Category: Story

Writing about story, storytelling and narrative, in theory and practice.

What shape is a story?

A blog post is the wrong shape for pulling together strands from The Story. The day was enormously disparate – so many tales – but there were common strands that tied talks together across disciplines and across wildly varying conceptions of narrative and of story.

Listen. Because listening generously creates an articulate speaker. Moments in Karl James’s deeply moving talk stuck out for me like sore thumbs: I am not a journalist, he said, and therefore I get a better story. I can ask more questions. How do my questions differ from what journalists ask?

As a journalist, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. Always you try to listen, but always you have the shape of the story to contend with. Literally, in some cases, for print: the story is a certain shape, a certain length and width and height with a certain size and shape of picture that goes with it; the form is constrained and constraining, and the questions you ask end up being designed to elicit answers that fit in and with the space you have available. The story gets chopped up into pieces, and the parts that fit become canonical while the rest are left as fragments that do not get retold. Good journalism is surgery.

Fragments. The idea that stories are falling apart, narratives disintegrating into small pieces that carry meaning by themselves but that are no longer embedded into larger story structures. And that by escaping from stable structures these fragments become building blocks, “accreting like coral” (to borrow @glinner’s phrase) and forming new, more serendipitous narratives.

This is a problem I’ve been running up against in journalism since I started journalisting – stories that in former times could be pinned to the page or confined to the lead slot on the evening bulletin can’t be, any more. They twist and turn and escape their boundaries. There is always more that can be said, context to the content the curators choose – like the video Adam Curtis showed of an interview in Helmand, where, once you reached outside the shape the story had to fit, you found an even more fascinating narrative, that fascinated more because it didn’t make sense – because it felt real, because it wasn’t neat or tidy or enclosed. Grand narratives are disintegrating, being questioned and contextualised in unexpected ways by the people formerly known as the audience.

Some speakers at The Story – Phil Gyford, Lucy Kimbell – are tackling this head-on in fields that aren’t (necessarily) newsgathering. Journalists should be talking to other storytellers, because all sorts of people are dealing with this fragmentation of narrative and they’re doing it innovatively and creatively and we are idiots if we are not looking for the links and the lessons between news storytelling and other creative practices.

Because the coral accretions of those fragments become things like The IT Crowd, or Cornelia Parker‘s objects that carry huge cultural significance despite being divorced from their original contexts. Like atoms in the ether, stories bubble into existence and coalesce whether there is anyone there to “read” them or not; like our host Margaret Robertson’s declaration that our clothes tell stories about ourselves; like @kcorrick’s Sole of The Story. Like conference notes that become art objects and accrue their own stories. And like LARPers frothing about zombies and turning fragments of experience into solid narratives, curating the experience themselves.

And because stories are still hugely powerful, and not always benign. Jane, in Karl James’s Dialogue Project, warns against becoming your story, when that story is damaging or damaged. Mark Stevenson recasts the metanarrative of global disaster into a story about how everything is getting better, really. Matt Adams uses text messages to tell stories with teenagers, in an attempt to shape a world where they are more informed and more aware of difficulties facing them. Cultures tell grand stories to themselves, to define themselves, and a grand story can shape as well as define.

This blog post doesn’t have a beginning or a middle, and it isn’t really going to have an end. I’m rewiring my brain to cope with new concepts – I genuinely feel like several speakers yesterday took the top of my head off and I am still finding unexpected cogs in peculiar places and gluing the results back together. There will be more, I am certain.

[edited to add link to Antony Mayfield’s summary of Adam Curtis’s talk]

Zombies and stories

I’m still collecting my thoughts from The Story yesterday – so much to digest & absorb from some absolutely fantastic speakers in all sorts of disciplines. I’m going to blog once I’ve significantly rewired my brain to take in all that was said, but in the mean time, here are my slides and notes from the talk I made (including all the bits I skipped over because I ran out of time). I think there’s going to be an audio podcast uploaded too – I’ll add the link once it’s up.

Zombie LARP – a story machineNotes after the jump. Continue reading Zombies and stories

Knocking them undead

Tomorrow, I’m going to be doing some Proper Public Speaking for the first time since I was a precocious 7-year-old. I’m speaking at The Story, and I’m privileged to be speaking alongside a host of amazing storytellers, artists, builders, makers, photographers, creators and other folks who do awesome things with narrative.

