Slides from my talk at Emory University March 29 2018:
Are Games Bad for Stories? Seeing Interactive Narrative as its own Genre
Slides from my talk at Emory University March 29 2018:
Are Games Bad for Stories? Seeing Interactive Narrative as its own Genre
Posted in Interactive Narrative, What is a Medium?
Tagged Bandersnatch, game, Interactive Narrative, ludology, narratology, Replay Story, Russian Doll, token
Here are the slides for my keynote at ICIDS 2018
My talk at the University of Utrecht in May 2017, Who’s Afraid of the Holodeck? Facing the Future of Digital Narrative without Ludoparanoia
from HKU Interactive Design Channel
Janet Murray Talk on May 21, 2017, co-organized by University of Utrecht focus area game research and HKU University of the Arts Utrecht Professorship Interactive Narrative Design. Introduction by Rene Glas (UU) and Hartmut Koenitz (HKU).
And here are the slides
PDF Who’s Afraid of the Holodeck jhm
The slides from my AR in Action Talk AR in Action 2017 MURRAY
and here is the video
Thanks to Andrew Marantz for calling my attention to this December 2015 interview with filmmaker Charlie Kaufman in which he describes a TV pilot he worked on with a plot structure similar to Life After Life, exploring the alternate paths the same person’s life might have taken:
It seems that you would be an ideal person for an Amazon or a Netflix to throw a lot of money at and say, “Hey, make us a distinctive, Charlie Kaufman–esque show.”
I had a pilot at HBO that Catherine Keener was going to be in. The whole series takes place on one day. The premise of the show is that there are so many different accidents in your life that lead you in different directions, and as you look at someone’s life from birth to, let’s say, 50, there are so many different versions of that life that could have happened. My idea was that you take this woman, she is this age on this day, that’s the only given, and then each episode is based on a different route. Maybe it broke off here and the difference is very small; maybe it broke off when she was a baby, in which case it’s a completely different life. In the course of the series, you start to recognize, first of all, there’s clues given as to what these things were that happened that changed the course of her life. But there are also similarities in all these different versions of herself — about who she is. What I thought was really cool about the show, in addition to the premise, which I really liked, is that there’s no one right version of it. You can watch this in any order, and it’s a different show. The example that I like to use is that in one episode, she’s married to this man and you see their life together. In the next episode, she’s divorced from this man and you see her life having been divorced from this man. In a third episode, she and this man walk by each other on the street, clearly have never met. And depending on which order you watch the series in, there are different a-hamoments.So what happened with it?
I wrote a first episode, and then they wanted to see a second episode because they weren’t sure what it was going to be. So I wrote a second episode. And I decided to make the second episode very, very different, so that they could see how it could be very, very different. The response I got from them was, “Well, I don’t see how this could be the second episode. It’s so different.” And it’s like, “Well, no. I’m not saying it’s the second episode. I’m saying it’s another episode. This isn’t like the order that the show has to go in if we want to establish the premise.” It may not be the real reason they didn’t want to do it, but they could not remove that idea from their head. Ultimately, they didn’t go ahead with the series.
This is clearly a genre that will work best on interactive platforms. The significant thing here is that both Charlie Kaufman and Kate Atkinson, Hollywood/experimental filmmaker and mainstream/experimental British novelist are conceiving of extended replay stories of this kind.
New ebook-only edition revised for 2016 with over 10,000 words of new content in the form of chapter-by-chapter commentary, with new examples and useful web links illustrative of the enduring principles of design that have been validated by multiple communities of practice — from game designers to digital journalists to VR developers — since 1997 when it first appeared, and emphasizing productive design strategies for the next phase of creative innovation.
In a previous post I identified some of the unsolved design issues that make VR a less than engaging storytelling platform, and questioned whether the global elite wearing headsets to look at refugees in a UN-sponsored virtual reality documentary, were experiencing an expansion of empathy, as claimed by one of the filmmakers, or simply a sense of excitement at the novelty of a new technological gadget. This interview with Gabo Arora, who c0-produced the project provides some useful context: that the VR experience was positioned as a high profile replacement for a cancelled appearance by Bono. It also offers a key detail about an important design intervention that Arora made in staging one part of the film. The glamour of VR may not last, but the design intervention — creating action that encircles the viewer — is a useful convention that is likely to become a staple of the evolving medium.
It is works better in the refugee camp (see 6:20 in), than in the Disney VR of the intro to the Lion King which disrupts the immersive effect of a meticulously choreographed, costumed, and lighted stage picture by allowing us to move around chaotically, revealing the strained and tawdry artifice behind the illusion. Perhaps this is a new convention in the making as well — unintentional here, but potentially quite powerful: to take a composed image, like the pseudo-African primitivist landscape of a Broadway musical, and expose its constructed and distorting character nature by turning into an explorable 3D space.
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
A coda to my Last Word on Ludology v Narratology:
In this moment from the popular British sit-com Gavin and Stacey (BBC 2007-2010) — available now in the US on several streaming services including youtube and very worth watching — Nessa, a jaded woman of the world who now works in a small Welsh video arcade, explains why she is never bored watching customers play videogames:
Posted in Interactive Narrative
Tagged Hamlet on the Holodeck, Narrative, videogames
Sam Barlow’s new story-game HER STORY uses database searching as a productive approach to interactive narrative. It demonstrates how the dramatic arts of script-writing and acting for the camera can be refined to create engrossing interactive storytelling. The story is made up of brief video excerpts from seven police interviews with the same woman, played brilliantly by Viva Seifert. The interactor is given 4 snippets to begin the investigation and then accesses others by typing key words into a search field. . The story is fixed and unchanging, and the case has long ago been solved, but the interactor is motivated to find out what happened by Barlow’s carefully structured storytelling and the power of Seifert’s performance.
Here are some of the techniques that make this story effective:
Posted in Interactive Narrative