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.

Rapid Sims – A case study

What does this motley crew have to do with Rapid Sims? This is the Caspian team picking up an award for best learning game and simulation at the eLearning awards in London.

The award was presented for work on The Rome Game – a game that takes players back in time to ancient Rome where in their role as a futuristic Time Knight they must solve mysteries to protec the integrity of time from those that would change it.

This was our first game developed with our authoring tool Thinking Worlds 3.0. This enabled a very complex game with 48 different scenarios, 20+worlds and hundreds of historical characters and artefacts to be delivered end to end in six months. I’ll publish some examples of TW3.0 in a bit but for now I’ll share the award submission document as a case study.

Virtual Worlds….. Big Business

This is a short article i wrote for a UK newspaper. Linked to issues of browser based 3D games it discusses what I see as converging forces within Virtual Worlds, Casual Games and Social Networking. The winners will win big.

FREGGERS, Weemee, Minilife, Maple Story and Habo Hotel. They’re peculiar names, but potentially society-changing tools for a whole generation of young people – and they’re very big business.