In literature, symbolic objects transcend their physical limits to embody themes or carry metaphors. Pandora’s Box, to take a very obvious one, is not only a functional, fundamental element of the story but also a powerful metaphor for the confusion and chaos released by curiosity. It’s an integral element of the myth but it also carries meaning beyond its origin story.

As news stories run and run, twisting and turning often in far more fanciful ways than any fiction, sometimes these sorts of symbolic objects turn up. My favourite for a long time now has been the duck house, made famous during the MPs’ expenses scandal. More so than any of the other ludicrous things paid for by MPS out of their expenses, the duck house came to symbolise the lavishness, the detachment from reality and the sheer unadulterated silliness of the whole affair. It’s hard to sum up all of that with a news story, or even with a pithy quote, but a symbolic object can do the heavy lifting that no amount of text can quite manage. The duck house even manages to subtly imply a bunch of waddling, quacking MPs into the bargain. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Then a couple of weeks ago we had the horse. Phone hacking as a news story has gotten so convoluted and complex that it’s impossible for anyone but the most dedicated news junkie to follow in full. There’s a (necessarily) slow-moving inquiry that hasn’t yet brought politicians into the picture, and there’s an ongoing feeling that the cosy relationships between principle actors in the drama are not going to be publicly revealed.

Hence, the horse: a wonderful symbolic proxy for power, passed back and forth between the police, the Brooks family and Cameron himself. Horsegate played out in microcosm the larger drama, with denials, memory lapses and an eventual, half-hearted confession after which precisely nothing changed. It was a gift for cartoonists, too, especially in its connotations of servility – and a physical reminder of the closeness of Cameron in class and in pastimes to the Chipping Norton set, and the vast chasm between that and most of the rest of the country.

So today, to the pasty. It’s not a sausage roll tax or a hot food tax; it’s a pasty tax. A regional delicacy beloved of workers and students, both of whom have been walloped pretty hard since the coalition came to power. It’s a working lunch, a travelling lunch, a cheap, hot lunch eaten on the go by busy, normal people. It’s sustenance for hard days. In its Cornish origins it has subtle echoes of resistance, of regional pride; it’s determinedly non-London, as is Greggs, which has its origins in Newcastle. Greggs is on every high street; it’s well loved for what it does; and it’s almost impossible to imagine Cameron or Osborne there.

It is no coincidence that these symbolic objects are all about class. British national discourse is fairly bad at talking about class, thinking about class, examining unspoken opinions or getting a good sense of the realities of social stratification. The definition of “middle” class has vastly expanded and encompasses everyone not wearing a tiara or a hoody. But the duck house is so far out of everyday experience that it can’t be packaged as anything other than a symbol of wealth. Horse riding is a pricy pastime that carries Victorian, upper-class connotations. And the humble pasty is something an awful lot of people have eaten in the last few years – the sort of people who’ve been hit badly by the economics of austerity. The sort of people who aren’t Cameron.

These things surface an undercurrent, a class divide that doesn’t often get publicly debated outside of riots-based moralising. That we latch onto these symbols shows how hard it is to talk about class, equality and social mobility in the UK without resorting to stereotype or self-delusion, especially at present, when the optimistic view is that we are all headed for difficulty. Almost everyone is braced for the worst, counting pennies, fearing redundancy or more price rises. We are all so terribly nervous about what happens next. We have to have a pasty to focus on instead.

And writers? Well, they need to find a use for what they do, I guess. Because a story for its own sake written from a single point of view – digital or otherwise – is increasingly looking like it isn’t enough.

Journalists are facing down this problem online, now, as well as creative writers and other sorts of digital storytellers. In a way, it’s comforting to remember it’s not just written news but all sorts of writing that’s wrestling with these questions. And it’s also comforting to remember that things like Instapaper, the Long Good Read, Longreads and a vast array of others are whirring away, proving that for many people, yes, a written story is enough.

