The future of Storytelling

According to researchers at MIT and Hollywood, the Story is under threat in our always on distracted world. Not sure that I’d agree with that after just watching series 5 of The Wire and the Christmas Doctor Who and reading A Thousand Splendid Suns. However, I am a big advocate of the power of narrative and stories as simulators that run on minds – so an initiative bringing great minds and money to spread the word on stories perks my interest.

The Centre for Future Storytelling is a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios who are investing $25million over seven years to fund the project. The project aims to -

“revolutionize how we tell our stories, from major motion pictures to peer-to-peer multimedia sharing. By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web”

Frank Moss, the director of the MIT Media Lab – “The challenge is to acknowledge the inevitability of change, that kids especially take media in small chunks continuously now. My dream is that the depth of stories to convey meaning, importance and emotion can be preserved in this world of on-the-run multiple media. Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human.”  Hear hear.

Stories and narrative – ‘simulators that run on minds’

I seem to have heard a lot about stories, narrative and learning recently. A couple of projects we are working on require the use of overarching narrative within the learning games. These methods were specifically requested by the clients to drive deeper learner engagement and higher performance. In conversations with Donald Clark, he points out the complex narrative present in many popular TV shows and video games. In part this is a response to the current media backlash against the Internet and digital media as learning and social medium – turning us into pancake people, highly distracted learners who have neither the time nor skills to reflect deeply on the avalanche of information available to us. So we know a little bit about a lot of things but without any depth. Donald, quite rightly rejects this notion and as part of this rejection he points to the complex storylines of TV drama The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost, 24 etc. These demand high levels of analysis and reflection to unravel plots, character intentions and motives.

A great article in Gamasutra describes a renaissance in narrative design through releases such as Bioshock, Façade and Far Cry 2. Games designers have long since recognized the power of narrative to engage and motivate players. Next Gen is driving new levels of innovation in modular story design and increasing player freedom to be able to create their own narrative within games.  So, all of this has had me thinking about the how and why of integrating narrative into the design of Immersive Learning Simulations.             

 

By happy coincidence an article in the Scientific American landed in my inbox entitled “The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn. Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind”