if:book:group

discussion: narrative, interactivity, play

Chris: So we've got a variety of different backgrounds. How much do all these different activities talk to one another? What can we learn from each other? Is something changing in storymaking? Or is everything much as it always was?

Bob: There's no doubt things are changing, though perhaps over longer period of time than we might think. John raised a fundamental issue, are we building a culture of marketised events or a culture of liberation? And what does liberation mean? We often talk about the forms we're inventing as though they're disconnected from human culture. Technicians talk about what machines can do, but at the end of the day it's not a fundamental question. There are bigger, harder questions. that's why i appreciated John's play the other night.

John: I play a few core roles in the group. I deliver narratives, sometimes direct, piece each show together like a techie. But the fundamental thing I do has been the same for thousands of years: it's the role of the shaman who takes us through our collective narratives. These days too many of us, the storymakers, have forgotten that role: taking people through a story so they can grow, step out of the cave.

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Simon: I like the idea of 'we the storymakers'. I love ARGs, but they're often a way of interacting with someone else's story. I like the idea of helping people bring their own stories into the open.

Chris: So is there a question of 'good' or 'bad' story? Is there such a thing?

Noga: In the books I'm reading there's a strong separation between humans and technology – as though technology is not a creative endeavour. There's this real fear of the post-human.

Simon: The idea that humans can create something 'unnatural' is odd.

Seb Mary: I've just completed a piece of work for Playstation where I had to write a new character into the Greek mythical pantheon. As a classically-educated lit boffin I wrung my hands about this, but then I realised people have been playing fast and loose with Greek myth for centuries. And actually the Playstation game itself is a lot closer to the gory spirit of Greek myth than most of the anodyne 'literary' appropriations. The old stories can show up in some surprising places.

James: As far as 'unnatural' goes, writers always deny how pervasive technology is. Almost all writers now work on a computer.

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Kate: And I realised the other day that though I write digital fiction my print novels barely ever mention someone going online.

Seb Mary: So how does the tech delivery affect how an ARG is told?

Dan: Perplex City was challenging, as the story was told through multiple sites and it was very hard to follow. So you got an 'engagement pyramid' with a small number very immersed, and the rest following from more of a distance.

Now that we're working with Channel 4, it's interesting discussing these issues with people who are used to telly-sized audiences: going from five million to 1,500 people. But instead of collecting ratings you can track every interaction with your audience, at every stage.

Chris: With new media writing you can do things without huge budget, which is exciting. There seems to be a huge potential for open-endedness around new tech.

John: There's also a huge cross-breeding of different memes. One of our key products is 'weaponised art': the idea that you take a piece of art and deliver it like a weapon, for change. The idea came out of a Superbowl ad where instead of fighting, Godzilla and a giant robot have sex and Godzilla births a baby Humvee. To me that's taking two hard-earned pieces of art, that came out of Hiroshima, and raping them for advertising. And that hummer is a weapon: people go to war to fill it with oil. It's weaponised, so we respond by weaponising our own art.

Simon: So do your own weaponised memes rape the icons too?

John: I've got to the point where my art is important to give everything up for. I do it for my kids: I'm terrified by the world we find ourselves in. But this question is levelled at FP a lot: how do we have the right?

Simon: So how do you?

John: Because we take our audience through a decoding that's aimed at revealing your true will. We also put our performers through the same process. Nothing we're doing is new: theatre has been doing this for the longest time. But you know you're hitting the mark if you get a few people walking out.

Lucy: It's interesting to see how people interact with technology. In the flesh people find it harder to interact. People shut down: they're used to having a screen between you and the content.

Noga: It's also changing a lot for children, even what we think children are. Children now have access to technology where they can be 'equal' as never before. That influences the way we think about them.

Chris: I remember a friend's 12-year-old worrying her parents sitting on her computer every night. It turns out she's writing fan fiction and uploading to a site where she gets peer-reviewed. Without education or parental support she's engaged in a writing workshop.

Simon: I'm a bit younger than most here: I grew up with the internet. What I found exciting was being listened to regardless of my age. I spent a lot of time in philosophy chatrooms, having conversations no-one would have with me in the real world. But peer-review online communities can be strange: you tend to get either friendly people but weak reviews, or else strict rules and a high quality of reviews.

Mary: So what about the quality of storytelling? Is it different if it's interactive?

Dan: We don't really know yet.

Simon: If we're start talking about interacting with a story, there's the potential for it to be very different.

Dan: It's the difference between doing something and thinking about it.

Kate: With Flight Paths I really want to explore what that interactivity means.

Noga: With shamans and oral storytelling, you can tell the same story a thousand times and it'll be different every time. Computer games try to replicate that experience of it being different every time. Maybe we can look at the history of print as something that held us back, now we can be free again.

Dan: I'm not a writer, but there are these rules of 'show' and 'tell': whether you tell someone something is happening, or take them through the experience of it happening. There's a lot we're still learning about how you take someone through a 'show' experience in an ARG.

John: I love ARGs, but I find it frustrating not to be able to see things in the flesh. In early shamanic cultures, a shaman might become someone's deepest fear, passion or dream, so they could experience that and go through it. There are lots of people now offering entertainment that's supposed to do that - but there's this jarring feeling.

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Bob: I've played a lot of computer games. Your [Dan's] description was eloquent, but have to ask: who cares? Sitting in this room, trying to figure something out, this is a journey, a microcosm, it's way more interesting than any game you can devise. Immediacy and presence are so important.

Chris: If the book represents self-expression and we're talking about the future of the book, where in our culture is self-expression happening? Is it ARGs, the theatre? Somewhere between the technology and the people there's a frenzy of experimentation going on. I wonder what it'll look like when we look back at a canon emerging.

Simon: Re what Bob said, there are a few projects trying to take the idea of achieving something in real life, and pulling people into it as if it were a game. For example I got involved with a technology project, '24 Weeks', that took some incredibly ambitious idea of totally transforming the web and treated it as a game. I walked in by accident and decide to get involved. But no-one told me what to do, I was left to engage with it in any way I wanted. There was no pathway, no direction, just this excitement. I saw lots of people arrive, but very few got past the stage of confusion and frustration: most just want to be managed.

I was just discovering ARGs at the time. I've always loved video games, but ARGs feel a bit more grass-roots – you don't need such massive resources, someone with paper and a bitof effort can create something worthwhile. I love the idea of a game that says it's not a game but asks you to achieve it in real life, and also of achieving something in real life via a game.

I've been experimenting with this with my friends, with varying degrees of success: you come up against limitations of time, ambition, decision-making, and also of groups getting annoyed at having a 'nice night out' turned into hard work. I'm not a qualified teacher and I realise this is the territory it's wandering into. We put an animation together in an evening; have lots of recorded conversations. It's fascinating, but I wouldn't say I've succeeded yet.