The Story program in chocolate, by Liz Henry

I promised myself I wouldn’t eat The Story until I was done digesting it.

I’m not sure that’s happened yet, but I’m getting there, and I think it’s time to start eating Meg Pickard. Maybe by the time I get to Danny O’Brien I’ll be finished putting all the pieces into place in my head. Maybe not. But I will at least be full of chocolate.

Last year I didn’t have the sort of perspective on The Story that I do this year. For one thing, I was speaking at it, which made it harder to think sensibly about the day, and brought me too close to one bit of it.

This time I got to relax and enjoy one of the best events I’ve ever been to. I tweeted – a lot – and I’ve pulled together a chronological run-through of the day in tweets on Storify. I suspect it may not mean enough for people who weren’t there to be able to decode the day; it was a busy day with a lot of astonishing ideas and people in it.

There are stories we tell ourselves, and stories we tell other people about ourselves. Often, it seems, they’re the same story. Last.fm’s model of frictionless sharing lets people build identity by doing stuff – the way we would before the internet, before fast fashion and the Kindle, with clothes, class and consumption habits the most available elements of our outward-facing selves.

On the other hand, Ellie Harrison‘s early work quantifying her habits and activities seems to almost reverse that process – aiming to learn more about precisely who you are by meticulously chronicling everything you do. (Though she did also build a vending machine that vends crisps every time the BBC website mentions news about the recession. I’m not sure that quite fits this particular thesis. But the Bring Back British Rail T-shirt definitely does.) The End‘s series of philosophical questions about death also lets you build up an identity around your actions – crystallising things you might not otherwise think about, then plotting you on a grid that includes your friends and major thinkers.

Tom Watson and Emily Bell discussing phone hacking was illuminating, and my most anticipated talk of the day (for obvious reasons). Another big theme that ran through many of the talks was the collision of reality and story – a junction where everyone in news media works, and where the phone hacking discussion and Liz Henry’s talk about fake lesbians provided strong, cautionary tales about what happens when the story takes over. Henry made an incredibly strong point that when someone’s fake identity takes over, people’s real struggles get lost; by attempting to speak for others, we drown their voices.

But  Scott Burnham provided a strong counterpoint, with a glorious tale about an art project in which dozens of people laid out hundreds of thousands of pennies to spell ‘Obsessions make my life worse and my work better’ on an Amsterdam pavement. As time passed people began to play with it, making new words out of the pennies, turning them over. And then the police cleared it up to stop it being stolen. His final point was that the things we do will always disappear, but the stories we create will always remain.

The more I think on it, the more I come back to Karen‘s talk as being the heart of the event, though I didn’t see it at the time. She talked about making something she was interested in, a story just for her – a whole magazine of it, in fact. But the magazine is also an extension of her self, a story she’s telling the world about who she is and how she operates. An externally constructed identity as well as a document of interest – like Matt Sheret‘s playlists, or (on a group level) Scott Burnham’s penny art, or The End’s philosophical mindmaps, or Amina‘s blog. Jeremy Deller tried to heal the wounds of a whole community by recreating events that changed its identity forever, by putting on costumes and playing with being something we’re not, something we used to be. Fiona Raby told stories about a collective future where not just our identities but our bodies were changed. Danny O’Brien talked about – well, about everything, frankly, very fast and with huge energy and expansiveness, but also about delusion and identity and what happens when group identities collide.

And Matthew Herbert made an album out of a pig, in an act which says something about the artist as well as the pig. He talked about the process of art, the investigation and discovery involved in making sound this way, finding out that pig labour is quiet and that tractors are natural bass tones. He talked about recording the sound of towers falling on 9/11, and being sent a recording of someone in Palestine being shot against a wall, and the ethics of making those things, those lives and deaths, into stories in sound.

We are all made of stories. Some of them are our own creations, some we own, some we tell inadvertently through action and through accretion, and some belong to other people, a long way outside our control.

