Narrative Design: Friday, April 21st, 3:15 p.m. - PANEL NOTES
Siobhan O'Flynn moderating, with Colin Craig (Henderson Bas), Geoff Lillemon (oculart.com + modernista), Ron Gervais (iamstatic.com), Joshua Hirsch (bigspaceship.com).
SO: the whole question of story in the interactive environment, I don't agree that every interactive project has a story, so when brainstorming, e.g., does storytelling figure into it?
JH: sometimes the client has a story, a total agenda... sometimes it's a secret, like with War of the Worlds, got almost no assets, other times they keep just certain parts secret, so you end up doing kind of a prequel. In terms of working it sounds alot like working on a game, you describe what is done, you do this, and then this, etc. but a lot of that doesn't survive through production. Also, beginning, middle, end question, we don't often do that, it's rare, commercials have beginning, middle, end but interactive doesn't usually.
GL: it's almost like going from one media to the next, if you leave them with questions, then they are encouraged to go see the movie
SO: with Oculart, is it about story or experience...
GL: The story is in the creation process, was it long and tedious or whatever... like meeting someone, there's a flutter at the beginning, then there's the work and in the end its almost heartbreaking to leave... at the end you see it all and the process is in there somehow, you see it altogether.
RG: Your work is like other media, the aesthetic is full of the process, and that is pretty unique in a cool media like the net where it's hard to get things to emote.
GL: I'm working on a music project now using jazz, and like brainscanning that can pick up emotional variables, so the idea is that you composite pieces of music to generate a feeling.
SO: Are you designing for story or experience? Geoff's thing seems to be about emotion, not traditional narrative, not sequential.
GL: If you put things in sequence, it's never experienced the same way twice, but the pieces aren't necessarily very meaningful.
JH: In our work, if you strip away the structure, then the emotion is what is left.
CC: You are seeing more evocative work on the web because of the people who are working in the online environment; also it's about restrictions, you can only do so much in the kind of timeframe that you have people's attention for.
RG: I'm not sure that you can even apply the storytelling model to this environment, the fact that you have to click into an experience, you have to click and click but you can walk away at any time.
audience question: When you work on something, do you always start with a scenario and a frame of mind?
JH: Yeah, that's how we start out, even if it doesn't work out in the end, you have to incorporate the use and you imagine how they are going to "play" through things but then it doesn't always work how you think it's going to.
audience question: You don't have to have a linear narrative to tell a story; it's like a piece of art, there is no beginning or end... the Web generates certain circumstances, a certain situation, then developers have tools to make that... the new art will be made by engineers, because of the nature of Web tools, there are new possibilities.
CC: It's interesting that there are new narrative forms, the user experience is in relation to new kinds of experience; sometimes we can compete, sometimes we can't... we are limited but if we are going to contribute it's going to be through the things that are unique to our medium, like interactivity... but clicking buttons is not much different than flipping pages. The other thing is incorporating data; you see elements of it in blogs, in Yugo Nakamura's NEC site where user submissions grow leaves on trees and NEC plants real trees based on the number of trees "grown" by user submissions. Probably that was conceived of as a narrative.
JH: Will Wright's new game Spore - you start as a cell and grow into a creature, then a tribe, then a city, then a universe; the creatures populating your world are created by other people playing, drawn from data saved.
audience question: Like Twin peaks, the David Lynch thing; it evolved week after week. What if each time you visit, you get a different technology, image one time, video the next?
JH: With Flash 8, Grant Skinner was talking about interacting with mouse movement, not just clicks.
GL: I like the idea of aging websites... over 60 years, e.g. a site could alter, change, learn as it gains knowledge. You could give a website a lifespan.
RG: It's all about simulation; our reference to narrative is through the experience we've already had when we sit down to experience something on the Web, but there is no website that will provoke me to cry, or make you want to gush about it.
GL: But waht about a multi-player game and then something tragic happens?
RG: Gaming is a different thing all together, and it's true the best narrative sort of things online involve gaming.
CC: Scale is a big issue, there is so much money behind gaming; we can only make small experiences online by comparison. You'll notice online that there is a real individual sense, there are really no rules, the types of styles are far more individual and idiosyncratic, so despite all the problems it's really an ideal world.
RG: How the web is delivered to us is maybe determinative, e.g., having a wireless mouse, being comfortable and watching in the dark might open up some possibilities.
CC: Yeah, you are fighting so many things, lights are on, people are around, couriers are arriving... you are sitting up at a desk.
audience question: I work with Josh, but we did a campaign for the show Lost and it was wildly successful. We didn't think of it as a game but that's how people referred to it; it's not limited by our experience of other media; people bring their experience of other media to the Web.
