If you’re a writer interested in finding out more about immersive entertainment – discovering how your audiences can be immersed and play an active part in your story – then we have a great series of specialist immersive writing guides made available to The Writing Platform by Portal Entertainment and the Immersive Writing Lab team.

The guides, created by Mike Jones, Portal Entertainment’s Head of Story, will help writers who want to write ‘immersive entertainment’: writers who want their audiences to be immersed and play an active part in their story. This fifth guide explains how to create use memory and ritual to affect emotional states.

—

We watch, read or play stories in order to feel something. We might feel inspired or excited, we might feel moved, intrigued or challenged, we might feel thrilled, joyous or terrified. Not only do we hope for and allow story experiences to effect us in this way but we expect them to do so. These feeling-states are part of the contract of expectations we have with the story we pay to see, read or play. For creators of multi-platform, immersive and interactive storyworlds this contract with the viewer is no less important, and moreover it prompts us to think in an audience-centric way, focused first on their experience of the story rather than our internal conceptualisation of it.

Emotional-States

Genre, mood, tone, style, theme are all tools we can employ that shape not only how an audience feels about the story they are experiencing but also how they expect to be made to feel even before they enter. If I sign up to engage a romantic-comedy based storyworld my expectations are that it will make me feel a certain way – happy, excited, nervous and elated. If that storyworld turns out to be more scary than funny, more tragic than joyous; then the audience is going to be very unsatisfied because their emotional expectations haven’t been met.

In the storyworld bible for Battlestar Galactica – which informs the broadcast series, tele-movie, webseries, comics and video game incarnations of the BSG storyworld – creator, Ronald D. Moore, writes;

“The Battlestar Galactica lives in a perpetual state of crisis, one in which the Cylons can appear at any moment, and where terrorist bombs, murders, rebellions, accidents, and plagues are the unfortunate routines of day to day life. There are no days for our characters, no safe havens, nothing approaching the quiet normal existence they once knew. They are on the run for their very lives. This series is about a chase. Let the chase begin.”

In this simple paragraph he has summed up the core emotional states that underpin the BSG storyworld and are consistent right across any and all platform incarnations of BSG – crisis, paranoia, terror, tension, the feeling of being chased and hounded. Each and any story told in the BSG universe is predicated on eliciting these emotions. They are not only what we get, they are what audiences expect.

So there are two key questions we should ask at the front of our storyworld development process:

How do I want my audience to feel whilst they are in the storyworld?

How do I want my audience to feel after they have left the storyworld?

The two are not the same and indeed can vary widely. Whilst I’m within the storyworld I may feel frightened, thrilled or confused. But once outside of it, at the completion of all or part of it, I might feel differently – satisfied, intrigued, relieved or hopeful. This idea of movement between emotional states is fundamental to good storytelling on any medium. If I were writing a story where I wanted the audience to be moved to feel sorrow and sadness I could write a scene showing a character very sad and crying. But this is going to be very dull and not nearly as effective as a scene that shows the same person as joyous and happy but who then looses the thing that made them so and they fall into sadness. It’s the movement between two different – and often opposite – emotional states that makes an audience emotionally engage. And this goes as much for the macro level of a storyworld as it does at a micro scene by scene level of an individual story.

What we need to ask then is, what are the dominant emotional states of your storyworld experience and how do they change for the viewer as they move between platforms, in and out of the storyworld. A good story is not disposable, it’s not simply felt in the moment of the experience and then forgotten. Great story experiences continue to effect us long after they are over. And long-form episodic stories – those that demand we return to watch, play or read more – effect us most profoundly of all. How do you want your audience to feel before, during and after the experience? What are the different emotions they move through? How do different platforms bring out or emphasise different emotional states and their variations?

Memories

A way of developing a storyworld that can effect audiences in this way is to focus on articulating the memories the storyworld generates for the audience. The definition of a ‘memory’ is simply something retained and recounted in the mind. So as the creator of a storyworld you need to ask what memories do you want to create for the audience…? We can think of these in two ways;

What will the audience be prompted to remember? And, what will they need to remember?

