Here is a film that was made for my participation in the the 2015 Future of Storytelling Summit.
Source: Future of Storytelling | 2015 Films
Among the games that flash by are Dys4ia, Blood and Laurels, Unmanned, Every Day the Same Dream, Framed, Walden, Her Story, Papers Please, and Game of Thrones: Iron from Ice
The interactive TV projects are from my Georgia Tech eTV Lab
The folks at TED have kindly dug up for me my 1998 talk which I still stand behind and which predicts the future well, but is also still timely. It is longer than the current crop, and more spontaneous. It falls into 4 segments and it references other talks, some of which are on the TED website but most of which are not.
Here is a summary:
1.PREAMBLE: WE NEED EVERY MEDIUM TO EXPRESS OUR HUMANITY (first 5 minutes) I take issue with Julie Taymor who spoke disparagingly of screen-based experiences, and offered the rituals of Bali dancers ( invoked again in her 20** TED Talk) as the superior paradigm for art that addresses the human condition. I also take issue with John Warnock, founder of Adobe and a rare book collector who described his meticulously prepared facsimile book series as purposely avoiding interactivity, such as searching by text, which makes it much less useful. I would still consider both positions examples of a fetishism for legacy forms of representation. (first 5 minutes).
2. ELIZA IS OUR CREATION MYTH (5:00 – 17:00) I compare the amazement at the birth of film (the legend of the Ciotat Train showing) to the amazement at the birth of procedural storytelling (the legend of Eliza at MIT), as I do in Chapter 3 ofHamlet on the Holodeck, and as I have done with my students pretty much every semester for the past 20 years.
3. PROTOTYPE OF A MULTISEQUENTIAL STORY WORLD STILL AHEAD OF ITS TIME 17:00- 2500) show an MIT project I created with Freedom Baird, sponsored by IBM and based on Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, The Norman Conquest. The TV dramas are also now on YouTube. They were meant to be seen on three successive nights in any order, and each one is complete in itself but an exit in one play is an entrance in another play. This makes a nice comparison with Mitch Horowitz’s recent work on the Netflix version of Arrested Development, as I discussed in another post. (timecode: )
4. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? (last 30 seconds) I sum up as I do in Hamlet on the Holodeck, by comparing the development of conventions of interaction with the invention of the soliloquy in Shakespeare’s time.
Other references: John Warnock is the founder of Adobe and a rare book collector. At 1998 TED he presented a facsimile book series that purposely avoids interactivity, such as searching by text, which makes it much less useful. This is a good example of what I would now call legacy media fetishism.
Brenda Laurel, feminist game designer and pioneer of interactive storytelling, whose talk on her wonderful but short-lived series Purple Moon, is on the TED site.
Marvin Minsky, one of the seminal theorists of the field of Artificial Intelligence, who has a notorious blind spot for humanistic discourse. In the corridor between sessions Ben Shneiderman and argued with him. Minsky took the position that fictional stories were a waste of time because they were not true. Ben and I were appropriately outraged.
There has been a lot of twitter chatter this week about an endearing rant by Darius Kazemi with the arresting title of Fuck Videogames aimed at encouraging frustrated game designers to embrace other forms of creative expression.
Clearly this is a timely message, and probably a mark of the success that this active community of practice has had in encouraging creative expression in videogames.
I don’t quarrel with Kazemi’s main point — and in fact I’ve often said that there is no hierarchy of media. No individual book, for example, is more valuable than any individual game (or film or TV show) just because it is expressed in lengthy text passages instead of interactive bits or moving images. But Kazemi isn’t talking about books or films. He is talking gelato and cat poop — which I do indeed have a problem with.
Posted in Ch 13 Game Model, Ch 2 Affordances of the Medium, What is a Medium?
Tagged Darius Kazemi
For an area of interest – perhaps one that you are thinking of as the focus for a larger project — place at least 3 existing digital artifacts on the grid diagram according to their use of the digital affordances described in chapters 2 and 3 of ITM. What affordances or combinations of affordances have been under-exploited
For example, if skateboarding is your focus, you might put a Google map of local skateboard stores in the Spatial quadrant and a skateboarding blog and a skateboarding Twitter feed in the Participatory quadrant. You might then see missed opportunities, such as an encyclopedic archive of skateboard designs or an interactive model of a skateboard park or an augmented reality overlay of skateboarding tricks visible in a particular park.
There is a continuing controversy over whether or not digital media designers 
should know how to program. As someone who learned to program a long time ago but does not actively program, I have taken the position that if everyone only designed what they could personally program we would have much lamer artifacts. For one thing we would not have anything designed by Steve Jobs who worked with the most skilled computer wizards but did not feel the need to code himself. Continue reading
Television producers are increasingly turning to interactive applications to encourage fans to become more immersed in a series’ storyworld through activities that provoke the active creation of belief.
HBO GO Game of Thrones Application
Active Creation of Belief is a design term I first used in Hamlet on the Holodeck, to contrast with Coleridge’s classic term of “suspension of disbelief” and to refute the notion that narrative pleasures are incompatible with interactivity.
Janet H. Murray 