CC: Where you took advantage of the media was with the fact that you can't control time; people explore at their own pace, the story unfold non-linearly.
SO: If you think about narrative spatially, then you don't think about it linearly. Also, before we lose it, Lost leveraged what people already know.
JH: Yeah, there was a barcode on the site that didn't mean anything and thousands of people downloaded it and tried to "decode" it. (laughter)
audience question: What is the definition of narrative? You're using it interchangably with experience. It is a confusion that also confuses the idea of authorship. If data is driving something it's not going to be as intentionally emotional as when a person is authoring it.
RG: There's a lot of talk about experience. I'm still trying to figure out what that is about. Narrative painting e.g. can tell a story but it is a still single image.
CC: My wife is an ESL teacher and they talk about people's experience as a narrative. I work in advertising where there is little opportunity to tell real stories but we still use that language to describe what we do. There is a vogue to incorporate your product into a story, e.g. Diesel. It's related to product placement in movies and games.
RG: It's something that we use to translate into an enjoyable experience.
GL: The idea of pulling in things, like the weather generating "story" with variables... can still create an experience.
CC: It's partly about how many options you build into it, the choose your own adventure model, 10 possible endings is a sort of superficial use of interaction as opposed to an infinite number of possible endings.
SO: HiRes is doing very resistent websites, not easy to get into and that is very interesting.
RG: Maybe it's just that no one has put enough money into an online web project.
CC: The gaming industry has, e.g. Warcraft, there is a new personal style.
audience question: What is good storytelling online? Can you give examples?
GL: Wikipedia.
JH: Web cartoons.
RG: I believe i've made my position clear.
SO: Certain puzzles lend themselves very well, that put the user into the position as detective, tracing the narrative, e.g. the Grudge, you know what your role is, so narrative and experience go hand in hand. If you understand the deep structure, you can design something very very rich.
audience question: Is there something that evolves beyond the web to other technology or devices?
GL: Yes definitely GPS, hot spots... we're doing something called locative cinema,
walks and rocks...
...
[bloggers questions: What about Hilman Curtis for short narrative or iamstatic's project last year called Growth & Pattern? There was a lot of narrative stuff there.
What is the reading experience that we are trying to compare to? And as Margot Knight asked what is the knowledge experience of reading online? You don't write a book and send it out to a focus group and then change the location or add a character or create a new event because of what they say.] permanent link
SO: the whole question of story in the interactive environment, I don't agree that every interactive project has a story, so when brainstorming, e.g., does storytelling figure into it?
JH: sometimes the client has a story, a total agenda... sometimes it's a secret, like with War of the Worlds, got almost no assets, other times they keep just certain parts secret, so you end up doing kind of a prequel. In terms of working it sounds alot like working on a game, you describe what is done, you do this, and then this, etc. but a lot of that doesn't survive through production. Also, beginning, middle, end question, we don't often do that, it's rare, commercials have beginning, middle, end but interactive doesn't usually.
GL: it's almost like going from one media to the next, if you leave them with questions, then they are encouraged to go see the movie
SO: with Oculart, is it about story or experience...
GL: The story is in the creation process, was it long and tedious or whatever... like meeting someone, there's a flutter at the beginning, then there's the work and in the end its almost heartbreaking to leave... at the end you see it all and the process is in there somehow, you see it altogether.
RG: Your work is like other media, the aesthetic is full of the process, and that is pretty unique in a cool media like the net where it's hard to get things to emote.
GL: I'm working on a music project now using jazz, and like brainscanning that can pick up emotional variables, so the idea is that you composite pieces of music to generate a feeling.
SO: Are you designing for story or experience? Geoff's thing seems to be about emotion, not traditional narrative, not sequential.
GL: If you put things in sequence, it's never experienced the same way twice, but the pieces aren't necessarily very meaningful.
JH: In our work, if you strip away the structure, then the emotion is what is left.
CC: You are seeing more evocative work on the web because of the people who are working in the online environment; also it's about restrictions, you can only do so much in the kind of timeframe that you have people's attention for.
RG: I'm not sure that you can even apply the storytelling model to this environment, the fact that you have to click into an experience, you have to click and click but you can walk away at any time.
audience question: When you work on something, do you always start with a scenario and a frame of mind?
JH: Yeah, that's how we start out, even if it doesn't work out in the end, you have to incorporate the use and you imagine how they are going to "play" through things but then it doesn't always work how you think it's going to.
audience question: You don't have to have a linear narrative to tell a story; it's like a piece of art, there is no beginning or end... the Web generates certain circumstances, a certain situation, then developers have tools to make that... the new art will be made by engineers, because of the nature of Web tools, there are new possibilities.
