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For the fifth time at Mason, I have delivered a D’var Torah, an interpretation of the Torah, to the High Holidays congregation at the university Hillel service. This year I spoke on the eve of Rosh Hashanah and my topic, relevantly enough to this blog, was the power of storytelling and why it is important that we all do it. You can read the entire piece at my Nodality and I am excerpting a chunk here.

Tonight is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, which literally translates to ‘head of the year.’ It’s the first day, One Tishrei, of the new Jewish Year 5772. The Rabbis teach us that Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of man and woman.

Isn’t that sort of odd?

There were six days of creation (and one day of rest) in the first week of the world. We are not starting at the beginning of this biblical week, nor really at the end. Instead we start our calendar, and every new year, at the anniversary of day 6, the creation of man. Why day six? Is it because humanity might, perhaps, be a bit egotistical?

I think there is more to it then that.

Is there something else that makes day 6 special? In Genesis, chapter two, we receive the second version of the creation story. God has created Adam but, before creating Eve, Adonai has a task for the first man. God brings forth every beast and bird He has created and presents them to Adam. The Torah states that God “brought them to the man to see what he would call each one and whatever the man called each living creature, that remained its name.” (Verse 19).

 

Read the rest at: The power in our stories. Rosh Hashanah D’var Torah for 5772.

Related posts:

1. Notes from Warren Spector’s "Next-Gen Storytelling"
2. The storytelling of the 99 percent.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been using the two terms ‘Story’ and ‘Narrative’ very frequently on this blog. As I look back, I realize that I may not have done a very good job defining them, or more importantly, the difference between the two.

The goal here is to explain these concepts and how they relate to each other to someone completely unfamiliar with literary theory.

Story

A ‘story’ is, in simplest terms, a sequence of events. So when thinking of a story it is A then B then C then D, the set of relevant events in chronological order.

Let’s go spelling bee and use these two terms in somewhat defining sentences.

The story of Bob’s Monday begins when he wakes up in the morning. He brushes his teeth, gets dressed, gets in his car, drives to work, parks, sits at his desk, goes to lunch, flirts with his coworkers, goes back to his desk, does more work, drives home, eats dinner and then he goes to sleep at night.

Story is the entire sequence of events (though even that paragraph simplifies some).

Plot

Plot describes a set of events as they relate to each other. The term is concerned with how to sequence and select the events of a story as a structure for its telling and how that telling can find maximum effect.

The plot usually concerns itself with specific points of the story and the pattern of their relation. If we go with Freytag on this, plot breaks down a story into events dealing with exposition, the rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

The plot of Bob’s Monday begins when he wakes up in the morning. The most interesting part of the day is at lunch, when he flirts with his coworkers. The plot ends when he goes to sleep at night.

Narrative

The concept of narrative deals more with how the events are told. Narrative is the ordering of events into a consumable format.

If you don’t mind using the previous words in this one’s definition, narrative is the method and means by which you construct the events of a story into a plot. It concerns itself with the sequence of the events, the medium on which they are told and the way these events are put together into one coherent unit. 

Narratives may involve a reordering of the events of a story. The story’s events can be set out of chronological order; be combined with elements from outside of the story to better tell the consumer what is going on; or to build dramatic effect. Sometimes a narrative may draw attention to things or events the story lacks, because the contrast is interesting.

The narrative comes from the events of the story in order to create a dramatic effect through the structure of the plot.

The narrative of Bob’s Monday: Bob wakes up in the morning, skipping breakfast so he can go straight to work. Though most of Bob’s day is boring, he enjoys lunch, when he frequently flirts with his coworkers. After work he goes straight home to get enough sleep to go to work the next day.

If you’ve been confused by how I use these different terms, hopefully this helps you better understand them. If not, please tell me down in the comments and I can elaborate further.

Related articles

• Week Two – Hypertexts and Interactives (rhetoric114.wordpress.com)
• Constructing My Visual Narrative (jaredb528.wordpress.com)

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1. Branching narrative schema and similar narrative structures
2. Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]
3. Story arcs beyond TV [Thinking]

Sometimes it is important to maintain a character or narrative over multiple stories. The tool for that is story arcs. Story arcs are most common in TV and graphic novels, however, with the easy linking of stories, there is an opportunity to expand the use of arcs.

A quick review: A story arc allows you to move one narrative thread through another narrative thread, or is simply an evolving narrative, and is most often used for character development. It is especially common in episodic storytelling, where character story arcs spread over multiple episodes of a story. Sometimes plot-lines outside of characters are also spread out over more than one episode.