There’s an inherent conflict in videogames between lean-back and lean-forward interaction. Generally the game itself is lean-forward. We’re doing something interesting with our hands (or whole bodies) that’s affecting what’s on the screen. We’re physically invested in making a thing happen. But story is more of a lean-back affair – it’s something we want to absorb and be entertained by. Modern video games spend a lot of time trying to integrate the two. Bioshock had partial success with this – make story something you come across as part of the scenery – and some failures too (scattered diary pages are not a good storytelling technique, even if the pages are audio recordings for some reason). Not many video games have much success, and most have a lot of fail.

Cut scenes are the best example of this – they literally make you stop playing in order to absorb the story. Some cut scenes are so lean-back that they make you leave the room to make a cup of tea while the game gets on with talking to itself, so you can come back and do the fun bits. It’s a jarring, completely bizarre experience to go from a big boss battle where you’re really engaged in pushing buttons and seeing Stuff Happen as a direct result, to a scene where you’re expected to just sit there and absorb as control is taken away from you completely.

But story matters. Without a story of some kind, events are just events. Luckily, humans are hard-wired to make stories out of pretty much everything we experience. Pong is fun not just because of its mechanics but also because you can make up a story about playing tennis on your computer. Pacman is fun in part because of the story you tell in your head about getting the power pill and eating the ghosts. But neither of those things are stories told by the game; they’re stories that emerge from the game as you play it – from the intersection of player with technology/rule systems. Emergent stories are my favourite kind of story, because they’re the ones that games sustain really well. (Not just video games either. Live, card, tabletop and more. Board games have been doing emergent story well since Go was invented.)

Emergent stories can be far more engaging than the stories designers try to put into games. Beating your mates at Soul Calibur is a better story than the Soul Calibur story mode (not hard, I know). But emergent stories don’t actually have storytellers while they’re happening. Game designers can’t actually design the emergent stories they want players to have, because those are born from context and from the physical places and ways people are playing and stuff designers just can’t control. You can build a really good framework for generating stories, but you can’t force the stories to happen. Often emergent stories don’t actually get told, in any real sense, until after the events of the game; they’re reconstructed from divergent events in retrospect, not in real time. That’d make the player the storyteller.

What I think I’m getting at here is that story, like all meaning, is not contained within the cultural artefact itself but instead is created anew at every reading at the nexus between the artefact, the viewer and the contextual forces that surround both. The problem with a lot of video game stories is that story is fundamentally separated from gameplay, and often gameplay actively works against story or makes story unbelievable (LA Noire, Uncharted, GTAIV, to name a few). In tabletop gaming one of the marks of a bad session is that the players feel railroaded into taking certain pathways or choices because of the GM’s conception of how things should go. But that’s exactly what most video games do – even those with pretty branching endings and multiple pathways and meaningful choices that affect the game world.

I’m not a ludologist. I like my games chock-full of story, but I want story that’s meaningful in the context of gameplay and delivered in a way that isn’t head-snappingly oblique to the rest of the play experience. I just don’t know if that’s actually something video games can do.

This post is part of an ongoing conversation with Si Lumb and Mark Sorrell, and is written at some speed, because my thinking is slippery and if I stop to think about it for too long I’ll start disagreeing with myself.

Hello.

I’m Mary, and I’m here to talk to you about toy guns and zombies, with the assistance of some state-of-the-art graphics.

With my partner Grant I run a game called Zombie LARP. LARP stands for live action role play – essentially, games that require the suspension of disbelief in real life, where players dress up or pretend to be the main characters in the game, generally with a conflict resolution mechanic relying on a mix of skill and chance. And often large pretend weapons. It’s sort of a cross between tabletop Dungeons and Dragons and amateur dramatics.

What we do, unsurprisingly, revolves around zombies. We run a game in which a bunch of people pretend to be zombies and attempt to “eat” survivors – or tag, because we can’t actually physically represent eating people. And the survivors get toy guns like these, which shoot foam darts at the zombies.

