Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion, I pitched to James an idea to establish an online space devoted to all things Synthetic Reality based (my umbrella term for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality). This space, called Augmentology 101, intrigued James to the point where a decision was made to sponsor it through the Ars Virtua Foundation and CADRE Laboratory for New Media. What followed was an amazing exploration into the creative potentials of Synthetic Reality – what’s now known as XR (Extended Reality) – and how it might manifest within the realm of electronic literature.  

It’s now been 10 years since the initialisation of the Augmentology 101 project. During this decade, there’s been a major upswing in VR and AR production and development, with impactful XR content such as Firebird – La Péri (a 2016 English/Chinese/French multilingual VR Experience) and Queerskins VR (2018) being standout examples.

Screenshot from the 2016 Multilingual Virtual Reality Project “Firebird – La Peri”

My own attempts at merging digital literature into developing XR fields have been multiple and varied, originating in delving into VR in the 1990’s when VRML was the shiny new thing. Surprisingly enough, the creative and technical challenges that VR creators faced back then are similar to those we face today: high performance requirements, mainstream adoption hurdles (see: Gartner Hype Cycle), and monetisation dilemmas are all relevant. Likewise, skillsets required by VR content creators in the mid 1990’s again parallel XR creators of today, including developing a deep knowledge of spatial storytelling logistics; emotional intelligence; and the ability to formulate story experiences that take into account various hardware and platform limitations such as field of view constraints, tethered headsets restricting natural movements, and hardware specific limitations like the screen-door effect.

In terms of XR projects I’ve produced in the last decade, a brief selection includes conceiving of and co-developing the 2013 anti-surveillance AR game #PRISOM, and in 2015 mapping out with Andy Campbell the (now unfinished) PC/VR project Square Ebony that was to be filled with: “…movement/imagery like huge ‘Panic Room’ landscaped letters…a force field of green…branches intertwined…tangles being text…[that] revolves around an entity…this entity is slowly reconfiguring itself…at the top of a hill/mountain/plateau surrounded by brackish water” (notes from Square Ebony Project Meeting and Documentation, Breeze and Campbell, March 10th 2015). In 2016 I lectured as part of the “Future Possible: Beyond the Screen” Series which centred on how VR can transform creative practice, and which also included a live VR performance walkthrough using one of my Tilt Brush created works. In 2017 I keynoted at the Electronic Literature Conference with a VR performance presented both live at the Conference and simultaneously in Virtual Reality.

“Layering the New real: Tracking the Self in Disembodied [Un] Virtual Spaces” Keynote

Press Image for “Our Cupidity Coda”: VR Literature

Thorough participation in a high-end VR based experience like Perpetual Nomads hinges entirely on immersion, which is triggered initially through the audience having to don gear that firstly reduces their ability to engage in their actual physical space in standard ways (their vision and hearing being “co-opted” into a VR space). The leap of faith the audience needs to make to establish a valid and willing suspension of disbelief (as Samuel Coleridge so aptly phrased it) is already set in motion by the fact a user is entirely aware from the moment they slip on a VR Headset that their body is in essence hijacked by the experience (haptically, kinetically), as opposed to a more removed projection into a story space via more traditional forms (think book reading, movies, tv). Such body co-opting might lead a user to disengage from the VR experience from the very beginning which will reduce the likelihood of true immersion: alternatively, they may readily fall headlong into the experience with an absolute sense of engagement and wonder (the preferred option as a VR content creator!) if the work has been precisely crafted.

For the most part, XR projects such as those mentioned above currently exist only in the mainstream margins, with a majority of experiences requiring costly high-end VR rigs and expensive desktop computers that demand audiences experience the works in their optimal state. To counteract this selective catering to the exorbitant end of the XR market, in early 2018 I had the idea to create a VR Experience that would reduce the mandatory use of high-end tech. This project would instead cater directly to a range of audiences by crafting a work that could be experienced across a far larger (and much more accessible) range of lower-end tech. This VR Literature work is called A Place Called Ormalcy.

Title Image from the “A Place Called Ormalcy” Press Kit

A Place Called Ormalcy is digital literature designed for, and developed in, Virtual Reality. It was constructed using the Virtual Reality Application MasterpieceVR to craft the 3D models, with each chapter (made up of 3D models, text, and audio components) then combined and hosted via the Sketchfab platform. It’s comprised of a text-based story made up of seven short Chapters which are housed in 3D/Virtual Reality environments. It can be accessed via a wide range (crucial in terms of its social commentary aspect) of mobile devices, desktop PCs and both low-end and high-end Virtual Reality hardware. Audiences using the cheapest type of VR equipment (such as Cardboard headsets) are able to access complete versions of this VR literature experience, as are users of any net connected mobile device with a WebVR-enabled browser.

The story of A Place Called Ormalcy (warning: spoilery parts ahead) unfolds through a series of snapshots of the life of Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding chap who resides in the aesthetically cartoonish world of Ormalcy. Ormalcy exists in an alternative universe complete with its own idiosyncratic language patterns. The storyworld initially presents as a Utopia full of innocent “claymationesque” contented creatures and happy citizens. As the story plays out, however, it soon becomes apparent that in actuality, this VR Experience allegorically traces the makings of a dystopic society, and how such fascist principles can arise in the most benevolent of places. This VR Literature work has social commentary at its very core, commenting directly on and about the rise of current totalitarian trajectories and the contemporary malaise, confusion and accompanying acclimatization patterns.

“A Place Called Ormalcy” Chapter Progression

A Place Called Ormalcy uses a combination of WebVR, 3D, VR, text and audio assets in ways that mirror a slow dystopian creep. In the desktop and mobile versions, each chapter becomes progressively visually cloistered, with dark fog and grainy distortions increasing to finally create a type of gun-barrelled claustrophobic effect. This combines with a gradual leaching of the intense colours found in the free-flowing organic imagery of the initial Chapters which results in a startlingly stripped back, fuzzy palette and model constructions: vibrancy gradually bleaches out to stark black, white and greys. Correspondingly, the 3D tableaus and audio tracks likewise alter from an initial complexity – Mr Ormal begins his story journey waving directly to the audience in “Chapter Wonne” in a bright and blooming space – which incrementally shifts towards the dramatically minimal in the final “Chapter Severn” where Mr Ormal transforms into (…spoiler alert here…) something vastly other.

In the VR version of A Place Called Ormalcy, additional effects mark the dystopic “boiling frog” dilemma that Mr Ormal faces. Each VR tableau subtly increases in size and scale as the Chapters progress, with the audience finding themselves in the climatic Chapter in a looming monochromatic set surrounded by huge windowless block-shaped buildings devoid of detail – except multiple, and menacing, “88” shaped logos (and the awfully transfigured Mr Ormal). In the VR version, the text becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, with the audience having to teleport, twist and turn in the VR Environment to read each annotation, echoing the “fake news” proclamations of our contemporary Western world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access truth over relentless propaganda.

Although A Place Called Ormalcy may seemingly convey a message of hopelessness or helplessness, the ending does contain clues that all is not lost in this particular dystopian scenario – the final soundtrack offers hope, with protestors chanting and proclaiming resistance as key. Just as VR Literature can work to extend the creation of accessible electronic literature beyond the text-centric to truly encapsulate the haptic and the spatially-oriented, A Place Called Ormalcy illustrates how XR projects can act as relevant social commentary at a time when it is sorely needed. I look forward to continuing to promote, create, and experiment with stretching the limits of VR and AR while producing XR projects that are openly accessible, as well as socially relevant.

Kelly Jones and Linda Sandvik are one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Writer, Kelly, and technologist, Linda, applied to the programme as individuals and were paired by the selection panel because of their shared interests, complementary skill and their openness to collaborating with someone they had never met. 

Kelly’s and Linda’s project is inspired by Kelly’s parents meeting on illegal CB Radio and uses physical computing to explore the ideas of connection and intimacy, ephemerality and permanence.  

We spoke with Kelly and Linda about how 1.4 for Copy came into being, the collaboration process and where they will go from here.

You can read their previous diary entries, here and here.

Tell us about your project 1.4 for copy – what is it, how does it work, and where can people experience it?

Kelly: The initial idea for 1.4 for copy came from myself being inspired by the story of how my parents met on an illegal CB radio in Dagenham in 1981. CB is a great piece of kit, the first R&D (NTW Waleslab) I did on the piece we just played with CB radio to test it capability as a performance platform. There is something so beautiful about the static of CB, you can spend hours just waiting for a voice to appear, it’s quite mesmerizing.  CB is still very much alive in Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. I met their local CB guru and we spoke about the science of radio waves and the technical side of how CB works. I think that’s informed the work.  The piece we have made for MIX is an interactive sound sculpture, that’s aim, is to connect the audience through out the conference space. Using the real sound clips of my parents and some written scenes performed by voice actors, the audience will have to work for the story.  The less people that fill the space the more distorted and fragmented the story becomes, there are CB radios in the space so they can radio other audience members to help them out.

Linda: We are using PIR sensors and arduinos on the entry and exit doors to count how many people are in the room, the more people the better you can hear the story.

What story are you telling through 1.4 for Copy and what do you hope to inspire or provoke in people?

Kelly: 1.4 for Copy is about connection. As a society I feel that we are quite disconnected from each other. Politically now is very much a replica of what was going on in the 1980s, tory government, recession, mass unemployment. In times of hardship we should be sticking together and helping each other out but this doesn’t seem to be the case. We very rarely help each other out anymore. The piece aims to take us away from our phones and social media and make us talk to one another. I hope to make people form new relationships and speak to people they may never have thought about. It’s not just about the story of two people meeting, I’d love the audience to share their own stories with each other.

How has the project evolved from when you first started working on it to the final piece?

Kelly: Originally when myself and Linda began to talk about the project we knew we didn’t want to make a website. Both myself and Linda have a love of immersive theatre gaming shows, which meant we were both thinking something a bit more audience participatory.  Originally we thought we’d make something a bit like a CB radio chat roulette. Each audience members getting CB licenses, booths being placed in different locations enabling them to talk to each other. However we both realized quite quickly that it was essentially just Skype and didn’t say what both interested us about the project. We met up to discuss the heart of the idea, why we liked the project, what interested us the most and what we liked. Which is when we came up with what we are doing for MIX. I think projects always naturally become through process what they were always meant to be.

You applied to the programme as individuals and were paired by the selection panel, what was it like embarking on an artistic collaboration with someone you had never met, let alone worked with? Did it throw up particular challenges and how did you handle them?

Kelly: At first I think I found it hard. It can take a long time to get used to a collaboration and because I live in Wales and Linda lives in London, every time we saw each other there was no time for testing each others working practice we just had to get down to business.  I think the collaboration found it’s own rhythm and actually as it worked out, we were well matched. In hindsight I think it may have been good to have arranged a workshop by an external party for us to get used to making together prior to actually making together. I don’t think the partnership didn’t work, actually myself and Linda have plans to continue working on the project together, I just wish we had more time to establish each others working process.

Kelly you applied as a writer and Linda, you applied as a technologist, what was your working process? Were their clear demarcations around who did what or was it more fluid than that?

Kelly: I’d say the process was quite a fluid one. After the initial meeting we kept chatting and batting ideas back and forth. I think for me and Linda this worked very well. It meant between meetings we had time to reflect back on what we had discussed and sift out anything that we felt didn’t work for the project.

I think my role in the project changed. I feel I started out being the writer but that quickly adapted to writer/maker. I think this helped us pull together our ideas. In my practice I am both a writer and maker so was happy that I got to use those skills. I also work quite visually and this comes from my maker background, this helped us look at the project from a different angle and imagine what the piece we were to make might look like.

What did you learn from making 1.4 for Copy? And what will you take away from your collaboration?

Kelly: Well, myself and Linda will be working together in the future, so the collaboration has helped shape a new creative partnership. I think I have learnt that when forming a new creative partnership it takes time and patience. It also means working around both of your workloads. Linda is very good at explaining the technical stuff to me so I have learnt a load about how to use a combination of gadgets to make a project work. A lot of the projects I work on have digital aspects, or at least I want them to, I have never had any idea how to execute them. I feel like I am now able to at least try to break it down in what needs to be in place in order to make it work and not just be an add on but an essential for the show.