Particularly plot-focused episodic narratives may use overlapping arcs, allowing an episode to both complete and start a new primary arc.

Image via Kalkion.

I’m curious if the same techniques behind story arcs in episodic content can be applied to other media.

Journalism

The first possibility is in journalism. Journalists often write each article without thinking if it will need a follow-up. As a result stories tend to stand alone, making it difficult for news websites to engage the participant beyond the landing story. In order to get more impressions, they instead spread the story out over multiple pages. This is one of the reasons that news websites have such high bounce rates.

But news organizations, especially local organizations which often follow a story topic over significant periods of time, have a real opportunity to establish arcs over multiple stories, allowing readers to get a better sense of the whole of the story and the people involved. This can drill down further than topics and get people more engaged. If there is something to really connect readers to other content, than it can build traffic and keep users on the site.

The New York Times sometimes plays with interactive features that build on the concept of an arc through a progressing story. I believe that The Washington Post used to  have a related topics frequency graph of some sort that fed on keywords, but they don’t anymore.

Can you think of any ways that news organizations can innovate to make story arcs a part of building coverage?

Transmedia

I was thinking about the value of leaving hints and bits of story in each transmedia element. This is sort of an ARG concept. Transmedia concepts often reveal depth to a story through content, but I’m thinking more along the lines of hiding points on a story arc throughout different media.

The issue is that it could be revealed in different order each time. Perhaps it could build on a narrative where order is not as important. It might work well with time travel.

Design

The most obvious way is to include elements of previous UI stages in other user interface stages, providing a connection. This isn’t particularly uncommon, but I’m thinking about how the technique can be in narrative terms. Really we are establishing a simple type of story about progression from one level of use to the next.

Is it possible to expand beyond that? Hyperlinks are, I suppose, another way to do it.

What about implementing overlapping arcs in each UI level? Include part of the last UI in the current stage. I’ve seen this done before and it is usually pretty cool. I think that could be especially useful with browser-based interactive fiction.

Music

Establishing a story arc over the course of a commercial album is not entirely unheard of but it is pretty rare. When it is done, it can be fairly successful. I’d like to see it more often. Beyond that, what would be really interesting is to treat each song as an episode, with its own story and arcs connecting them together.

Can you think of any other interesting ways to use story arcs?

Related posts:

1. Thinking about how we could use musical cues with online content
2. Story vs Narrative vs Plot

Look to the future! Image via Wikipedia

The beginning is a pretty bad place to start and exposition is for suckers. The key to good writing, be it journalism, fiction, screenplay or science fiction trilogy, is to start in the middle of things.

While it is tempting to lead a reader by the nose through your way of thinking and bring them step by torturous step to your conclusion, in the end that’s not fun for either party. Contrary to The Sound of Music, the very beginning is a bad place to start.

In medias res, used in many epic poems, is the art of starting at a moment of importance, interest or action. This is pretty different from the way most people are taught, it is the antithesis of the five paragraph essay, which plods from point A to Z of your concept in strict, ordered regimented steps.

The alternative is excitement. Starting with the most important or interesting part of the narrative has many benefits, especially when writing in modern mediums. You are building an effective hook, one that can pull your reader in. This is especially important as attention spans grow shorter.

It’s easier to write when you start with excitement. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to get to the part you actually want to say. Journalism calls it burying the lede and you have almost certainly done it. You may be up to a point or trying to explain a complicated topic. There are any number of reasons that it might have made sense at the time. However, it is rarely, if ever the right choice.

If you are trying to tell a story of any kind, the place to start is in the middle. Lead off with action or intense detail relevant to the rest of the story. You’ll see this in the truly good journalism as well as good prose  in any medium. As the narrative goes on, you can add in the history to support the present and subtly build in references and explanations.

Remember the slow reveal.

Oh… and it is great for SEO.

Related articles

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Related posts:

1. Story arcs beyond TV [Thinking]
2. Remix Project [Assignment]
3. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]

Image via Wikipedia

So I finished Red Dead Redemption last month. It was a pretty fun game and, despite excessive horse riding, I enjoyed myself. Then I got to the end and I never wanted anything to do with the game again. This is why.

Below are spoilers, so if you intend to play through Red Dead yourself do so and come back.

Rockstar has a tendency to write reluctant protagonists. Niko Bellic, from GTA4, wouldn’t stop whining about how he wanted to live the American dream in peace, even while he was shooting people. Red Dead is no exception. The main character, John Marston, is so eager to be done with his mission he practically gets killed in the first 30 minutes of the game.

Thankfully, Marston has a good reason for his reluctance while on an armed rampage. Our player character is an ex-outlaw and the FBI is holding his family hostage to get him to kill off his old running buddies. For once, I’ve found an open world game with a plot that actually makes a great deal of sense. In fact, overall, the game is well written; the characters seem fairly three-dimensional; the narrative thread is coherent and enjoyable; and overall the game mechanics make it just fun to play.

If you played through the first 95% of the game, you might very well be justified if you thought it was one of the best games you’ve played.

Then came the end.

Red Dead contains a great deal of homage to the old Wild West films and stories of its genre, but it is rarely predictable. However, about 35 hours into the 38 hours I spent playing the game, I had beaten everyone. All the bosses were dead, I’d cleaned up most of my little corner of the west and completed many of the side quests.  Marston’s family was and I went through a series of farming quests. I had to go hunting, pick up supplies, hang with Marston’s son and round-up cattle. I got a taste of the idyllic life of the Marston family farm. Of course, I knew what was coming. They were fattening me for the slaughter.

In this case the ‘they’ is the FBI, who have decided that, despite you having followed their orders and saved their lives throughout the game, you are clearly too much of an outlaw to live.

Now, you can play the game as a good or bad Marston but, no matter what you do, Marston is perpetually talking about his desire to just go home and settle down. The last few missions before the end are boring farm tasks. You just mosey around and build up a non-outlaw life for yourself. Despite this, the FBI send what is apparently an entire regiment of the American army to wipe out your farm. After killing what has to be a good 40 or 50 people, you and your family retreat to a barn. You make your wife and son go out through the back while you, in dramatic slow motion, push open the barn doors and confront about 12 enemies. You’re given the opportunity to kill some of them, but in the end they shoot you down.

This is not a bad concept. It’s easy to see that Rockstar was trying to emulate the old Westerns. In the typical western style it wasn’t entirely uncommon for the hero, running from a past he couldn’t escape, to die to protect the ones he loves. If that had been the case, the death scene and corresponding interactivity would have made a lot of sense. However, the scene, and indeed the whole final mission, did not fit in the existing narrative or character.

You spend the game fighting hard, even taking down governments, to gain back your family and farm. You’ve proved your potential usefulness and willingness to obey the FBI. You even spend the last few missions seeing just how much Marston loves his family and non-outlaw life.

There is just no real reason for the FBI to wait a week or two after letting Marston have everything back before hitting him. It’s just foolish to try to do so while he’s staying in a highly defensible position which he values. They could have just shot him in the back. Honestly. There are sniper rifles in the game, someone could have just taken a head shot. The agents could have just walked in the front door.

But ignoring that stupidity, there was no reason for the FBI to come after him to begin with. Marston had settled down. He’d spent all game talking about how much he wanted to become a farmer. If he had wanted to be an outlaw he could have gone off and never came back. He had just finished discrediting himself to the entire outlaw community by hunting down his brothers-in-crime, he was not a threat.

Then there is Marston’s behavior. They shot his uncle, they shot up his farm, they tried to shoot his family. While you play John Marston, you kill a fort filled with armed men, ride west, and start a Mexican revolution. You have friends and back-up all over. If the game hadn’t stopped me, I could have easily taken out all of those enemies. Marston, as a character, could fall back and gather friendly forces. He could even retreat to Mexico, where he’d be free from the FBI and probably able to put together a decent life.

There is another completely illogical element. That Marston would take a chance on a threat to his family continuing to exist. Marston is so in love with his wife that he refuses to have sex with the many prostitutes littered throughout the area (a serious act of self-control in a Rockstar game). He’s been all about his family this whole time. The game makes it abundantly clear that the West is still not a kind place to women who don’t have men. The strongest female character in the game still gets kidnapped and raped before you can save her, even with her having a father. Why, in god’s name, would Marston want to leave his family alone instead of going on the run with them? Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s been fighting for?

John Marston’s actions are essentially suicide without reason. It goes completely contrary to his character. Rockstar just wanted to shock you by killing off your character at the end of the game. But it’s a cheap shock, one existing outside of everything already established in the game and because of that it cheapens the whole game.

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This April 1 two separate mainstream websites launched a prank that mapped adventure game-type controls to their website. This got me thinking, is it time to revisit how we build and play Interactive Fiction?

Both XKCD and Woot applied game elements to their website on Thursday. Woot’s appears to be  static HTML and more ‘choose your own adventure’ than IF. However XKCD’s interface (based off WordPress theme CLI), though limited, was clearly in the spirit of IF. It required text commands, had the standard navigation, included the use of an item, and (of course) involved a grue.

