COLLABORATIVE

STORYTELLING
OR

“How to gamejack for fun and profit!”

INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING
The term was allegedly coined by veteran game
designer Chris Crawford, a main proponent and
developer and creator of “storytron.com” who defines
interactive storytelling as:

"a form of interactive entertainment in which the

player plays the role of the protagonist in a
dramatically rich environment."
 (NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH…)

INTERACTIVE FICTION
 Democracy: Fiction or Non-Fiction?
 How reliable are the masses?
"Ask 100 people to answer a question or
solve a problem and the average answer will
often be at least as good as the answer of the
smartest member. With most things, the
average is mediocrity," but, "with decision-
making, it’s often excellence... as if we’ve
been programmed to be collectively smart."

-James Surowiecki
“The Wisdom of Crowds”
 THEN: Fireside Stories
 The lost art of the Bard…
[Greek] poems followed a strict meter – dactylic
hexameter – 18 syllables per line with special stress. They
were highly formulaic, including epithets (“gray-eyed
goddess Athena”), familiar scenes (banquets, funerals),
and traditional stories (the Trojan War). What literary
scholars discovered is that these rigid structures permitted
Homer and other bards the ability to deliver epic poetry in
dactylic hexameter while composing in real time during a
recital performance! Even as these formulae enabled
composition, they also constrained innovation; as a result,
these formulae effectively ensured that the content of the
poems changed only minimally across generations.

http://wisdomtools.com/documents/HCII2005-Siegel-final4.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L7VTH8ii_8
 NOW: Self-Publishing

http://www.webook.com/
http://www.thisisby.us/

http://www.lulu.com/
RPGs
Role Play
or “Roll” Play?
 Shared Authoring
“Y.A.R.N”: http://cheats.gamespy.com/web-games/yarn-gamespy/

http://www.woodenboat.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-48628.html

http://rootclip.com/
 “Secrets of Interactive Storytelling”
By Ernest W. Adams
(No longer available online – retrieved via google cache from www.next-gen.biz

Granularity refers to the frequency with which a

game switches back and forth between interactive
material and narrative, non-interactive material. A
game like StarCraft has large granularity. You
play a whole mission, lasting anywhere from 20
minutes to a couple of hours, before you get any
more story.

STRONGLY RELATED: http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit/body_interactive_narratives_revisit.htm

Linear Stories
Story with either with large granularity
(StarCraft) or small granularity (Half-Life).
The story is on a rail. Nothing the player
does can change the future. He can end
the game prematurely by losing, but that’s
all. The story only has one ending.

“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams

Branching Stories
In these, the player's decisions, or sometimes his
skill at overcoming challenges, determines how
the plot line branches. The more frequently this
occurs, and the more options he has at each
branch point, the more material the designer has
to create. The story can have multiple endings.
The classic example was Wing Commander III, a
large-granularity game whose plot lines branched
depending on how well you did at the combat
missions you flew.

“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams

Foldback / Multilinear Stories
The story branches out for a while, but
eventually it returns to an inevitable event
that the player has to pass through no
matter what. Then it branches again, before
folding back to another inevitable event.
This is the traditional adventure game
structure, and they usually have only one
ending.

“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams

Linear Stories W/ Optional Side Quests
The RPG solution. The overall quest is
linear, but in the meantime the player has
the option to take a ton of side quests—
subplots, if you like—to build up his stats
enough to let him take on the main
challenge. He can usually abandon a side
quest without penalty if he wants to.

“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams

Emergent Stories
This means stories that arise out of the core mechanics of the
game, without any narrative (non-interactive) elements or formal
organization. The story is supposed to "just happen."

Unfortunately, there aren’t many examples of this. People point to

The Sims, but I see The Sims as more of a story-generation tool
than a story-telling game. Players like to make up stories about
their Sims, but the players don’t really feel as if they’re participating
as a character themselves. The only game I’ve ever seen that felt
as if it really generated emergent stories was one called King of
Dragon Pass, which used a database of characters and a database
of character-agnostic situations to generate a story-like sequence
of events. It would mix and match the characters and the situations
to produce new outcomes.

“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams

 (AND IN CONCLUSION…)

EMERGENT PROPERTIES
Along with “Collaborative Storytelling,” is one of
Dave Szulborski’s proposed “Elements of ARG,” it
can be defined as:

“The secondary or unexpected attributes beyond

game’s main stated intent. While not technically
an element of traditional games, emergent
properties are still important in all good games
and game design.”