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Part 7...

Unfortunately much of the web today is designed around an old media ...the magazine. You can flip through the pages, look at the pictures, maybe read something. The only real interactivity is the ubiquitous button click to navigate.

This is not interactivity. In his FlashForward talk Josh Ulm outlines five criteria by which you can determine interactivity. The more of these qualities an experience has, the richer the interactive experience.

1. Subject and Participant

This one is quite obvious. If I tell you a story you react. If I just stand on a street corner telling the story to myself there will be a toally different reaction.

2. Intention

Does the potential for an interaction between the story teller and the listener exist? At the beginning of this lecture as soon as I moved out of your context or didn't meet your expectations for this lecture, you became distracted and started concentrating on your environment and friends. Think of the best story you have ever told. You and the audience made eye contact and maintained it throughout the telling of the story. Eye contact signals the intention to communicate. If done effectively people stay put.

There was a site in Toronto that is an online rave. It is called Safehouse and people stay on that site, on average, for 30 minutes per visit exploring the various rooms in the "House".
When Bryan Rieger, one of the site's developers told this story to potential investors they greeted it with skepticism until they saw the numbers.

The site works because the people visiting the site are there for an experience and are hooked by the potential for interactivity which, in this case, is the opportunity to customize the story.

3. Investment

When people visit SafeHouse and stay put they are investing their time, thought and emotion in the exchange. They are moved to interact with the story.

Another example with this is something that just drives me crazy. Most evenings, just as I am sitting down to dinner with my family, the phone will ring and the caller will want to engage me in the story of their product's features. Now I am standing there watching my dinner get cold and the caller is attempting to tell me a great story about their phone service, new windows for my house or a great newspaper. Obviously I have no intention of making any sort of investment with them and I will either be rude or polite but I am not making any sort of eye contact with them. I am thinking about how to get rid of them and not concentrating on their story. Interactive media the Back button on the browser or a "Quit" command is the digital equivalent only it is more impersonal and doesn't involve any sort of human-to- human interaction. In fact, it is rather brutal, if you really think about it.

4. Participlation

I was standing in front of an Andy Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe in a gallery of the Museum of Modern Art this past May. As I stood there a couple of people starting talking about the painting and their reactions to it. On the surface, you could say, the couple was interacting with Andy and the painting. Alternatively, were they simply standing in the Museum of Modern Art talking about an Andy Warhol painting? I would suggest the latter and it was not an interactive experience.

For interactivity to work, the user must participate in the story and have a role in its telling or development and that role must be important.

5. Change

What many developers don't seem to understand is how difficult it is to change the internet. Yes there is a high level of participation but the majority of sites and CD's out there offer little more than the opportunity to select which page or section to view or which form to fill out. The interactive experience is always the same each time we visit the site or start the CD. Even the Dreams piece , with its multiple choices, never offers more potential to me than it does to each of you. When things change, though, they offer more personalization to each of us. The experience is mine., It is not yours.

Amazon.com may just be the first faint glimmering of this one. When you visit the site and register each subsequent visit will result in a series of suggested books that meet your interests. Up until this past April I ordered a lot of software and web design books and each time I visited the line up of these books changed. In April, I started thinking about what we do and decided to order a couple of academic books that explored digital media. Now , when I enter the site, they have a totally different series of offerings that I might be interested in purchasing. Thus my Amazon page is different from every one else's Amazon page. It is mine alone and when I participate I change the content and it is specific to my interests, not yours.

This works through the use of an intelligent system which is still in its infancy but the rise of dynamic content which can be customized to the user over the past few years and its ability to mold its story to my unique needs holds immense promise for the story teller. Imagine listening to the Ojibwa story teller and the story you hear from his different from the one the person next to you is hearing.

6. Awareness of Effects

There has to be a pay off. It is not enough to invoke change if we do not recognize that our experience is unique. When we take responsibility for change, the value and importance of the experience grows geometrically. If there is a purpose for our involvement in the story the reward becomes even more significant.

SafeHouse works because the visitor is taking responsibility for the evolution of the story. Dreams works for the same reason.
Josh calls this "reward" because there is a physical sensation that comes along with your realization of purpose. It is , as Josh says, " encouraging, inspiring, and often exciting."

7. Accumulation of Effects (History)

This may just be where interactive story telling will find its strength in interactive media. Imagine what would happen if a piece accumulates the effects of each person who touches it and changes it. This is history and evolution and is an interactive environment that changes over time. Instead of machine-human interaction it will be story teller- story teller interaction where the listeners become the story tellers.

Rather than show you what I am talking about, I am going to let you experience it.

I am a Boy Scout leader. I work with a group of 8 to 10 year-old boys and we spend a lot of time out doors. When we go to camp the highlight of the weekend is inevitably the camp fire. For five years now we have been telling a story that is much like the Dream piece I just demonstrated. It started with me and since then the story has changed across those multiple dimensions as over 500 boys and adults have involved themselves in the story

What does a story told around a camp fire in Canada have to do with an interactive story telling lecture in Germany? It is the non linearity of what we do that is the common thread. The classic Aristotelian story is linear. The story in the realm of interactive media is the opposite.
I have with me my "Story Stick" and here is how this will work. I am going to start the story and when I pass the stick to one of you, you will tell the next piece of the story. I will then ask the story teller at some point to stop and pass the stick to another member of the audience and he or she will tell the next bit of the story. We'll do this three times. Then I will restart the story , again, and you will see how engaging and powerful this form of interactive story telling is for not only the audience but the participants.