From what I can tell, XKCD’s interface is implemented mostly with jQuery and involves a lot of pre-programing using the standard type of code you’d find in Javascript.

A while ago, I made my own forey into the world of IF, studying a number of games for a class and going so far as to attempt to build my own. I taught myself TADS3 which is, from what I can tell, the easiest IF programming language out there. I used it to build part of a game. The entire time, I was trying to figure out why it was so difficult. It seemed to me that the amount of code that should be required for a working IF story should be minimal. XKCD’s little IF has made me think about it again. How difficult could it be to create IF using standard XML and Javascript, as opposed to some of the more obscure tools out there?

Now, I know that IF is a field that sort of relishes its obscurity, however, I think that a properly put together IF in an interface that didn’t require the installation of strange and unusual programs, might meet with more success and would certainly appeal to a wider audience.

I’m thinking that an entire IF could be laid out within an XML database and standardized Javascript could be used to transform it into a working game. I admit, I’m no expert in either language, but does this seem possible to you?

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2. Interactive Fiction
3. What would you want in a Kindle app?

How can we use order and placement within a multimedia package or interactive story to enrich the narrative?

I’ve been reading through Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics on and off these last few months and it strikes me just how important this book is to anyone dealing with multimedia, not just comic artists or aficionados. When you think about it, in many ways comics were multimedia before anyone else was. They took an unusual step in completely combining images and words to create unique narratives that spoke in both media with one voice.

In comics, you can’t take any media out and still have a complete story. A comic without the words or without the artwork is not really a comic and may not even be a story. Even without words, there is still a narrative drawing everything together. The same can’t be said for most implementations of multimedia now. Many people who create narratives online do so with separate media in separate places, or create text with audio or video that doesn’t add to the narrative or does so in a way unassociated with the space it is in.

All this is confused even more by the web, with hypertexts and social media it would be relatively easy to have someone destroy the intended sequence for a user.

The question is, in what way can we use sequence to imbue our linked multimedia with narrative, instead of sitting along side it.

Get rid of sidebars?

Sidebars have been a standard practice in print media for a long time and in many sites it seems that the practice has carried over. The sidebar holds related but not integrated content for a narrative. Sometimes it may hold a summery for bored readers. But this practice ignores the possibilities of the web.

• Content can be embedded inside of text with tooltips.
• Rolling over text can reveal hidden elements.
• Separate sequences of text and imagery can be integrated to enrich narrative. But go beyond slideshows, show the sequence, push interaction.

Image via Wikipedia

Match beats

There are often different multimedia sequences which share beats with other media related to the narrative. By beats, I mean places where moments in the narrative line up between two media, for example photo and sound. This is why Soundslides is so attractive, it allows you to tell richer stories by combining photos and audio then you would be able to do with those two media sitting separate on the same page.

‘Here sequence is ridiculously important, the sequence of audio clips and photos can be matched up to create a rich story. One that is easy to digest and quite attractive.

• Narrating video with voiceovers
• Put navigation elements next to related content (tagging).
• Integrate related social searches (like Twitter) inline with an article.

Move beyond the paragraph

Image via Wikipedia

With the advent of easy typography on the web, considering how your text looks within the body of a website is key. The paragraph itself is a form of punctuation. However, we need to think beyond just the two+ sentence paragraph and into methods that take advantage of all the ways we can manipulate type today. The form and accepted format of the paragraph is something that comes from how we write by hand and is further formalized by the technology behind the printing press. However, the popularity of something like Twitter shows that this is not always the way we think anymore.

Placement of paragraphs, sentences or words can have a unique effect as well, imagine spreading out elements of a story in a way that shows emotion or meaning. We could deform letters or display them one at a time. We can even use words as playing cards. Why should we limit our storytelling to paragraph format?

• Spread and sequence sentences or paragraphs. Many people work on screens that are far wider than a book page. Why not spread out you sentences on one line or consider other formats?
• Place standard text within non-standard places. You can use floating divs or JavaScript to write on top of pictures or even on top of videos. With JavaScript or perhaps HTML5, you’d be able to animate it. Gives a new meaning to ‘voice’ over, huh?
• What about a cloud format? Letting concepts float up and hover around?

Consider left to right, than break it

McCloud notes how we read from left to right and how that changes how we read, what blanks our mind fills in, and where our eyes go next. (I wonder how things change where the society’s primary language goes in the opposite direction.)