The former encompasses the experience of the storyworld, what images and imagery, what actions that were taken (by characters or by themselves), what ideas, what emotions? The later question is more connected to activity and action in the storyworld and speaks to plot and returnability; what thing do the audience need to remember in order to comprehend or take action within the storyworld? What events, circumstances and relationships do they need to be able to recall in order to advance the story? What memories need to be planted in order for the audience to make clear connections between plot and thematic elements? What ‘objects’ do you give the audience as a way for them to retain the memory?

Being specific about how you want your audience to feel allows you, as a writer, to connect emotions to writing choices in character, plot, platform, design, tone, style and mood. When we can answer these questions about memories – being specific about the memories we want to construct for the audience – we can start to build and make decisions about how the storyworld is presented, how it is narrated and experienced. How can iconography, colour or particular imagery be used to connect memories for the viewer? How do you highlight specific things that need to be remembered by the audience? What mood or tonal aspects do need you put in place to ensure audience is feeling a particular way? What locations and settings best provide a space to deliver on these feeling states? If you want to move your the audience from feeling claustrophobic and trapped to feeling free and liberated, then you will need a storyworld that naturally encompasses these two types of spaces – confined and expansive vs closed and open – and dramatise these two spaces as opposites that motivate characters to seek one space over another.

Rituals

Memories are best shaped not by what happens but by what you ‘do’. Even when watching a traditional movie the moments that stand out will be the moments that made us emotionally active or compelled us to think about our own lives in a particular way.

“I’ll never forget when I first saw X because after that I… it was the first time I realised… it changed the way I….” etc

With this idea of a link between action and memory – the things we do and the things we remember – we can observe that deep memories are shaped and perpetuated by ritual. Ritual is set of actions learned and repeated and which have emotional weight, significance or necessity attached to them. Religious services around weddings and funerals are forms of ritual, but so to are the personal habits and patterns of behaviour that people perform around certain events – things they always do on their birthday or the sequence of tasks they perform before going to bed in order to get a good night sleep.

So, if we think about childhood memories they are often recalled as part of a pattern rather than in isolation; “As kids my Dad and I would always X when we did Y” – and we remember such ritual memories by place, repetition, and significance.

Ritual requires ‘investment’, that objects and activities are invested with significance. This is the basis of narrative suspense – allowing the audience privileged information to know that an object, event or person is MORE than just an object, event or person, but a harbinger of something bigger.

In an immersive and interactive storyworld, considering rituals is a useful way of thinking about the embedding of memories into actions and investing objects and spaces with significance. What rituals, repeatable actions, are your audience introduced to and asked to perform? Are there specific activities they have to repeatedly undertake? Are there certain tasks they have to do before they can advance? Do they have to collect, gather, find, assemble, decode or arrange? Do they have to change or manipulate the environment in particular ways or follow defined procedures.

An open world video game like L.A. Noire has very specific rituals around interviewing suspects. These rituals are clearly defined, have a repeatable pattern and must be performed over and over to achieve different outcomes. The ritual of interviewing is a key part of the immersion and role-play of the storyworld. More importantly, it both generates memories and compels audiences to recall memories in order to solve cases and advance the story. More than just a game mechanic, it is one that demands the viewer to immersive themselves by compelling memory and ritual.

The central idea is that powerful memories are constructed by engaging the audience with rituals they can perform. This puts the onus of the writer to embed their storyworld with repeatable actions that are loaded with significance. At the same time, rituals become powerful tools for escalating narrative drama. High dramatic stakes come when established rituals are broken or threatened because such threats are directly to the memories the audience has built up around those rituals.

Immersive Writing Lab Series Summary

In the five parts of the IWL writers guide we have looked at a toolkit for helping to build viable, dynamic and compelling storyworlds that can move across platforms, involve the viewer to take part in the story and generate rich narrative experiences. On a practical level, these guides cover the 5 key areas immersive writing should address in order to demonstrate an holistic approach that is audience-focused and viable as an immersive experience.

1. WORLD – Logline, Timeline, Dramatic Pressures and Genre

2. CHARACTERS – Protagonists, Antagonists, Communities and Points-of-view

3. MULTI-STRANDED PLOT – Dramatic Questions, Events, Thresholds, Inversions

4. AUDIENCE – User-Journey, active and reluctant pathways

5. MEMORIES – Rituals and emotional-states.

If you’re a writer interested in finding out more about immersive entertainment – discovering how your audiences can be immersed and play an active part in your story – then we have a great series of specialist immersive writing guides made available to The Writing Platform by Portal Entertainment and the Immersive Writing Lab team.