I’m going to be talking about Zombie, which last night sold out its ninth event in just five hours – talking about how we generate emergent stories, what systems we use to encourage and nurture and later curate stories born from player activity, in a community-oriented and word-of-mouth focussed way. The talk is called The Story Machine. I’ll post up my notes and slides after the event, but here as a teaser is one of my favourite images – drawn by the lovely and long-suffering @gshowitt.

The Story Machine
The Story Machine

David Cameron is Voldemort. No, seriously.

I’ve lost count of the number of articles on the student demos that start like this: Where did the passion come from? Why are students – schoolchildren – teenagers – taking to the streets in their thousands to protest, all of a sudden? Isn’t this the apathetic generation who doesn’t care about anything?

Frankly – no, no it’s not. I don’t think it ever has been. But the popular media has told itself, and the rest of us, a very sad story about young people that isn’t entirely true, and it’s not a surprise to see the mainstream media startled by a sudden, vocal proof that one of their favourite narratives just doesn’t work.

The mainstream media delights in telling stories about terrifying, terrible youth. Soaring youth crime and inner-city gangs. The fattest teenager in Britain. Pregnant at 13. Asbos. Yobs are taking over the streets. 12-year-olds encouraged to have sex early. Drug-infested schools. And yes, these are cherry-picked, but it’s easy to find dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories like this, many with the same or similar headlines. It’s much harder to find positive stories on youth that feed into such well-known narratives – a good news story about young people is framed as an anomaly, proof that our Asbo-ridden drug-taking pregnant yobbish terrible youth is not quite as broken as we all, of course, thought.

Sure, the media reports prodigies too – and then delights in their downfall. And when a child star fails to fall, there are gleeful attempts to toss them down – vile upskirt photos of Emma Watson on the front page of the Star; jeering at the temerity of Daniel Radcliffe to appear naked on stage. Positive, uplifting role models for our teenagers, that we rip apart for sport. For newsprint.

But for thousands of young people the stories just don’t hold true. They aren’t pregnant at 15, or drinking on street corners, or morbidly obese, or on heroin, or committing knife crimes. They’re just trying to grow up. And for those children – the ones we see marching on the streets now – there’s another story that resonates much more strongly with their lives.

So let’s talk about Hogwarts, Harry Potter and the Idealised Transition Into Adulthood. Let’s talk about the series of books that has defined a generation’s relationship to its school days, to its society, even to itself. The teenagers on these demos are far more likely to have read Harry Potter than any newspaper, at all – not only because the books speak to them but because the media speaks about, of and for them instead, and not in a very pleasant way.

Harry Potter offers an escape. It offers a world where Broken Britain barely intrudes at all, and the realities of everyday life – broken homes, morbid obesity (Dudley), vicious child abuse – are left behind Harry as soon as he enters Hogwarts – as soon as he enters education. And within those walls is a world where bullying is rife and problematic, sure, but teenage pregnancy, drugs, alcohol, knife crime, all the myriad vices that the Daily Mail ensures us are endemic in today’s teenage culture – they simply don’t exist. Here’s a story that helps middle-class kids make sense of themselves without telling them they’re failures. Harry Potter is even a pioneering ground for participatory media – it’s not such a huge leap from fanfic and forum roleplay to the sorts of joined-up stories and easy control of narrative that pervades the UCL occupation.

Most importantly, let’s talk about the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series, where education (in the form of Hogwarts itself) has finally come under such strenuous and sustained attack that our heroes decide to go rogue. Throughout the whole series politicians are weak, easy to manipulate, refusing to listen to children until it’s too late. They appoint Dolores Umbridge. They fail to notice the return of Voldemort. They fail to act decisively. They fail.

And throughout the series the children’s appeals to authority fail, but hard work and persistence and simply Being Right is enough to prevail in the end. Until the end, when, in a world without Dumbledore’s kindly smile to smooth over the cracks, the teenage heroes – sixth-formers, let’s not forget – must take on the assembled weight of the entire political system to try to prevent that system from destroying itself. For the sake of education, they fight, and they die.