Linda: I think what we have now is just the beginning and I’m really looking forward to working more with Kelly. When we started I had never even heard of CB radio, but the recordings of Kelly’s parents immediately fascinated me, and I was able to borrow a CB radio that I tried out.

What’s next for 1.4 for Copy?

Kelly: Well, I have a seed commission to write the play from NTW but myself and Linda have also been invited to apply for Experimentica Festival with the piece we are showing at MIX.

Linda: There are a lot of ways I want to improve/expand on 1.4 copy but most would require extra funding and money for equipment. A better way to count people using kinects would be good, as well as more walkie talkies/turning it into a collaborative treasure hunt game.

And what’s next for each of you – any projects in the pipeline that we should keep an eye out for?

Kelly: I am touring a show of mine THE DROWNED GIRL in Wales this autumn.  The Drowned Girl is a solo show about, unsuccessfully learning how to swim as a child vs. adult drowning and wading through life when grieving. It’s made up of stories from my life and a fusion of storytelling and concrete sound made up from the places in the story.

Linda: I am finishing my Knight-Mozilla fellowship at the Guardian, and dream of going to Antarctica or the Arctic and taking more aerial photographs with helium balloons and kites.

Kelly Jones and Linda Sandvik are one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Writer, Kelly, and technologist, Linda, applied to the programme as individuals and were paired by the selection panel because of their shared interests, complementary skill and their openness to collaborating with someone they had never met. 

Kelly’s and Linda’s project is inspired by Kelly’s parents meeting on illegal CB Radio and uses physical computing to explore the ideas of connection and intimacy, ephemerality and permanence. This is the second in a series of diary posts by Kelly and Linda documenting the evolution of their project and their collaboration. You can read their first diary post here. 

So what exactly is a CB radio? I had no idea until I met Kelly Jones for this project. Despite having actually watched Convoy, a terrible movie centered around the use of CB radios and trucker culture. I’ve not really done anything with radio before, I think maybe in school once they made us make Crystal radio apparatus for receiving radio during a WW2 project, but never for transmitting. My first impression is it seems a bit like a walkie talkie. You hold in a button to speak, then release. The difference being whereas a walkie talkie has a range about 2 miles, the CB radio can do 20 miles (or more, with mod-ed equipment). They also operate on different frequencies, walkie-talkies are usually paired with another device, a CB radio can talk to any other CB radio within range. People might bring a receiver with them on the move, but have a home base to broadcast from. It was very popular with truckers. Metallic frames of the cars and trucks make an excellent groundplane which improves the range of the antenna. Kelly let me borrow a car antenna to play around with. “Try putting a biscuit tin on the base to expand the range” suggested one helpful enthusiast on twitter. “And run a wire from the antenna to the base”.

I set up the radio on my desk in my bedroom and turned it on. I say “turned it on”. What I do is I stick two loose wires into the power pack. It turns on briefly but when I move one of the wires fall out. I tape it on. When turned on it immediately goes to channel 9. “Oh shit this is the emergency channel I shouldn’t be on here aaah” I think and flick to channel 4, where I get a lovely static. I’ve been talking to people on twitter about CB radios. One person tells me their father still uses it. When there are storms or earthquakes he listens out on the emergency channel in case anyone needs help. Some situations could occur when you don’t have a phone or internet. But probably a mobile phone is more reliable these days.

I talked to a few CB radio enthusiasts about the rise and fall of CB. Newer technologies replaced it. In some cases IRC (internet relay chat, actually created well before the height of CB). Some said IRC was less intrusive. There’s a log you can read if you’re not there at the time. If you’re busy you can catch up later. There are some things they missed though. The voices. The mystery of not knowing the real name. If it’s just text on a computer screen you can’t really know for sure if you’re talking to a human. Talking over CB radio is more Snapchat-like. You have to be there, in the moment. I like that.