The guides, created by Mike Jones, Portal Entertainment’s Head of Story, will help writers who want to write ‘immersive entertainment’: writers who want their audiences to be immersed and play an active part in their story. This fourth guide explains how to create audience user-journeys.

Active Audiences

Whilst all forms of narrative writing share common elements, interactive and immersive experiences have particular demands that are quite unique; demands that will shape and influence the way such stories are constructed. Such forms change the nature of the relationship between the audience and the work.

We often hear traditional media such as books, film and TV referred to as ‘passive’ media, and interactive formats such as video games, as ‘active’. But these terms are a misnomer and largely unhelpful. There is nothing ‘passive’ about watching a movie, unless it’s a very bad and boring movie! Any good narrative is very consciously engaging the audience in an active mental process. In the previous article we referred to dramatic questions and the implication of an audience posing questions to themselves, as they are watching, results in them being compelled to speculate on possible outcomes and assemble the story for themselves. This is very much an active audience.

We also looked previously at the idea of role-play and the specific roles assigned to audiences within the storyworld. It is this idea of a an active role in the telling of the story, and which can effect the chain of causality in the narrative, that results in the real measure of an interactive and immersive experience; the user-journey.

User-Journey

In an interactive story form, or one that moves across different mediums rather than a single medium, the user-journey is the mapping of the paths the audience may take through the storyworld – the actions they take, the choices they make and the platforms they move through. The key questions to ask are;

– Is there a single entry point where every audience person starts? Or are there multiple entry points for different types of audiences?

– Is there a single ultimate conclusion? Or are their multiple possible conclusions to the experience?

– How do the audience’s choices effect the possible conclusions?

The answers to these questions will inform the shape of the user-journeys as a document that informs both the development and the execution of an interactive and immersive storyworld.

A typical user-journey map shows the branching paths of the experience and how choices and actions effect the path an audience member is following. Such maps are most commonly shown as flow-charts and as such are very visual tools for being able to trace the movement of an audience member against the events of the plot and timeline.

Importantly, undertaking the process of creating a user-journey map also allows you to recognise that not all audiences are the same and there may be different archetypal users within the experience. Open-world sandbox computer games deal with this by providing scope to satisfy different user demands and expectations in different ways. A clear goal orientated plot with very specific prescribed tasks will appeal to one type of player, but would frustrate others who wish to explore in a more free-form and self directed way. Conversely, a storyworld that is pure exploration without dynamic motivations may feel very un-dramatic and unmotivated. Such immersive worlds therefore often offer a clear motivated plot but which is also able to be completed in stages and doesn’t lock the player in to completing within a specific time frame. Some players will bang through the main plot, others will meander.

A simple scenario like this can be seen in numerous video game storyworlds such as Borderlands, Skyrim or even Heavy Rain; all have room for free exploration whilst still including a central motivated narrative spine. This principle of recognising different user types and the different paths they may follow is as applicable in transmedia and multi-platform experiences well beyond self-contained video games. A very useful exercise therefore for storyworld creators is to begin by articulating two different user journeys through your storyworld; one as a highly involved audience member and the other for an audience that is more reluctant. These two extremes will shape the extents of interactivity within your storyworld and allow you to design specific motivations for each type.

For example, lets say you have a story where the audience is engaged directly by a fictional character and is asked to perform a specific action – e.g. to lie or steal. Some audiences will jump right into that role play and explore the ramifications of the illicit or illegal action. A different audience type however may baulk at performing the action and choose to resist; wishing to observe rather than partake in the lying and the stealing.

This ‘reluctant’ audience member is now on a different user-journey and the choice they make should have ramifications. Rather than being pushed out of the experience or into a lesser version of the experience, you have the opportunity to create an alternate pathway of story elements to lead that audience through a parallel branching narrative. Such a pathway may lead back to the same or a different end point but within the storyworld’s plot of timeline events, the two users will have had two different experiences.