Stories – especially popular, populist, wildly successful books, especially fairy tales and moral tales like this one – are a culture telling stories to allay its fears, to resolve the conflicts it fears will shatter it in two, to make sure there is a happy ending after all. They are like dreams, in that they enable the body conscious to process difficult events, working them into a pattern, a narrative that makes sense and which they can survive. David Cameron is Voldemort. Nick Clegg is shaping up to be Professor Quirrell, but he’s also got a shot at being Snape – in tomorrow’s vote on education cuts and university fees we’re all expecting him to kill Dumbledore, and only time will tell whether he’ll be redeemed by his later actions.

The media and popular politics paints teenagers as bad guys, as problems, as passive blanks or as villains. Harry Potter paints them as our saviours – our righteous, furious, glorious saviours who will do what’s right, even if it looks wrong to us, because it’s what’s necessary. Even if it’s violent. Even if it gets them into trouble. Because the world will be a better place in the end.

Why on earth are we surprised when they take to the streets?

Wikileaks, cultural discourse, and why the leaks might not make a big difference

In 1985 American literary critic Jane Tompkins published a book, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. It was an attempt to attract critical attention to novels – often bestsellers – that had been traditionally ignored or even panned by the canon-makers who dominated literary criticism. It represented an opening up of “low” art to “high” critical modes. Among other books, it looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin not just as a sentimental novel but as a persuasive political text that swayed the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. It credits it with an important role in the Civil War – that of getting the word out and making it cool to be anti-slavery.

Tompkins talks about bestselling fiction as cultures speaking to themselves. Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown’s works aren’t just bestsellers because they have a good story or they’re wonderfully written – if anything, they suceed despite that. What those books all do is take a central cultural dilemma and work it out in a safe, controllable way, helping to assuage the fears and worries of millions of readers and allowing them to reimagine the world with those conflicts resolved.*

Journalists are just as much a product of the cultures we write in and about, no matter how much we’d like to pretend otherwise sometimes. Perhaps the only exception is Wikileaks, because it’s outside national cultures; even so, its journalism work is subject to the same forces and influences as the rest of us.

Yesterday Wikileaks published, simultaneously with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, 92,000 logs from the war in Afghanistan that show the conflict at its most naked and basic. There are too many of the documents for the picture to be clear at this stage – there’s still a lot of work to be done – but the three news organisations have already done a great deal of work towards stitching coherent narratives together to make stories for easy consumption.

But the story resists consumption. There is no easy line through the logs that builds a narrative anyone can agree with; the documents are sticky and difficult and present problems that are simply insurmountable. As Wikileaks fouder Julian Assange said today:

The real story is that it is war, it’s one damned thing after another. It’s the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces (…) This is the story of the war since 2004 and like most of the accidents that occur in the world, they are as a result of cars not buses, most of the deaths in this war are the event of the everyday squalor of war, not the big incidents.

But that’s not a comfortable story that gets us to sleep at night. It’s not our brave boys or the illegal war or Private Jessica Lynch, whichever version of the story you read. The good guys aren’t so great and the bad guys aren’t easily identifiable and everything is blurred right down to the level of individual decisions that might or might not be right, on the ground, in that time and place. That’s not a story that assuages any fears or resolves any conflicts neatly or easily.

And for that reason, I agree with @jayrosen_nyu. He says:

I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

Journalism, like literature, is a culture speaking to itself, defining itself, creating and reinventing itself. Whether fiction or non-fiction, a good story has to be in the right place at the right time in order to make real change within a culture. Yesterday’s Afghanistan log disclosures aren’t safe, or pretty, or easily understood. They don’t tell a story that anyone can nod along to. They don’t lend themselves to easy summation or even a coherent narrative. They remind us that the situation is far more complicated than we normally imagine. And I don’t think that’s a story we want to tell ourselves right now.

* Because those are all relatively recent works, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely which conflicts they’re resolving and how. If I had to: Harry Potter is dealing with anti-technology backlash, fear of rapid change, desire for an underlying order in a world without metanarratives, and the fact that the good and the bad guys all look the same these days; Dan Brown is dealing with surveillance and secrecy fears as well as the terror of the destruction of metanarratives and the worry that there might actually be no underlying purpose for anything; and Twilight is tackling changing and confusing rules and mores in male and female sexuality and transposing them into a “safe” traditional narrative where everyone knows the rules. But it’ll take a good few years yet before the picture is as crystal clear as, say, the way Peyton Place’s popularity came from how it dealt with fears and growing understanding of human sexuality in the wake of the Kinsey Report.

