Interactive Stories

Anrick Bregman Interactive Director Unit9

The modern internaut is traveling in a galaxy far far away, a digital galaxy, experiencing something genuinely new, but based on something very old. How do the origins of our storytelling culture translate to the interactive medium of modern websites? The potential to create genuinely rewarding experiences is there, but the internet has to embrace emotions to reach it.

Stories Are Cultural Representations Of Ourselves And Our Collective Cultural History.

The Internet
Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure (1). As far as technological advances go, the internet is one of the more significant of recent times. In our modern world, websites are transforming how we do just about everything: maps, music, news, friends, strangers, naked strangers, live cameras, on bombs, history, celebrities, lies, truth, medical help, films, home videos, music, books, pizza, your house, my house, football, feedback, insults, dialogue, micro networking, micro targeting, et cetera et cetera. The number of ways with which we now interact with websites is incredible and the internet is changing almost on a daily basis, fueled by both technology and ideas.

But after a deep breath and a moment to reflect on all of this, there is one key question I am left with. How do our stories transfer to this medium. In and amongst all the varieties of websites, and the many different ways to interact with them, there must surely also be a great new way to interact with emotionally driven stories and experiences? What is the interactive equivalent of the film, or book? Yes, there is YouTube. And there are blogs, and podcasts. But what about the next level? To put it another way, how can we tell an engaging story on the internet if a click is not quite the same as turning a page, and the screen is still not quite able to live up to the smell and feel of holding a printed book in your hands, or watching something in the cinema with Dolby surround sound?

The Interactive Story
Stories amplify basic human behavior. They reflect our ambitions, hopes, fears, traumas and triumphs. They bring us undeniable truths about ourselves and each other. They are experiences which not only entertain but also deal directly with real social and cultural issues. "Stories allow our individual actions or observations to be shown in a cultural, social, or political context. Stories are cultural representations of ourselves, and of our collective cultural history." (2)

Through the internet, the methods with which we tell stories are slowly changing, multiplying, and diversifying, but a good story is still just as easy to define, and just as hard to create as it has always been. Simple, memorable, offering a journey, and most important, a powerful ending, a revelation, and moments of profound happiness or sadness. But interactive storytelling is new because it allows the reader to control the flow and direction of the story. The reader constructs their own version, and comes to their own conclusions. This works in games, but also in brand campaigns, educational applications, social networking and even virtual worlds. The concept of a truly interactive story has its origins in the Choose Your Own Adventure books, where several endings would be presented on different pages for readers to choose from. Fast forward to today and we have a huge diversification of this form of storytelling, a medium which has proven its creative and commercial potential. But the promise for the modern internaut of using this medium as a place for emotive experiences has not yet been realized.

Brands can play a major role in shaping online culture into a medium which is experienced, not just browsed.

Challenge 1: Playing
The reasons for this are many. To begin with, the attention span of the modern internaut is notoriously short. Our collective obsession with speed, refreshes and single sentence updates, creates chaos; a drain, where all the knowledge is mixed, where the deep and the trivial coexist. A blurred collective brainwave where multitasking is the modus operandi and playing is thought of as solely an amusing past time. I think that brings us to a big misconception with emotional experiences. We need to challenge the common assumption that anything to do with interactivity is light entertainment. We should challenge that clicking is playing, and therefore trivial in nature or intent. Why not charge our experiences with real, and sometimes serious cultural or social context? Why not create interactive content that links to our fears, hopes or collective painful memories, just like they do with our pleasures and fantasies? Why not use the medium to explore all types of stories?

An extreme example: Shindler's List is widely viewed and highly regarded and no one feels guilty for watching it. But when game developer Luc Bernard released an online game about the Holocaust, it was lambasted for being highly inappropriate. There were feelings of anger in response to the idea of 'playing' with this sensitive subject. It shows how experiencing a story is still very much misunderstood. Through computers and the internet, "learning by doing becomes the rule rather than the exception. Since computer simulation of just about anything is now possible, one need not learn about the frog by dissecting it." (3)