CC: It's interesting that there are new narrative forms, the user experience is in relation to new kinds of experience; sometimes we can compete, sometimes we can't... we are limited but if we are going to contribute it's going to be through the things that are unique to our medium, like interactivity... but clicking buttons is not much different than flipping pages. The other thing is incorporating data; you see elements of it in blogs, in Yugo Nakamura's NEC site where user submissions grow leaves on trees and NEC plants real trees based on the number of trees "grown" by user submissions. Probably that was conceived of as a narrative.
JH: Will Wright's new game Spore - you start as a cell and grow into a creature, then a tribe, then a city, then a universe; the creatures populating your world are created by other people playing, drawn from data saved.
audience question: Like Twin peaks, the David Lynch thing; it evolved week after week. What if each time you visit, you get a different technology, image one time, video the next?
JH: With Flash 8, Grant Skinner was talking about interacting with mouse movement, not just clicks.
GL: I like the idea of aging websites... over 60 years, e.g. a site could alter, change, learn as it gains knowledge. You could give a website a lifespan.
RG: It's all about simulation; our reference to narrative is through the experience we've already had when we sit down to experience something on the Web, but there is no website that will provoke me to cry, or make you want to gush about it.
GL: But waht about a multi-player game and then something tragic happens?
RG: Gaming is a different thing all together, and it's true the best narrative sort of things online involve gaming.
CC: Scale is a big issue, there is so much money behind gaming; we can only make small experiences online by comparison. You'll notice online that there is a real individual sense, there are really no rules, the types of styles are far more individual and idiosyncratic, so despite all the problems it's really an ideal world.
RG: How the web is delivered to us is maybe determinative, e.g., having a wireless mouse, being comfortable and watching in the dark might open up some possibilities.
CC: Yeah, you are fighting so many things, lights are on, people are around, couriers are arriving... you are sitting up at a desk.
audience question: I work with Josh, but we did a campaign for the show Lost and it was wildly successful. We didn't think of it as a game but that's how people referred to it; it's not limited by our experience of other media; people bring their experience of other media to the Web.
CC: Where you took advantage of the media was with the fact that you can't control time; people explore at their own pace, the story unfold non-linearly.
SO: If you think about narrative spatially, then you don't think about it linearly. Also, before we lose it, Lost leveraged what people already know.
JH: Yeah, there was a barcode on the site that didn't mean anything and thousands of people downloaded it and tried to "decode" it. (laughter)
audience question: What is the definition of narrative? You're using it interchangably with experience. It is a confusion that also confuses the idea of authorship. If data is driving something it's not going to be as intentionally emotional as when a person is authoring it.
RG: There's a lot of talk about experience. I'm still trying to figure out what that is about. Narrative painting e.g. can tell a story but it is a still single image.
CC: My wife is an ESL teacher and they talk about people's experience as a narrative. I work in advertising where there is little opportunity to tell real stories but we still use that language to describe what we do. There is a vogue to incorporate your product into a story, e.g. Diesel. It's related to product placement in movies and games.
RG: It's something that we use to translate into an enjoyable experience.
GL: The idea of pulling in things, like the weather generating "story" with variables... can still create an experience.
CC: It's partly about how many options you build into it, the choose your own adventure model, 10 possible endings is a sort of superficial use of interaction as opposed to an infinite number of possible endings.
SO: HiRes is doing very resistent websites, not easy to get into and that is very interesting.
RG: Maybe it's just that no one has put enough money into an online web project.
CC: The gaming industry has, e.g. Warcraft, there is a new personal style.
audience question: What is good storytelling online? Can you give examples?
GL: Wikipedia.
JH: Web cartoons.
RG: I believe i've made my position clear.
SO: Certain puzzles lend themselves very well, that put the user into the position as detective, tracing the narrative, e.g. the Grudge, you know what your role is, so narrative and experience go hand in hand. If you understand the deep structure, you can design something very very rich.
audience question: Is there something that evolves beyond the web to other technology or devices?
GL: Yes definitely GPS, hot spots... we're doing something called locative cinema,
walks and rocks...
...
[bloggers questions: What about Hilman Curtis for short narrative or iamstatic's project last year called Growth & Pattern? There was a lot of narrative stuff there.
What is the reading experience that we are trying to compare to? And as Margot Knight asked what is the knowledge experience of reading online? You don't write a book and send it out to a focus group and then change the location or add a character or create a new event because of what they say.] permanent link
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