The aesthetics of hyperlinking

This post is long, overdue, and wordy, and some of it was written while I had a fever. So I present as a pre-emptive antidote a very enjoyable and quite silly browser game about information overload.
Continue reading The aesthetics of hyperlinking

Exploring the read/write world

Paper boats carrying prayers across a sea of mapsYesterday, Nick Booth at Podnosh posted a transcript of a conversation on Twitter where he asked for useful analogies to describe the internet to people who’ve only experienced radio and tv.

The conversation – and the comments – got me thinking about the way metaphors limit what we can understand about the online world and affect how we use it, particularly the page/document conceptual metaphor that pervades our language.

We use print language constantly online. Web pages, archives, scroll, above the fold, inbox, email, post. The metaphor is pervasive and often goes unnoticed as we use the language that reinforces it, making it hard to tease out the implications and assumptions of this mindset.

But pages aren’t flat, static, words on the screen as we see in print papers. What happens if we call a page a node? Or a window? Or a stream, a fall, a flow, a conversation, a connection, a junction?

Conceiving of pages as stories, for instance, opens up the idea of letting journalists develop an entire story online, rather than in our notebooks. Posting complete transcripts of interviews, not just the quotes we think are important. Including raw footage alongside the edit for those who are interested. Asking at early stages of a project where users think we should be investigating more. Incorporating links to our research and visualisations of our data not when we think they are relevant but when we stumble across them.

Conceiving of pages as junctions makes flat print-like design stand out as inadequate – not fit for their intended purpose, which is to facilitate forward movement and choice for reader.

And what if, instead of a reader, we have a traveller? The idea of a reader implies commitment, passivity, and above all a text-based medium. A traveller is someone who can leave at any moment, and opens up the idea of the page as a literal place – a location that can be moved through and explored rather than a document.

Thinking of the web as a series of pages gets us print design replicated online, lacking the myriad subtleties that are possible in a space that is simultaneously a limitless sea of connections and a location and a conversation and a lot of other things. Essentially, it gets you the front page of the new Times website – pretty and clean, but flat and without the cues many travellers use to make meaningful journeys through the web.

Thinking of it in any other way at all requires seriously examining the words we use, and playing with putting others in their place. Each conceptual metaphor has its own problems – calling the internet a brain inadvertently implies the organised hivemind that Twitter users protest does not exist, for instance – but we need a library (or bathtub, or pantry) that’s full of different options in order to open up new ways of thinking about what’s possible online.

Home Sweet Home: Playing in the streets

Evening News: Home Sweet Home versionThere’s a cake shop next door, a giant hamster over the road and soldiers are fighting zombies on the roof. MARY HAMILTON welcomes you to the new-look Evening News.

Breaking news: the postman has delivered a letter.

That’s how most of the news comes in to the Home Sweet Home offices of the Evening News. It’s delivered by a tall man in short trousers, a flat cap and socks, who leaves the envelopes leaning up against the front canopy of the 20cm cardboard building.

I built the office myself, from flat-pack cutout to fully-fledged busy office building complete with newspaper bundles and Plasticene journalists, sharing glue, card and colouring pens with neighbours and strangers.

I even recreated Bernard Meadows’ eyecatching bronze ball sculptures, carefully rolling and squeezing yellow moulding clay and poking it gingerly with a pencil, before giving the rest of my clay to an excited six-year-old who wanted to make bees for her garden.

It is part of a performance – or perhaps an exhibition – called Home Sweet Home, the brainchild of Goldsmiths graduates Abigail Conway and Lucy Hayhoe, in which participants build their own city from flat-pack parts and then experience its evolution as it fills with people playing along.

Watching the tiny town sprout from a black and white canvas into a riot of colour in the extravagant surroundings of Blackfriars Hall was both surreal and sublime, as bizarre buildings and peculiar personalities developed thanks to the imagination of neighbours.

But when the letters began to arrive the town took on a new and magical dimension, with stories, greetings, and feats of collective imagination all emerging thanks to the postal service and the presenters at the radio station.

My letter reads: “Dear Editor, An escaped swan ate my shoes!  Please put it in your newspaper! Yours, Joz Norris, No. 188”.

Immediately I spring into action. I post a breaking news update on the billboard outside the office – crafted from matchsticks, card and successive layers of paper posters – and dash off a return letter asking for more detail about the attack.

