"...I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who
is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great
creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing
with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard
is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what
we mean to each other."
Genre: recognizeable story conventions (e. g. cowboy: the lone stranger/paladin (free-lancing knight), the town in danger and isolated from society...)
Murray talks about the Gothic governess genre and the Lucy Davenport, an extended Victorian fantasy being used by Captain Janeway in Star Trek: The Next Generation. An alien uses fictitious characters to seduce the crew into catatonic trances. But fundamentally, within the Star Trek world, Holodecks are good things, as (relatively) uncontroversial as cinema is in our world.
Basic fears. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World had "feelies", which were all-sensory movies. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 included the protagonist's wife who was addicted to her immersive soap operas. "For Huxley and Bradbury, the more persuasive the medium, the more dangerous it is."
But, to avoid anything that is potentially addictive would mean the
we would have to give up motorcycles, swimming, sex and eating. We need
a richer theoretical basis than merely fear of positive feedback, to understand
what is happening with cyber-storytelling.
1. The Aristotelian Poetics
Character -> Desire -> Thought -> Action
At the heart of any story are found the central characters. If you have rich, well-developed characters, the story almost tells itself as you work through the natural desires of the characters, imagine and represent their thoughts, and figure out the resulting actions.
So, a key set of questions must be
Who are the characters?
What kind of people are they?
What are their desires?
Unities of place and time
The ancient Greeks believed that a story should be built around a central event and location (like a modern situation comedy) and that events elsewhere and elsewhen were usually represented by retrospective dialog or "reports from the front." There is an interesting analogy between this concept and the "stateless" design of the Macintosh user interface, in which all excursions away from the basic state returned one to this state. Windows of course has adopted the same technique.
2. Dramatic Story Structure
The Freitag Graph:
introduction
rising action
climax
denouement
The most common element in the forward motion of the story is the development of a central character. Luke Skywalker's coming of age story is one such development. Sometimes however the central character is already fully mature (James Bond comes to mind) and all that is developing, is his knowledge of and understanding of the central mystery in the story. But a key question in any story would be
What is developing?
1455: Gutenberg invents the printing press. Books printed before 1501 are called inconabula (Latin for "swaddling clothes"). It took 50 years to establish conventions such as page numbers, paragraphs, chapters, etc. which give structure and made books useful.
Multiform stories.
It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) is given a view of what the world would have been like if he had never lived. The angel Clarence encounters Bailey on a bridge contemplating suicide and runs a kind of a 30 year simulation experiment for George's benefit.
Lifelines play an important role in Dune, in which Paul Atriedes has a clairvoyant ability to see the futures of others' lives as multiple branching pathways. By locating the events at the major divergences, he can see how to influence history. Murray also describes Groundhog Day as a "familiar marriage plot, in which courtship is depicted as a process of moral education." Phil the protagonist keeps on trying to seduce Rita the TV producer, but only when he becomes a better person (learning the piano, preventing many accidents during the day) does he deserve (and win) her.
In It's a wonderful life the protagonist is a constant and the world changes. In Groundhog Day the world is held constant and the protagonist changes.
Active Audiences
Speculation by the audience: a basic component in serials (like the X files.)
Fan culture: another active medium. (Tammy Faye Bakker Fan Club, really!) fan-written episodes of Star Trek. Re-editing scenes of episodes into new stories. "Textual poaching".
Improv theater: soliciting suggestions from the audience, weaving them into the story.
Participatory theater: casting audience members as bit-players in group events such as comic weddings, jury trials or wakes. (Compleat works of Wm. Shakespeare, Abridged) does this very nicely.
MUDs are intensely evocative environments for fantasy play.
3D movies: contradictory because they make you want to PLAY the thing; control the viewpoint; but the storyteller still has control.
Simulator Rides: Star Tours is still my favorite.
Electronic games: Planetfall. Murray describes a game in which you move through a puzzle universe. You find and activate a robot Floyd, who accompanies you through the story and ultimately goes into a dangerous place to get an essential piece of equipment. Floyd dies in your arms. "The game changes from a challenging tpzzle to an evocative theatrical experience." The character was established and then sacrificed, giving emotional meaning to the experience.
Hypertext.Afternoon (Michael Joyce, Jay David Bolter, John Smith.) "I want to say I may have seen my son die today." Murray's remark: Confusion is not a bug but a feature.
VR
MERL's Diamond Park; Alpha Worlds, etc.
MIT's ALIVE project - little critters follow you around and you can
pet the dog, etc.