Each game is different, with different numbers of survivors, often in very different venues. We have to tailor the game to different groups, players, experience levels and so on. The game runs on a rotating basis – people take it in turns to be survivors and zombies – which lets us change things on the fly in between sessions and iterate throug. And we can actually change things during the course of the game itself, if it’s too easy or too hard, by moving zombies around or dropping extra weapons. We call that responsive design.

There are a few constants: we work very hard to make sure the player experience is immersive, exciting and fun; we give the players an objective to complete before they can get out; and across most of our games we have a survival rate of about 5%. I take great pride in that.

What we don’t do is create experiences – the players do that themselves. Our job is to create an environment and a system in which experiences occur. Within the game we work to make a system where exciting, dramatic experiences happen organically – and we do a lot of framing work to help forge a unified narrative out of the players’ individual, fragmented experiences of play. There’s various names for this – some folks think of it as procedural storytelling, or emergent storytelling. We use the concept of creating and operating a story machine – a system within which exciting stories are born through the interaction between the player and the rules, procedures and environment we create. We borrow a lot of UX design to help us do this – looking at flow and navigation, thinking about personas, tackling context, considering emotion. Good LARP creators are pretty familiar with all these things – they just might phrase them differently.

So, LARPs are about turning the real world into a game environment. Some require a lot of pretending about your surroundings, while others aim to be as immersive as possible. For instance, we used to run in a university building – we turned most of the lights off, used overhead projectors to cast weird shadows, and (around the time we started getting serious about the game) dressed up the rooms. Now we run in a huge abandoned shopping mall, which to be honest does a lot of the work for us – and players themselves add a lot to the atmosphere of the game with costumes and makeup.

We keep the core mechanics very simple. Many live games that include combat use things like damage calls, which you have to remember along with your character’s capabilities; or magic spells, that you have to remember and imagine. Some even have completely abstracted turn-based combat systems. Our character options and rules are very limited, work with people’s instincts, and understand that if you’re scared or running around, the last thing you need are lots of rules to remember.

But the main mechanic of our game is combat – you have to fight the zombies in order to survive – so we do abstract that using NERF guns & foam weapons.

These form the basic, point-and-click interface for the game. The starter weapon – the Maverick -  has six shots. A fair few other weapons also have six shots, which is the main reason why one of our zombie behaviour rules is that they swarm in groups of seven – there should always be one more than you can comfortably shoot.

There are a lot of different types of gun, now. When we started there were about four, and now there’s a dizzying array varying from the utilitarian to the downright ridiculous. For instance, there’s the Rapid Fire – not sure why it’s called that, because it’s extremely slow to fire and very unreliable. Its main feature is that after you shoot it, it ejects shells onto the floor. That makes it Badass.

And then there’s guns like the Stampede. Fully automatic massive battery-powered behemoths that give you lots of ammunition but balance it out by making it almost impossible not to just charge screaming into the first combat wasting all your ammo.

For the players, this is the primary way they can affect the game – it lets them control their entire experience. So we emphasise it, talk to players about how it works, demonstrate it – all of which helps to frame the experience in a way that’s going to make sense for them. We treat the guns – which are, in fact, exceptionally silly pieces of kit – with a lot of seriousness. All that context helps players to take them more seriously than they might otherwise. It helps not only to make the game itself more immersive, because people are treating these toys as weapons as soon as they get into the building, but it also cuts the chances of people having NERF wars in the middle of our player rooms.

Every type of gun has its own behaviour, its own usability issues, its own play style and its own impact on the game. Much like a first-person-shooter computer game, we can balance the game using the numbers of zombies and the ammunition available, as well as the capabilities of the weapons. For us, that includes the likelihood of guns jamming, the plausibility of the players losing it and wasting their ammo within seconds of the game beginning, and conversely the propensity for people to hoard their bullets till the last possible moment. You’d be amazed how many people save one bullet, just in case.