Over time, petitions spring up on the community notice board. A campaign to build a public swimming pool gathers pace. Disgruntled residents try to force an election. A little girl who runs a flower shop donates a sponge-and-cocktail-stick floral display to my office.

A small zombie outbreak spreads and threatens other city properties, so the Evening News drafts in a local militia to fight them off. Other businesses welcome the zombies, selling them vintage clothes and inviting them in to a night club.

And I get another letter from Joz saying that he’s bought another pair of Doc Martens but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to look a swan in the eye ever again.

The whole experience is a testament to the power of play. Adults and children alike tap into the storytelling possibilities of the town, expressing their personalities through their houses and opening them up as the community evolves around them.

While some people come along, build houses and leave, those who stay build stories around their houses, and the whole community evolves and changes as the project progresses.

A giant hamster in the back garden of one house is asked to join the Spiegeltent as a performer. A few hours later he has moved to the circus with signs advertising his upcoming performances.

I spend the weekend doing what journalists do: asking questions, writing down stories, monitoring the notice board and answering letters, preparing for a burst of activity on Sunday night as I put the Home Sweet Home edition of the Evening News together.

The following day, when I return to Blackfriars Hall with a stack of miniature newspapers under my arm, the Spiegeltent has disappeared, replaced by a giant hamster run with tunnels, hoops and a swimming pool.

I arrive at the office to discover someone has stuck a giant red ball to my door, in imitation of the large inflatable ball currently touring Norwich as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. They are planted on the church, the fire station and the city hall, too.

For a short time this miniature cardboard community has been incredibly real. It has had action, politics, feuds, joy, fear and anger, and the people who created it have told hundreds of tiny stories that were, for a while, incredibly important, as they literally changed the way their city was constructed.

As the houses were dismantled and returned to their owners, I felt deeply privileged to have been present at the birth and the death of Norwich’s smallest suburb, and to have been able to tell just a few of the stories the residents created.

A version of this article and its accompanying miniature newspaper
were originally published in the Evening News
(www.eveningnews24.co.uk).

It’s Alive! Fostering emergent stories in Zombie

For those who don’t know, on Saturday I and a team of others ran the seventh Zombie LARP game. We’re hoping the next major event will be a big leap up in size, in ambition and in attendance. But before that happens I want to note down a few of our important principles – and important problems we need to solve.

What on earth is Zombie?

First, though, an explanation. Zombie is a live-action simulation game where people take it in turns to try to survive in an industrial complex overrun by the living dead. We run several scenarios over the course of the game, with a different group of people “surviving” in each one. When players aren’t trying to get out alive, they’re pretending to be zombies so that someone else can have a turn.

The game is a sort-of bastard child of traditional live-action roleplay (LARP) systems, fast-paced video games like Left for Dead, and the kinds of cowboys and Indians/summer water pistol games you played when you were a kid. The combat resolution system is based on Nerf guns (players shoot zombies) and a low-contact mechanic (zombies touch players on upper arms to represent biting, mauling etc.)

If you’ve read this and you still have no idea what we do, please leave a comment to tell me. I’m trying to improve my ability to explain the game to people who have never played a LARP or a video game before, so the experience would be useful.

How are we telling stories in Zombie?

Video games almost always have plot. Sometimes that plot is stretched over 50 or more insanely complex hours; sometimes it’s over in minutes so you can get on with killing things. Sometimes the storytelling is so deeply entrenched in the game that it’s inseperable from it; sometimes it’s abstracted from it so that the gameplay and the overarcing story are essentially separate entities. And sometimes the plot is about football.

Almost all LARPs are plot oriented. Some big games have top-down storytelling systems where world-changing events are affected by the big players in the game, while others have grass-roots player-oriented plot systems that allow even the most minor player characters to affect the universe.

In Zombie, plot takes a back seat to gameplay. Players might have twenty minutes at most to survive, and most of them won’t. That time seems a lot longer than it really is thanks to the game pacing and the adrenalin (much like the experience of riding a rollercoaster) but long-term character development is not an option, and neither is sticking around to watch the game world evolve. Zombie does have a wider plot system and the players can and do affect what happens, but when you’re running screaming down a corridor pursued by the undead trying to eat you, it’s impossible to take that in.