"Yesterday, my plane landed in Hamburg. I gathered my luggage and struggled to the taxi stand where I hailed a taxi..." Hand the stick to the next person and ask "What happened?".

Next story. "This morning, after breakfast, I had some time to myself and decided to explore the streets around my hotel. I walked through the lobby..." Hand the stick to the next person and ask "What happened?".

Not easy is it? It was new but once you understood what to do you will notice both the story teller and the audience were engaged in the story. All of the principals I had just presented were there and all of us had a compelling interactive story telling experience.

I am going to conclude with a bit of theory regarding the future of Interactive Storytelling.

In 1999 MIT Press published a book of essays called "The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media". One of the contributers and the editor is Peter Lunenfeld, an academic and founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group. His essay, "Unfinished Business", should be required reading for anyone getting into this business.

The point of the essay , as he points out in his first sentence is, "The business of the computer is always unfinished." The rise of hypermediacy and , in many respects, the use of hypertext, means our stories will never reach the point where we add- "The end". That story we just told is a good example of this. It, theoretically, will never end because there will always be someone to whom the Story Stick is passed and the story will constantly change as it is filtered through the expeiences and cultural contexts of the listeners and the story tellers.

According to Lunenfeld we should not react with fear to the concept of "unfinish" but to embrace it. "The unfinished work or person", he wrote, " allows us to read our own desires into a not yet fully formed object- opening up more space for pleasure and identification than any "complete" work or person can ever offer."

The use of interactivity in digital media has a profound effect upon our stories. A web page, with hyperlinks, is a good starting point for how unfinish will affect us.

All of those words are simply that, words. The communications tradition they come from ,therefore, is one of textuality which uses Aristotelian linearity- start, middle, end- as its model. Add the blue links and, like Dreams, the path starts to meander towards unfinish as the traditional boundaries between the text and the context change. In some cases, this change is profound.

This causes Lunenfield, to make a rather important observation- "Technology and popular culture propel us toward a state of unfinish in which the story is never over and the limits of what constitutes the story are never to be as clear again."

What is happening to create this state of unfinish is that the story around the story is becoming more predominent than the story itself. Gerarde Genette calls this "paratext" which is the collection of materials and stories that surround the original narative.

If anybody here is familiar with the personalities of the World Wrestling Federation you have been exposed to this. Hit the site and each of the so called "Superstars" is involved in a feud or alliance with the other "Superstars". Each one has his or her story line and it unfolds week- after - week and match after match. This business is huge in North America and millions of people follow the WWF as though it were some kind of cult. One of the biggest is "The Rock".

His story lately is that, in order for him to star in the movie "The Mummy Returns", he was suspended from the WWF. Once that finished he returned and started feuding with his arch nemesis, Booker-T.
Now watch the matches on TV. Rock appears, the crowd goes wild and thousands of "Pro Rock" hand lettered signs, held up by rabid fans, appear on the screen. So we have the Rock live. But I can also purchase the Ninentendo WWF game and have Rock on the screen. I can hit the WWF web site and purchase Rock videos or T-Shirts or go to Times Square in New York and purchase a Rock T-shirt. I can read about him in Rolling Stone because he is on the cover. I can visit his personal site. I can participate in a number of internet chats and contribute my stories and theories to other rabid fans. What we have here is a classic example of paratextuality revolving around a "property" of the World Wrestling Federation that has, in fact, not become "The Rock" but a number of "Rocks".

As Lunenfeld so succinctly puts it, "The result of such dubious corporate synergy is the blending of the text and the paratext, the pumping out of the undifferentiated and unfinished product into the electronically interlinked mediasphere. Final closure of narrative can not occur in such an environment because there is an economic imperative to develop narrative brands; products that can be sold and resold".

Never forget, Digital Media is as much an ecomic medium as it is a creative medium and that stories will soon need as much of a return on investment as they do on personal satisfaction and experience. Our stories, as I have pointed out, are now moving across multiple media and have to change to meet the needs of that media.

What I find absolutely fascinating about the concept of "unfinish" is not the fact it is digital or technological or even driven by the profit imperative.

What makes Interactive Story Telling so compelling is that it is rooted in communications history and starts with orality, moves through textuality becomes experiential through interactivity and somehow the story never ends as it moves into a state of unfinish.

What we do started tens of thousands of years ago when somebody turned to somebody else and said, "Here's what happened out there."

If as I pointed out, our stories will never finish, then how do I end this lecture knowing that I really can't end it? Simple. I choose to.

Thank you.

The Art of the Interactive Story Teller
EMMA Lecture,
Hamburg, Germany.
October 2001