But in some ways the game’s framework has less in common with modern FPS run-down-a-corridor-shooting games and more parallels with text adventure games: here is a verb we give you with which to interact with your environment to see what happens. This is all implicit, but the effect of rule systems like ours is to constrain potential actions to a limited set. The main verb we give people is SHOOT.

Other optional verbs that move the experience forward are things like HIT, RUN, HIDE, SCREAM, SWEAR, RUN FASTER, DIE. Even with this limited set of anticipated actions, players sometimes surprise us with things like PRETEND TO BE ZOMBIE.

Zombies, get verbs too, though much more limited set: SHAMBLE, HUNT, ATTACK, EAT and a few in response to player actions like FALL BACK, COLLAPSE, DIE and then later on RESURRECT.

For a while, we experimented with a magic system, but it didn’t work very well – mostly because it required people to remember things in a systematic way, when they were under quite a lot of physiological, zombie-related stress. But we did manage to bring in a power that sort of works: in some games, religious characters called Believers can scream freestyle religion in order to stun zombies. During one game, a player decided he wanted to play an atheist Believer, and managed to stun a crowd of zombies by telling them loudly and repeatedly that they were scientific impossibilities.

This is the sort of thing that happens a lot. Players want to use the verbs we give them in unusual ways. They want to try them on everything within the simulation. You see this tendency for users to muck around just about everywhere, but most clearly in video games, because they have the freedom to respond. Text adventures tend to have stock phrase responses for when you couldn’t do something, and as we’ve moved through point-and-click adventures those have gotten more sophisticated. Action adventure games have slightly better ways to deal with players testing the boundaries of the sim, though they’re not always perfect – you could drown Lara Croft; Uncharted 3 has safe areas where commands that would normally make Nathan Drake punch people instead make him wave or shake their hands; but you still can’t set fire to children in Skyrim.

But in a real-life, responsive environment you can’t provide stock responses to boundary testing. You have to make sure there’s a safe way to test boundaries without actually risking hurting people, so there has to be clear communication about where the hard, out-of-game boundaries are. And within the game, players, given a SHOOT option, will attempt to SHOOT everything. Including, and especially, things you don’t want them to shoot, like information-givers and quest-givers and each other.

For a while, we dealt with that by using unkillable god-like quest-givers, but the players didn’t enjoy that so much. People really, really want their boundary-testing to be rewarded by something delightful. So we started introducing things like hideous carnival-style puzzle games in which you could shoot things, but there would be obvious and unpleasant consequences. We started a reward system that built achievements on some of the most startling, brilliant things our players had done – so we have the “Over a man’s head mind you” award for gymnastics under stress, or the Cactus “Bastard” McPhillips award for astonishing bastardry, which gets awarded for things like sacrificing your best friend so you can run away. But only if it doesn’t contravene rule zero. I’ll come back to rule zero in a moment.

There’s delight in the unexpected interaction. In one event, there was a substitution puzzle in which players had to solve a cipher in order to determine which of several symbols they had to write on the walls. We had symbols for angel, demon, heaven, hell, kill, reanimate, and various other things – including symbols for our big unkillable god-like characters Emmerson and Kramer. After the game, players asked what would have happened if they’d written the symbols for “kill Kramer” in the ritual circle. That would have been a fantastic moment to go off-script, do something spontaneous and delightful.

So since then we try to look out for unexpected ways the players might use the tools we give them, and reward them by making it work. In the last game, in order to get out of the complex, the players had to find a demon and lead him through the zombie-infested mall to a magic circle. They could control him if they had a particular occult book. So they got the book, and rather than take him straight to the circle they moved him around the mall getting him to stand in doorways killing zombies for them.