As refs and storytellers, we do several things to try and work with the game elements to make the game story rewarding. Most of these were worked out through trial and error and getting it badly wrong before we worked out how to get it right.

  1. Broad brushstrokes.We talk in bold black-and-white hyperbole. Every run is all-or-nothing, do-or-die. Players are given missions that affect the fate of the wider game world, so their actions carry weight and the game retains a sense of urgency.
  2. Metaplot and wider world. Zombie has an overarching plot framework that makes it possible to slot game events into place. There are several organisations in the game’s world – a shady scientific corporation, an armed resistance unit – and the real-time games take place within a framework created by the actions of those organisations.
  3. Sandboxing. Runs in Zombie are set up to be sandboxes where the players can take many different routes to the goal. We have set pieces for players to encounter – a room full of injured survivors, or a super-powerful zombie intent on taking them down – but those are never static events that play out in a pre-defined way. They are elements of the game world that add authenticity to the run without scripting players’ actions or requiring them to act in accordance with anything.
  4. Emergent stories.This is a common concept in video game design but in my experience is used much less outside specialist gaming environments. It refers to narratives that are uncovered or revealed during gameplay, and which require input from players to understand and piece together. For Zombie, I commonly use the term to describe stories about moments in the game that are unpredictable and unpredicted, that form unique and structured narratives, and that are the result of player interaction with their environment.

    And this is the important one. We try and make sure that after the chaos of the run, players have their own, personal stories to tell. We give them space beforehand to construct back story for themselves – encouraging team action – and we give them briefing time and attention afterwards to help them construct individual and group narratives about what happened. We try to give them tools and communities in which to tell those stories, we respond to them and retell them and incorporate them into the structure of the game.

Some stories filter out and fall. Others become local legends – the tale of the player who leapt six feet over a group of zombies only to later be mauled to death in a dead end, or the player who hid from the zombies successfully for twenty minutes before his mobile phone went off, alerting them to his presence (he died shouting “Now is not a good time!”). Last night one player managed to obliterate about 40 zombies with a heroic show of power – that story too will be permanently recorded in the mythology and mythos of the game. We give people awards for creating brilliant stories – often those awards are nothing but a shout out, a retelling of their story and a biscuit or a sticker, but they carry value and people strive to obtain them.

What’s so good about emergent stories?

Zombie is an activity that, at heart, is very difficult to share. It’s designed and conceived as a completely immersive experience while you’re playing, making it very hard to film video or take pictures. Backchannel chat, feedback and social sharing in real time are impossible. Very few images or films survive from our early events (though a couple of Youtube videos do get a steady stream of views and bring in occasional new interest three years later).

But even in the first game, our players found a way to share their experiences. They told stories to each other and to their friends, passing on their favourite experiences orally. Almost everything we’ve done with our storytelling framework since then has focussed on creating the brilliant moments that make those stories, and encouraging people to tell them.

In planning meetings we make lists of “moments of awesome” that will be memorable if they work right, things that will stick in the mind. We put single zombies in weird situations just in case a player stumbles across them. We make tableaux, design interesting characters for players to meet and memorable situations for them to meander into.

We try not to dictate the stories. More often than not they happen organically. We can’t make the player team split up and get lost; we can’t force someone to go to incredible lengths to avoid in-character death; we can’t ever guarantee that what we do will be the focus of player attention. More often than not our efforts simply go to create a better atmosphere for these experiences to occur. We make it easier, but it’s the players who make it work.

And we can’t dictate how the players ought to tell stories. We try to give them as many routes as possible online, both by creating our own community area and by using Facebook (and Twitter to a lesser extent) to curate and collect and encourage. Stories like this are ephemeral, and while we want people to tell them and we want a long-lasting record, we know we can’t rely on ever having one.

Many non-gaming events rely on video and images for a record. Increasingly, conventions and similar (relatively passive) events are relying on backchannel chat and the wider analysis of that conversation to provide useful data and a lasting record of what occurred. For us, the record lies in memory and in oral channels that are hard to replicate online – because of the immersive nature of the experience along with various technical issues, it’s impossible to get an idea of “what it’s like to be at Zombie” from any one medium. But when our players tell their emergent stories, that has immense value for us. It’s the best marketing possible because it comes with a direct endorsement and genuine enthusiasm. It’s an elusive currency but it’s vital to our survival and it’s been integral to our growth.