What does this mean for web design? Should we throw out the concept of right-side sidebars or the sidebar-content-sidebar format? I’m not sure. I’d love to see some statistics on that if you have them. But what it does mean is that we have an opportunity to direct navigation in an order, not just as the presentation of options. It also means that we can reward users at the right side of a page by presenting them with something a little unusual, a new kind of punctuation.

But if we understand that the eye works this way, we can play with it, exploit it. With subtle strokes we could force it along a path. We could even defy the standard format and give multiple options. Instead of a buffet of every single area on a website, what about a limited menu, or a path that implies a narrative through the design.

• Can website navigation tell a story?
• Create a set of paths through your story or website using links or anchors. What if the selection of one path results in the exclusion of some options, what sort of narrowing down can be done?
• Embed artifacts in your site. Things that enrich the narrative of a site through consumption.

What’s next?

There is a lot to consider here. This doesn’t even get into real interactive options and the idea of narrative web design is something that has been banging away in my head for a while and I feel needs some serious expanding in the future.

However, It is important to start thinking right now about how sequences of events, media or even color can change how an online narrative is consumed.

Related posts:

1. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
2. The Android tablet is on the rise, so let’s think beyond the iPad magazine
3. The Browser Future of Interactive Fiction

So, as I’m bloging GTA4 I’ve noticed that typing up even a blog brief of my activities in the game takes up just as much time, if not more, than the actual play-time in-game.

I think this reflects a trend in another form of storytelling in another medium – Comic Books. In comic books there is something called Decompressed Storytelling. Decompressed storytelling is the idea of taking a story and spreading it out over more pages (spreading it to more then one ‘book’) by increasing detail, visuals and character interaction. The result being a slower paced and more spread out narrative.

It’s actually funny, I didn’t notice this in the last sandbox game I played (Spiderman 3) because it is actually based on a comic, so that sort of storytelling is expected. However, this form of narrative is a natural for sandbox-type games like GTA4.

It’s not unusual in the field of games to see narrative decompressed in this manner. You see the same type of narrative in Grim Fandango and many other games as well. The focus of these games is just as much on the character interactions and creating an opportunity to show of intensely detailed graphics as it is on telling the story. Sometimes this works out very well, other times, not so much.

Oddly, while the comic book industry is moving more and more towards decompressed storytelling, the majority of the game industry is moving in the opposite direction. Yes there are plenty of sandbox games where the story is littered throughout the landscape and completion means dozens of hours. However, for the directed games (case in point: Gears of War) the industry is moving towards shorter games with tighter stories.

Both narrative styles have their advantages and disadvantages. It really comes down to a question of what the consumer wants and what the industry can get away with.

Related posts:

1. Patriot Games Episode 5 – Lost Halos
2. A Jewish perspective on the importance of storytelling.
3. Notes from Warren Spector’s "Next-Gen Storytelling"

I’m looking through Warren Spector’s set of essays on Next-Gen Storytelling on The Escapist. Here’s my notes on part one.

• What makes a good story?
  • Change
  • Pacing (needs to vary)
  • Compelling Characters (Care about them!)
  • Subtext – “Your story should be about something.”
• Narrative Game Structures
  • Rollercoaster – A game with a predetermined narrative from which the players can’t deviate.
  • Retold – A game with no story at all beyond what the players retell about their experience. Games like MMOs.
  • Sandbox – Games whose story is player-generated. Tools are provided to players so that they can create their own story. Though there is no predetermined overarching narrative there is a strong sense of a story being created through the player’s choices.
  • Shared Authorship – The goal is to give the players significant freedom. The games in this category are separated by how “‘coercive’ their narrative is” and how deep the player choices are.
  • Procedural – This form of storytelling gives players the freedom to explore the game worlds and interpersonal relationships, to “‘grow’ stories through their choices.”
• Local Agency – Player ownership over the minute to minute
• Global Agency – Player control over the overall plot.
• “Trend Tracking” – Looking at the players many small decisions and using them to push one path or the other, to offer certain decisions, etc… and doing this for the overall game.
  • Issues:
    

    “We have to communicate to players on an ongoing basis what all the little decisions are adding up to.
    And we have to warn players that continuing with a particular play-style, in pursuit of particular goals, will result in some friends and/or enemies going away (along with all the information and assistance they might provide in the future).”

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1. Wasn’t The Shadow Really Lamont Cranston? [Notes]
2. Decompressed Storytelling and Sandbox Games
3. A Jewish perspective on the importance of storytelling.