Both types of audience are valid – some like to interact more than others. The user-journey map allows you not only to consider the needs of these two types of users but also to create specific motivations for each type to compel them forward. One type of user might respond well to action motivations – choices that offer them greater visceral experiences. Other types of audiences will respond best to emotional motivations, pathways that offer more emotional complexity or compel them forward through emotional dramatics.

In any of these cases the storyworld, its events, plot and timeline remains consistent, but the pathways through those events may vary for different users across different platforms.

Returnable Elements

Just as important as the pathway of choices for a user within a given medium, is the pathway of their experience across platforms. If I watch the TV series of your storyworld, what is it that makes me want to go to the interactive website? If I play the video game, what compels me to read the graphic novel? If I watch the movie, what drives me to sign up to play the alternate reality game?

In a multi-platform project each medium will bring its own type of experience, its own perspectives and paths through the shared storyworld. What we need to consider as a crucial part of the user-journey is how the audience is motivated and compelled to move between platforms. The ‘trans’ part of the world ‘transmedia’ means to move; but audiences do not move unless they are motivated.

If we recognise that multi-platform storytelling is essentially episodic storytelling (stories told in pieces) then we can think of these user-journey motivations across platforms as returnable elements – ie. the element that compels us to return to the storyworld.

There can be all manner of different forms of returnable elements but there are 3 major types that can help us articulate the user-journeys.

Anticipation:

When an audience is motivated by anticipation they are compelled to come back simply to discover ‘what happens next?’. This is the long standing idea of a ‘cliff-hanger’ and is very common in episodic television or in a chapterised novel. In essence anticipation is created by an un-answered dramatic question for which the audience must return to get the answer. But the same idea can apply across platforms as well as within them. A TV series for example may leave big questions for a specific character un-answered and so compel the audience to play the online game version to uncover what happened to them after the series.

Character:

A cliff-hanger isn’t the only way to bring an audience back or motivate them on. If you think of a common TV sitcom like The IT Crowd, there is very little in the way of continuing storylines so the reason to come back for another episode – the returnable element – is not anticipation of what happens next. Rather the compelling reason to return is to spend time with those characters and see how they will deal with new circumstances that befall them. In the case of immersive and interactive media different platforms and different user choices will create different circumstances for the character to respond to. The characters need to be strong enough, their responses and reactions varied and interesting enough to sustain and motivate an audience return.

Feeling States:

The third major returnable element type deals with the emotional expectations of audiences; how they expect to be made to feel? Some storyworlds are built neither on recurring characters nor on-going storylines. If we think of a TV series such as The Twilight Zone we have a storyworld that is unified by common themes, ideas and structures but which otherwise has no ongoing plot or characters. In such a case the reason to return for more is to ‘feel’ a certain way. No matter what the story is or who the characters are, the audience for The Twilight Zone knows how they expect to feel and the storyworld is designed to elicit those specific emotional responses. Now if we imagine The Twilight Zone as an interactive multi-platform project we can see how each medium may present a different aspect of supernatural occurrences and yet the reason to come back for more remains a desire to satisfy a certain Feeling State. Each individual platform, whether interactive or not, will succeed on its own merits if it delivers on that audience expectation.

Anticipation, character and feeling states, three very different motivations for your audience to return to, or move through, a storyworld. Of course, these three elements do not exist in isolation. Any given storyworld may employ aspects of all three together. What is important is to see these three as tools in a development process to allow you to be specific, rather than abstract, about the experience of the user and their journey.

The narrative-based user-journey map should articulate not only what happens and the branching paths of choices an audience may make, but also what is compelling the audience, why they are moving, why will they come back, what is driving them to interact?

Don’t expect the audience to be driven by curiosity alone, nor should you assume your audience want to interact or even that they will. All these things require clear motivation and consequences. Don’t be afraid to light a fire under the arses of your audience and make their journey through your storyworld and the choices they make, the platforms they visit, matter.

—-

For further reading see Mike’s first three Immersive Writing Guides:

#1 How To Create A Storyworld
#2 Guide to Creating Character
#3 How To Create Plot
#5 Memories, Rituals and Emotional States

If you’re a writer interested in finding out more about immersive entertainment – discovering how your audiences can be immersed and play an active part in your story – then we have a great series of specialist immersive writing guides made available to The Writing Platform by Portal Entertainment and the Immersive Writing Lab team.

