It should be clear that some structures are more rigid than others…. Discuss games that are impositional, use the tools of rhetoric in order to get across an authorial viewpoint.
This should echo for you the feeling of the medieval morality play!
Discuss games that are impositional in terms of mechanic, and proffer entrainment – training towards reflexes, acceptance, rote results for stimuli
Some might argue – those who make the case about games and violence, for example – that this is what games do, and why they are dangerous. And yet – even these are deeply deeply open to subversion by the player, because Doom is still just a sonnet machine.
Speed runs, glitch runs, and the like as valid sonnets for a game And these are in games designed to be impositional spaces! Our ability to build closed systems is pretty lacking. The human mind turns out to be way more powerful than we thought, in terms of its apprehension of systems.
But what of games that are designed to be less deterministic? Less impositional? What of games that are created to be expressive spaces? There is debate whether such things even exist,
but we needto look at aparticular moment in the mid 70s as the moment when everything we know about narrative and literary structures was upended by a bunch of people in Wisconsin.
Talk about the history of wargames, and thence to D&D Von Reiswitz to HGWells and Little Wars, to science fiction writers in NYC
The notion of the collaborative story circl with a master storyteller and autonomy. Still hugely bound about rules – no free verse here!
The scope of roleplaying with rules, in this fashion, was fascinatingly different from the kinds of simple roleplay and just plain old “play” inherent in the basic modeling of earlier folk games such as cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, or playing house. Those were games circumscribed around with social rules, more rules than any typical boardgame ever offers. Roleplaying games, despite the voluminous rulebooks, have less rules that the myriad social rules implicit inall of Victorian society, as expressed via a tea party.
Roleplay was a revolution. Games promptly began to explore the narrative forms that simulation. Today, we see its fruition in the Nordic LARP…talkabout that. But to rewind… In short order, we got the choose your own adventure, the adventure book, and hypertextual narratives. And in order to discuss this, we must venture briefly into the realm of graph theory. I do hope you had your multidisciplinary hats on today.
Cover the basics of graph theory
The choose your own adventure book is basically a hypertext, with a directed graph This preserves the authorial structure. Ths lets you pick a path through the carefully prunes part of Borges’ infinite tree.
The adventure book introduces a game, a simulation layer that exists at the point of choice.
Finally, the hypertext, once it reached its first flowering via the Storyspace software by Eastgate Systems “Storyspace,” explored the possibility of structures more likelthe rhizomes of plants, the structures of webs. Mention Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop
This had been prefigured by computer scientists like Vannevar Bush, as well as by the Modernists. But here, at last was something that could take the place of Cage’s simple I Ching randomizers. Eventually, these concepts begat the web
And indeed, while media became more and more about the containers, games dove headlong into an exploration of the full breadth of this space. Consider what even a very simple game today might offer: the ability to move back and forth inside of a small space for hours on end, without ever advancing plot or narrative in any fashion. What sort of story is that? And yet, even the narratively focused games will typically offer this freedom.
At the higher end, games like The Sims, which is at core a simple simulation of eight variables to model a human consciousness, and a pile of props with some simple physics sims, was proven to be an incredibly power story-generation engine.
Turns out the Sims rule structure is very like a twelve bar blues, or a sonnet’s rhyme scheme – neat infinite generativity, enabled and aided by the rules. – Alice and Kev
Oh, containers were stll incredibly important. It turned out that doing what is termed “cloning” or “reskinning” is a highly prevalent trend in games. And it’s an undeniably container-centric one.
Today, the business-savvy thing o do is to build IP – which means, to find mass market appeal impositinal structures to ceonvey very familiar stories. To re-use simulation structures that are known, and to constrain them to fit the dictates of the IP rather than permitting the player to truly explore the possibilities.
From this come game structures like string of pearls.
There was, however, a vein of games that is far more simulationist even than these. Sim City.
Dwarf Fortress.
Minecraft. Here are worlds operating more by rules of physics.
In the case of the online RPG we not only have a game structure, but we have human behavior fully imported into the world. An this means the chance to re-examine our own structures, to conduct gedankenexperiments. Alternate economic structures, The reinvention of political structures. We’re a far cry from chess and its assumptions.