Then there are always people who will push the boundaries of permitted interaction in other ways – changing the objectives, or the parameters of play, or the verbs involved. Part of playful exploration for many people is the creation of arbitrary goals and limitations, in an attempt to see what happens. You see this sort of creative reimagining all over the place, but again perhaps most clearly in games. Speed runs of Super Mario, or the Chronicles of Nondric, where a gamer played Oblivion as a commoner and tried to avoid doing any quests at all. Minecraft is built on this urge to create something amazing, unique and fascinating within a limited system. Zombie too has people who try to get different experiences out of the game by limiting or altering the verbs they use to interact with the environment. My personal favourite example of this: a group of four people turned up to the last game kitted out as morris dancers – complete with jingling, zombie-attracting bells on their legs – and went into the sim only with melee weapons, no guns at all.

They broke the game.

But that’s fine, because next time we’ll balance it more effectively. We’re looking at responding by taking away most of the melee weapons so people who do want to limit themselves in that way get to be a bit more special, and find the game a bit more challenging. And they’re talking about coming as some sort of Highland marching band. The wonderful thing is that everyone has fun.

That’s where we come back to Rule Zero. The most important rule of the game is very simple: don’t be a dick. By framing the whole event in those very simple but quite far-reaching terms we create an environment where everyone gives each other the benefit of the doubt. Rather than making rules that force players into certain types of unfun experiences when they’re applied rigidly, it lets us say: be flexible. If someone tries something unexpected, go with it. React in a way that makes sense in the situation you’re in. If it breaks the rules of the simulation, if it uses actions or verbs you’re not familiar with or you haven’t built in, that doesn’t matter, just so long as it’s fun. And if it’s fun enough, we’ll try and build it in for the next event.

Fundamentally: shooting zombies is fun, and pretending you’re a badass while doing it is even more fun. Everything else is about reinforcing that core mechanic, and trying to make it the most fun possible.

Today the final edition of the 168-year-old News of the World hit the stands, and 200 people woke up without jobs, thanks to the decision by News International on Thursday to close the paper.

Killing the News of the World, along with its many other possible benefits for Rupert Murdoch, is an attempt to grab control of the story back – or at least to dilute it. Suddenly, instead of dissecting past issues of the paper to look for more evidence of illegal (or at least immoral) behaviour, journalists are dissecting the final issue. Instead of the possible guilt of former editors, the result is to introduce a discussion about the relative innocence of Colin Myler and his current staff. [Edit: see also Roy Greenslade's look at the final edition.]

The gesture also attempts to make martyrs of the newspaper and of its existing journalists.  Suddenly it’s almost churlish to write furious diatribes about the past, when 200 forlorn journalist faces are staring out at you from the last ever newsroom photograph. The urge now is to eulogise, to sum up the 168-year life of the paper – and that means the narrative turns from exposing the illegal and immoral activities that have taken place over the years to a gentler summation of the paper’s life – lauding the good as well as discussing the bad.

It’s a hugely expensive and risky smokescreen to throw in front of a hungry set of journalists, but the result is still to change the terms of the narrative. The focus has shifted.

The political implications of this scandal are immensely complicated and far-reaching, but what I find most fascinating is the idea that the Murdoch empire had an interest in keeping politicians corrupt. If your power rests in part on your ability to unmask corruption – in selectively dishing dirt on those politicians who don’t do what you want – then in fact you have an incentive to ensure that there is a skeleton in everyone’s closet, and that you have the ability to expose it. You have a vested interest in building up the careers of celebrities whose secrets you can use to sell papers. The more corrupt the people at the top – the more dirty secrets you have on the most powerful politicians and policemen – the more control and power you wield.

Thanks to its 2.7m circulation and an estimated readership of about 8m, the News of the World was a kingmaker and a kingbreaker. But those readers won’t just disappear into the ether. The media landscape in the UK is undergoing seismic change not just because of the newspaper closure and the potential damage to other News International titles, but also because we don’t know where those loyal tabloid readers will end up. Presumably a Sunday edition of the Sun would snap them up immediately – so long as it wasn’t dead in the water from the News of the World fallout. But it will be very interesting to see whether the other Sunday papers see a circulation bump in the wake of the death of the Screws – or where the paper’s online readers will migrate to other mainstream titles, or disappear off to celebrity blogs or fragmented new media.