The guides, created by Mike Jones, Portal Entertainment’s Head of Story, will help writers who want to write ‘immersive entertainment’: writers who want their audiences to be immersed and play an active part in their story. This third guide explains how to create plot.

Plot and Dramatic Questions

Cause and Effect

Plot seems an easy idea to digest – “this happened, then that happened, then something else happened….” From the simplest fairy story, to the most complex of episodic and interactive narratives, the principle of a cause and effect chain of events is universal to our idea of narrative storytelling.

Sometimes a story’s plot events happen in a linear order. Sometimes plot events are experienced out of linear order. But in truth there is no such thing as a non-linear narrative. X causes Y which results in Z regardless of whether we see the end result first and are compelled to find out how and why Z happened? Or experience the events of X and Y and wonder what Z will be? The plot remains X-Y-Z even if the narration – how the story is told – varies.

Recognising this idea of Plot (a cause-and-effect chain of events) independent of the narration (how the events are told or experienced) is important in Storyworld development as it speaks to a fundamental principle that underpins all dramatic storytelling – Dramatic Questions.

Dramatic Questions

Regardless of whether your storyworld is being delivered as a film, tv show, game, web-series, ARG, interactive, non-linear or otherwise, what will compel your audience to engage is the dramatic questions they are motivated to ask…

In any good story audiences are constantly asking themselves questions, both consciously and subconsciously, about the events that are happening. Those story questions come in two types. First are the exposition questions – Where are we? Who are they? What do they want? Why did they do that? What’s happening? and so on. These are the kinds of mental questions the audience are posing for themselves as they experience the plot. Such exposition questions are about framing and interpreting the plot, establishing contexts and scenarios.

The other kind of questions audiences pose themselves are dramatic questions; these are questions that have inherent risks. Where Exposition Questions give us context, it is the Dramatic Questions that motivate us to watch, to be emotionally engaged, to care, speculate and be torn between hope and fear – Hoping for one outcome whilst Fearing another.

When developing a Storyworld plot it is crucial to be able to articulate the core motivating dramatic questions that will effect any and all characters in your world. Filmmaker and scholar Karen Pearlman, from the Australian Film TV and Radio School, puts it best when she saids “questions that begin with ‘Will’ imply an Action and have something at Stake” are naturally dramatic. Hence the simple phrase ‘Will X be able to Y or else Z’ gives us a very solid frame for writing dramatically active storyworlds rather than passive ones. As such, in writing a storyworld Bible, it is important you are able express the specific and driving dramatic questions your audience are compelled to ask.

Certainly such dramatic questions may be at the micro-level related to individual characters and their obstacles but what is important for an holistic storyworld with multiple-plotlines across multiple media is that the dramatic questions are detailed at a macro-level pertaining to societies, groups, institutions and communities. As a simple example, the micro-level dramatic question for Star Wars is ‘Will Luke stay on the good side of the force or will he succumb to the dark side?’, but the macro-level dramatic question that effects every character and every plot in the Star Wars storyworld is “Will the Rebels triumph over the Empire?”. The character-based dramatic question will only give you a single plot for a single story, where as a compelling, high stakes, macro-level dramatic question will give you potential for numerous plots across numerous media.

The important element about Dramatic Questions as a basis for Storyworld plots is that they need to be Unsolvable. By this we mean that the central problem the dramatic question derives from should be so large, pervasive, broad or complex that it cannot be solved, overcome or entirely answered; once the macro-level dramatic questions are answered your storyworld ceases to be dramatic. The plot of a feature film most commonly resolves and answers its dramatic questions but a storyworld is a much larger construct and so must be perpetually sustainable. If your dramatic questions aren’t big enough then its likely your storyworld will not have the fuel to span multiple platforms or sustain long-form storytelling and interaction. In particular dramatic questions that can stand perpetually are crucial to allow for multistranded plot and multiple outcomes…

Multi-Stranded Plot

The term multi-stranded plot can be used to describe a number of approaches to storytelling and takes on particular significance and complexity in a multi-platform and interactive media landscape. It could be a continuing narrative that has multiple independent, interconnected or related plot-lines that are told in parallel. This is the common approach of serial TV and, though very rare, is sometimes seen in feature film as well (such as P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia).