Most of the people I talk to on twitter who still use CB radio are drivers or truckers or live in the countryside in the US and spend a lot of time driving, across their ranch for instance. They mostly talk to other drivers. I guess traveling can be lonely. Unlike cellphones, there are no laws against using a CB radio while you’re driving.  The only people I’ve managed to talk to so far from my bedroom setup have been truckers. There are more channels busy in the early morning than in the evening. It’s interesting and strange to talk to them because I am a cyclist in London and trucks are the enemy. It feels weird to listen in to their chatting. That’s something you can do by the way, just listen without saying anything. Sometimes you may want to let people know you are there just by clicking your button quickly, without saying a word.

A friend told me her aunt and uncle met on CB radio, like Kelly’s parents. It’s probably equivalent to “we met on the internet”. But you’re a bit more likely to meet someone who lives close to where you live. I like that too. We can reach the whole world now but we have forgotten how to talk to those physically close to us. I live in London so of course I don’t know my neighbours or talk to people in my neighbourhood. I talk to people on twitter instead.

A few people tried to encourage me to get a ham radio license. They used to do CB radio before ham radio took over. All the cool kids are using it. I’ve been at the London Hackspace when they’ve tried talking to the ISS. Yes, even the International Space Station has a ham radio.

So how do we preserve the rich history and culture of CB radio for the future? Will archaeologists of the distant future be able to make receivers that can pick up these radio waves that are still floating around? What will they think of us?

Kelly Jones and Linda Sandvik are one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Writer, Kelly, and technologist, Linda, applied to the programme as individuals and were paired by the selection panel because of their shared interests, complementary skill and their openness to collaborating with someone they had never met. 

Kelly’s and Linda’s project is inspired by Kelly’s parents meeting on illegal CB Radio and uses physical computing to explore the ideas of connection and intimacy, ephemerality and permanence. This is the first in a series of diary posts by Kelly and Linda documenting the evolution of their project and their collaboration. 

After a rainy journey up (or across) from Cardiff myself and Linda met today for the  second time since finding out that we were awarded the Writing Platform Bursary. Our initial meeting happened at Warren Street station, with both myself and Linda awkwardly eyeing each other thinking, ‘Is that the writer? – Is that the technologist?’ Thankfully, she was the technologist and I, her writer. Quite quickly it became apparent why we were paired to work together. With a shared interest in immersive theatre games and a love of tea, we began brainstorming ideas and exploring a way of pairing narrative with an interactive technological experience.

Today we’d arranged to meet by a statue outside a London train station, that’s coincidentally surrounded by statues, a clever idea , like saying – I’ll meet you over by that bit of water to a goldfish. Obviously if that Goldfish isn’t in a bowl of water at the time he needs to meet the meet-ee, their ‘meeting’ would be much easier than mine and Linda’s was. Eventually finding each other we spent the day in The British Library, sharing our developments with the project and trying to log onto the Wi-Fi.

When I applied for the Writing Platform the idea that I included on my application was for a project called ‘1.4 for copy’. ‘1.4 for copy’ is a play about how my parents met on an illegal CB radio in Dagenham in 1980. After a period of research and development it transformed into a piece no longer just based on how my parents met, but about connection. Specifically, how in 2015 it’s much easier to be connected, but we rarely do, our heads always down, looking at a screen. The other most interesting part of the project for me is the science, radio waves infinitely travelling through space, the signal eventually fades but when you think about it those stories of the past, especially on CB, are floating right above our heads. Very romantic. These are the things that Linda and I are looking at with our project. Can we make the audience connect and leave a lasting, yet fading impression of those connections they’ve made?

At the moment we are trying to find someone to build us two booths or sheds to test the idea that we have. The idea, yet vague, is something we are both very excited about. We would like to pitch up a CB booth in two different locations, probably Cardiff and Hackney, to test. After an introduction to the world of CB through the stories I am writing the player is moved onto the booth. They are given a CB license number, CB dictionary and instructions, after logging on (through the power of WI-FI) they connect to the person who is in the other booth. They won’t be able to see each other, just hear their voice, and at the end of their conversation they will be given a task to do that will get pinned to the other players CB license number, building up a library, a constellation of connection. We further need to explore the role of the voyeur and text/script within this project and how as a writer I can satisfy the requirements to not just have a great tech/theatre project, but that also has narrative and words. More on this in the next post.