There are four main areas of uncertainty for me that arise from our approach, with questions that I don’t yet know how to answer. They are:

  1. How do we continue to foster personal, individual experiences and therefore stories while scaling our game upwards? If there are 180 players instead of 60, how does that affect our model?
  2. How can we encourage people to create and share content online that resonates with their emergent stories without sacrificing our immersive in-game experience? We already have teams going in with cameramen to film them, but the footage is necessarily low-quality and shaky and never reflects the full experience. How can we depict the game in ways that encourage emotional response and act as anchors for emergent stories in the same way that text can?
  3. How can this model apply to other events? How does it fit with (un)conferences and industry events? Networking events? Rallies? Fetes and carnivals? Riots and demonstrations? Is this another way of looking at and describing oral history? Or does this work to foster, encourage, document and curate emergent stories have journalistic potential?

If you have any suggestions for answers, or any more questions, please share them in the comments.

Assasin’s Creed: non-linear metanarrative

Assassin's Creed_AcreGamers now are accustomed to linear narratives, playing through a sequence of events with no choice or impact on the direction the story takes.

Most of us are getting used to branching narratives, simple option systems that open up differing dialogues, games areas and endings.

But Assassin’s Creed 2 is the first mainstream game I’ve played to make parts of the plot entirely optional and intentionally obscure.

First things first: I’m going to focus on Assassin’s Creed 2 in this post. There’s a lot to be said about narrative in the first game, but I’m the wrong person to write it because I found the cut scenes impossibly dull. So dull, in fact, that I generally went to put the kettle on while they happened. There are still plot points I’m unsure of as a result.

On the other hand, the second game cut scenes are slick, interesting and – crucially – well-voiced. Assassination scenes are limited to two or three sentences at most – sometimes still very incongruous, but much less flow-breaking and tea-inducing.

There are two congruent narratives running through the game – the story of Desmond, living in the present day, who has just escaped from the evil Templars who were forcing him to relive his ancestral memories, and is now working with the good Assassins, who are, um, asking him very nicely to relive his ancestral memories.

The second narrative is that of Ezio di Auditorre, the subject of Desmond’s memories and the main focus of the game. Desmond learns the Assassin skills he needs through living Ezio’s life, learning how to use a hidden blade and fall off incredibly tall buildings while suffering absolutely no ill effects. Oh, and some stuff about 15th-century Florentine intrigue and conspiracy.

Where things get interesting is the third narrative. The game doesn’t force you to get involved in what it neatly describes as “The Truth”. At no point does it force it on you. There are signposts but no map markers, hints but no spoilers, and not once are you hindered by choosing not to explore the hidden story.

At a fairly early point, Desmond is asked to find a weird glowing glyph on a building. If you do, you discover a password-protected encrypted file, and must solve a simple puzzle to reveal a snippet of narration and a video file.

There are 20 of these, each puzzle more difficult than the last. The videos and narration add up to reveal a vital and tantalising slice of the Assassin’s Creed backstory that provides clues to the next game and rounds out the game’s cliff-hanger ending in a very satisfying way. It leaves you with answers that lead to more questions.

But even within the puzzles there are more stories. Each puzzle takes real-world historical events, or great works of art, or scientific breakthroughs, and links them intricately to a massive web of conspiracy. Combined with Ezio’s narrative – which tallies closely with real-world events throughout – the game edges closer and closer to alternate reality territory.

And then you find the puzzles within the puzzles. Messages encrypted in Morse code within paintings within the glyphs, never acknowledged or explained. There are dozens of these, easy to miss, even easier to ignore, but each one is decipherable.

The impact of these little asides is not merely to problematise the existing story – adding vignettes and asides that most players simply are unaware of – but also to trouble the relationship between the game and the real historical events it links to. Forcing players to go beyond the fourth wall to decipher puzzles opens up the structure of the story to deeper interpretations than are possible in most games. Assassin’s Creed 2 positions itself, like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, as part fiction, part fact, and hence blurs the lines between the two. Complex analyses are springing up, not only solving the obvious puzzles but the hidden ones too, and players are using those analyses to attempt to uncover the “true” story of the game – the history of the Assassins and Templars. In effect, gamers are creating a fictional backstory using factual history and pointers from within the game. It’s a collaboration and a fascinating puzzle – and entirely optional.

Also it’s a lot of fun to throw yourself off tall buildings.