Multi-stranded narrative can also mean different plots on different platforms but which are part of the same storyworld. We see this in many transmedia projects where a web-series, game or ARG may use the same characters in the same world but present a different plot appropriate to each platform.

The term can also mean scope in a storyworld for the same plot line to be experienced from different points of view; through the eyes of different characters such as when you play a game with one character and then play it again with a different character to experience it differently.

What all three of these approaches to multi-stranded plot have in common is that they all require dramatic questions big enough to spawn multiple paths and perspectives through a plot, or even to spawn multiple plot outcomes. In developing and testing a storyworld for its potential to support multi-stranded plot there a number of key questions we can ask;

– What different points of view does my Storyworld naturally have? Are they equally interesting and compelling?

– Does each point of view have clear and distinct dramatic questions?

– Will the multi-plots be sequential, parallel or independent?

– Will the plots exist on the same medium or different mediums?

– Do the plots have fixed outcomes or multiple outcomes?

– Are all the outcomes satisfying in their own way?

Plot Event Types

To help develop Storyworld plots that are rich and compelling we can start to break down plot events into different types. This helps us recognise that a good plot is not simply a set of ‘things that happen’. Plot events have different archetypal roles within a story just as characters do. Here we’ll look at 4 plot event types that give us a tangible way to think about the scope of a multi-stranded plot and how that plot effects not just ‘A’ character but ALL characters in a larger Storyworld – Triggers, Actions, Thresholds, Inversions.

Trigger –

Trigger events are things that happen that force dramatic movement. Trigger events compel characters, institutions, societies and communities to be in Action and respond. At the start of a story they are often refereed to as inciting incidents, but trigger events can happen all through a multi-stranded plot and the effect of the Trigger event may impact upon multiple plot lines or even multiple platforms.

Action –

Not surprisingly plot event Actions are the natural response to Trigger events. Actions are the things characters, communities and institutions do in response to a trigger. Actions are the mainstay of a plot but compelling Actions only come from dynamic triggers and risks associated with the actions.

Threshold –

Where Trigger and Action events are the obvious engine of a plot, it is Threshold events that allow a plot to move dynamically. Thresholds represent points of no return, events from which there is no turning back or the future course of the plot is altered. In this way Thresholds are natural escalations in stakes and provide the climatic tent-poles for a narrative pattern. A plot that is all Trigger and Action events will get dull very quickly if there are no Thresholds to cross that change the course of the plot.

Inversion –

An Inversion event represents a very specific type of plot point that allows you to bring complexity and surprise to your multi-stranded plot. An Inversion is a reversal of fortune, a sudden change in circumstances, a fall from grace or a surprise twist. In a Storyworld, such inversions can effect whole societies or groups of characters as well as individuals. Inversion events are very good for ‘resetting’ the drama; when a dramatic question seems to be about to be answered or solved, an inversion shifts the objective or problem, changes the question. If not handled well an inversion can seem contrived and deus ex machina but if the inversion is rooted in plausibility of your storyworld then it can be a very effective plot event.

Audience-Centric

The point of thinking about storyworld plot in terms of dramatic questions, and how those questions are driven by triggers, actions, thresholds and inversions, is to ensure that your storytelling is Audience- Centric. By building the plot around the questions you want your audience to be asking, then you are continually referencing the experience you want your audience to have rather than focusing just on what you, as the author, want to say. This is even more important if, in an immersive storyworld, you are asking the audience to take part in the storyworld and be an active agent within it. A good Storyworld Bible is not just a description of an interesting place with interesting characters, its a map of experiences you want your audience to undertake.

—

For further reading please see Mike’s Immersive Writing Guides to:

#1 How To Create A Storyworld here
#2 Guide to Creating Character here
#4 Audience – User Journeys. Paths of how an audience could enter your world – highly involved and reluectant users
#5 Memories, Rituals and Emotional States – what memories will the audience take away from the storyworld and how will it make them feel?