When the first MUD was created the creators chose to break class barriers, and chose to break gender barriers, quite intentionally. The children of the roleplaying game set into the form of simulation a social revolution.
With games for thousands came entirely new storytelling forms, ones that hybridized the notions of authorial control and centralized media, and the notion of participatoy storytelling. The deat of Lord british, stories of GMs
Achaea and the mod.
Rebirth of hypertext, with greater authorial emphasis.
Environmental storytelling and the first person experience.
Proteus
Dear Esther
Gone Home
Adr1ft. We might think of these as the games that try to be print media; strongly authoried spaces where the primary messages cannot be subverted, but the discretion is in the player’s hands… ironic that they come from small indie team because they have to be so container centric, authrially imposed. On the other hand, this is VRs sweet spot. FPX
In pure sandbox games, often not in the hands of the game designers at all, we saw the tools for players to build their own worlds. Using one ruleset, we saw the concept of modules or levels. More, we saw the nature of storytelling itself changed by these sorts of videogames, as central game concepts migrated out into by now fairly staid and authrially controlled media.
In games like American idol,
in Survivor
and MTVs pioneering reality shows, we saw the flow of gam ideas outwards to narrative. Reality producers attempt to channel the actions of independent agents, much ike a game master does.
In television shows like Lost, we saw the rise of easter eggs
a digression explaining them
and explorable story space, reinventing the hypertextual narrative into a new form knows as transmedia.
As the loop closed on data gathering and metrics, we see that the once far removed sorytellers of big media are having their actions shaped and controlled by the increasingly prompter feedback of audiences. There is now another hand on the pen.
You may have seen HBO’s new show, Westworld. Upon watching it, I experienced the thrill of familiarity, because was depicted was exactly the storytelling process of an online game operator from 1985.
Is this a return to oral culture? Well, no. For the increased digitalization of culture has meant that more and more we live in a media landscape, and a communications landscape, that is informed by the rules of games. And this means two things: more of a web-like structure, as in the way that games themselves have evolved, with decentralized authority; and more of a landscape to game. To play. To bend to your will.
These days, the commonest use of the word “narrative isn’t the one from the halls of academia,isn’t the one from game studies either. Instead, it refers to constructed meme realities. It refers to selective interpretations of supposed facts. As in “the narrative from the MSM, the narrative from the alt-right.”
Make no mistake, these are authorially created as well, by those who have learned to play the new simulation game of how many clicks and likes and retweets. There is a new form of mythmaking, of storytelling once again shaping our fundamental understandings of the world, and it’s bein executed by a new type of author who use mmes as their novels, the Internet as thir pen, and people as their very ink.
Thus have games wrought in the end; the internet has no gamemaster. But it does have rules. The great virtue of games, the fact that they teach us to see systems as tractable, and situations as challenges to overcome, and the environment itself as arbitrary constraints, is also contributory to the internet discourse we see today.
Games also have solutions to offer, in their notions of fair play, of sportsmanship, in their ideas of game masters and referees, and in their resolute faith in the rules that hold something together.
These are challenges that games people have had to deal with, running online communities larger than cities, with a heck of a lot more fairness and focus on the fun than say, Facebook.
Either way, the digital bards are here, singing their siren song. Their storytelling structures are now the new paradigm, a change as large as the printing press or the audio recording. I am reminded of another time when a mix of the advnce of technology and social upheaval led to another medium being born. Superman was an immigrant from another planet, with a name ending in –el; created by children of Jewish immigrants as World War II was brewing.
Wonder Woman was based on Margaret Sanger’s niece, created by a polyamorous trio committed to woman’s suffrage and feminism. We’ve all seen what the comic book turned into, with its far simpler storytelling structures…
Here we are now, facing a true upheaval in the nature of what a story even is, the kind of change that hasn’t happened in half a millennium. It happens slowly when you live through it, doesn’t it? But by a historical scale, it’s fast.
This is your world now.
May you write it well.

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Digital Bards: Interactive Media and the Evolution of Storytelling

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