If the mass audience fragments, that could permanently reshape the hierarchy of power in this country in ways that are impossible to predict. We have already seen the power of the network in driving the story forwards. We have already seen a massive shift in power, with politicians openly attacking Rupert Murdoch, a man who seemed untouchable this time last week.

What happens next is anyone’s guess.

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Somewhere in the middle of all this, I start at the Guardian tomorrow as SEO Subeditor. I don’t know what next week holds but I’m immensely excited to be part of it – sad to leave Citywire, hugely so, but so excited.

Peter Knight, in his book Conspiracy Theories in American History, calls conspiracy theories “part of the lingua franca of everyday American life and entertainment”. He traces their history as far back as the first settlers on the continent, and argues that the country’s diversity combined with American exceptionalism to form a particularly fertile ground for certain types of conspiracy theory.

Popular conspiracies, like best-selling novels, solve problems; cultures talk to themselves, telling themselves soothing tales that may or may not accurately reflect reality. Where off-beat narratives like Roswell or the Illuminati flourish, they do so because they resolve some conflict within society that causes anxiety.

In 1964 Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal essay diagnosing a paranoid style in American politics. At that time it was easy to characterise conspiratorial viewpoints as being held only by the fringe elements of society; since then conspiracy theories have hit the mainstream again. JFK’s assassination, international banking, the moon landings, alien abductions, 9/11, the birther movement – all these have captured the imaginations of large segments of the American public.

Conspiracies have tended to fall into roughly one of two groups. Some conspiracies involve attacks by outside groups on America – for instance, communists, Jews, Masons, Catholics or, going back before the Civil War, slaves and abolitionists. Others involve attacks or systematic deceptions perpetrated on the American people by its government or by those in positions of power over it – examples include the belief that the moon landings were faked, the various theories that the US government knew about 9/11 before it happened, fluoride in the water, CIA drug experiments, and so on.

If there is one man who combines these two strands of fear almost perfectly, it is Barack Obama. Simultaneously the most powerful government official in the US, he is also perceived as an imposter, an outsider, in large part due to the colour of his skin.

And, for all that the paranoid style seems designed to increase rather than decrease fear and anxiety, its success comes from the fact that it resolves underlying conflicts in a way that renders them understandable to the man on the street, and less threatening. Hofstadter in 1964 ran down a list of reasons why the American right wing felt dispossessed, and had latched on to conspiracy as a way of regaining control; today, the Tea Party and the current cornucopia of conspiracy represent an even stronger expression of a stronger sense of unease and lack of control.

The birther movement is an elegant synthesis of the two prevailing concerns of American conspiracy theories into one hypothesis: if Obama was not born in the US, then his very existence is both an external attack on America and a mass deception perpetrated by those in power on the American people. Obama represents the threat of both in one body; perhaps this is why the theory has proven so attractive to so many people, even to potential presidential candidates like Donald Trump, to the extent that earlier this week Obama produced his long form birth certificate as proof.

(It won’t work, of course. Conspiracy theories interpret inconvenient facts as damage and route around them in much the same way that the internet does.)

And if there was another man who reconciles and combines these threats, it was Osama bin Laden. He was a vanishingly rare example of the conspiracy theory made flesh, a living, breathing individual who was demonstrably guilty of those terrible crimes that conspiracy theorists ascribe to their enemies. To borrow from Hofstadter again:

[He] is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way.

Bin Laden, while living, was the perfect pantomime villain in this theatre of conspiracy. He already embodied the threat against America from outside groups, and his actions were incorporated into anti-government conspiracy theories as people sought to make sense of the senseless horror and brutality of the events of 9/11.

His death will not lay conspiracies to rest, because his death does not solve the problems that those conspiracies do. His death will not resolve the insecurities that divide America, the fears that have driven the paranoid style to such great heights and made it a prevailing feature of US politics. And the circumstances surrounding the death – a highly-secretive government mission that has left no body to be examined – leave it wide open for reinterpretation.

Perhaps that’s a wise move from Obama. If Bin Laden becomes the bad guy, perhaps Obama can finally lay to rest some of the conspiracy theories surrounding his own existence. Or perhaps that would be one conspiracy too far.

Listen. Because listening generously creates an articulate speaker. Moments in Karl James’s deeply moving talk stuck out for me like sore thumbs: I am not a journalist, he said, and therefore I get a better story. I can ask more questions. How do my questions differ from what journalists ask?

As a journalist, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. Always you try to listen, but always you have the shape of the story to contend with. Literally, in some cases, for print: the story is a certain shape, a certain length and width and height with a certain size and shape of picture that goes with it; the form is constrained and constraining, and the questions you ask end up being designed to elicit answers that fit in and with the space you have available. The story gets chopped up into pieces, and the parts that fit become canonical while the rest are left as fragments that do not get retold. Good journalism is surgery.

Fragments. The idea that stories are falling apart, narratives disintegrating into small pieces that carry meaning by themselves but that are no longer embedded into larger story structures. And that by escaping from stable structures these fragments become building blocks, “accreting like coral” (to borrow @glinner’s phrase) and forming new, more serendipitous narratives.

This is a problem I’ve been running up against in journalism since I started journalisting – stories that in former times could be pinned to the page or confined to the lead slot on the evening bulletin can’t be, any more. They twist and turn and escape their boundaries. There is always more that can be said, context to the content the curators choose – like the video Adam Curtis showed of an interview in Helmand, where, once you reached outside the shape the story had to fit, you found an even more fascinating narrative, that fascinated more because it didn’t make sense – because it felt real, because it wasn’t neat or tidy or enclosed. Grand narratives are disintegrating, being questioned and contextualised in unexpected ways by the people formerly known as the audience.

Some speakers at The Story – Phil Gyford, Lucy Kimbell – are tackling this head-on in fields that aren’t (necessarily) newsgathering. Journalists should be talking to other storytellers, because all sorts of people are dealing with this fragmentation of narrative and they’re doing it innovatively and creatively and we are idiots if we are not looking for the links and the lessons between news storytelling and other creative practices.

Because the coral accretions of those fragments become things like The IT Crowd, or Cornelia Parker‘s objects that carry huge cultural significance despite being divorced from their original contexts. Like atoms in the ether, stories bubble into existence and coalesce whether there is anyone there to “read” them or not; like our host Margaret Robertson’s declaration that our clothes tell stories about ourselves; like @kcorrick’s Sole of The Story. Like conference notes that become art objects and accrue their own stories. And like LARPers frothing about zombies and turning fragments of experience into solid narratives, curating the experience themselves.

And because stories are still hugely powerful, and not always benign. Jane, in Karl James’s Dialogue Project, warns against becoming your story, when that story is damaging or damaged. Mark Stevenson recasts the metanarrative of global disaster into a story about how everything is getting better, really. Matt Adams uses text messages to tell stories with teenagers, in an attempt to shape a world where they are more informed and more aware of difficulties facing them. Cultures tell grand stories to themselves, to define themselves, and a grand story can shape as well as define.

This blog post doesn’t have a beginning or a middle, and it isn’t really going to have an end. I’m rewiring my brain to cope with new concepts – I genuinely feel like several speakers yesterday took the top of my head off and I am still finding unexpected cogs in peculiar places and gluing the results back together. There will be more, I am certain.

[edited to add link to Antony Mayfield's summary of Adam Curtis's talk]

I’m going to be talking about Zombie, which last night sold out its ninth event in just five hours – talking about how we generate emergent stories, what systems we use to encourage and nurture and later curate stories born from player activity, in a community-oriented and word-of-mouth focussed way. The talk is called The Story Machine. I’ll post up my notes and slides after the event, but here as a teaser is one of my favourite images – drawn by the lovely and long-suffering @gshowitt.

The Story Machine