If you can help Kelly and Linda build the booths they need you can reach out to them on Twitter @TheDrownedGirl and @hyper_linda or email us at hello[at]thewritingplatform.com and we’ll pass it on. 

We are also supporting Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke the bursary programme. Their project uses Minecraft to immerse the player in the experience of a poem and expand the idea of what literature and video games can be. You can watch their first video diary here.

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?

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 second guide explains how to create characters.

Characters – Goals, Obstacles, Communities and Points-of-View

It is somewhat stating the obvious to suggest that character is crucial to storytelling. Yet the idea of character is more complex than it might appear. And in the case of writing immersive interactive and multi-platform storyworlds, the notion of how to construct characters is extended with new considerations.

A story may be described in terms of its plot (this happens, then that happens then this happens…. etc) but it’s characters that provide us with point-of-view, empathy, metaphor, subtext and drama within that plot chain of events. More specifically, it is characters that give us a reason to care about the plot and make the plot events meaningful.

Writing a storyworld, as opposed to a singular narrative, requires some broader ideas about characters, what they represent, how they work and how they relate to each other in ongoing ways. We’ll break this down into 4 useful elements as a tool kit for thinking about the characters in your storyworld.

– Goals and Obstacles

– Role-Play

– Communities

– Points of view

Goals and Obstacles

In the previous guide we looked at the dramatic pressures of your storyworld, asking what forces in opposition pressurise and make dramatic (or comedic) your world? This is to say, what macro-level problems effect every character in your world? This is the central energy source that will both generate and motivate your characters who will not only struggle against or with these problems, but who will also be a product of them. Characters born in a particular world are a direct result of the world; their attitudes, behaviours, personality and – in particular – their goals and objectives, are a response to the problems of the world.

In the TV series Breaking Bad for example, the storyworld is one where there are two big problems; the first is a broken and dysfunctional health system that doesn’t cover peoples medical bills and the second is a huge demand for the drug crystal meth. These two big problems – health care and drugs – are the forces that beset every character in the Storyworld and which every character is responding to in some way. Characters are then made interesting, dramatic and compelling when they have specific goals and obstacles that are in opposition to the problem. Hence the storyworld of Breaking Bad naturally generates the character of an under-insured school teacher who has the goal of selling crystal meth to make enough money for his family before he dies and the obstacle of avoiding both the police and the other drug dealers. The problems of health care and drugs are so big they are unsolvable and so the dramatic pressure is sustainable over a very long-form narrative.

These same principles of a character’s goals and obstacles being a direct result of the problems of the storyworld are as applicable in an interactive multi-platform experience as they are in a TV series. The question is how do those storyworld pressures and problems manifest characters with clear goals and obstacles across different platforms and also how the audience can be compelled to respond interactively to the same goals and obstacles. What is crucial for the writing of your storyworld bible is to ensure that the very specific, personal, individual goals and obstacles of your characters are intrinsically linked to the problems of the world. In this way any character dropped into your world should be immediately pressurised and compelled to respond or act.

Role-Play

The idea of a motivated character with clear goals and defined obstacles is as applicable to interactive storytelling as it is with film, TV and books. In traditional narrative media we call such a motivated character an active protagonist with the idea that watching a character actively doing things is better than watching a passive character having things happen to them. In an interactive narrative experience the audience or user is most often asked to be the active protagonist – to play the role of a character with goals and obstacles.

Sometimes the audience will be asked to play the role of a pre-defined character, where the story tells the user who they are and the type of character they represent. In other cases the audience ‘plays themselves’, a tabula rasa onto which the audience are free to assign their own behaviours. In either case creating an active role-playing experience requires an extended idea of a character’s goals and obstacles.

The first is to clearly define the role for the audience in active terms; does an interactive narrative in your storyworld ask the user to be the fighter, finder, solver, rescuer, detective, strategist, organiser, chaser, escapee, etc…. What active roles does your storyworld naturally embody? By understanding the active verbs that describe what the user will ‘do’ in your storyworld you can define the three core things that make for a satisfying interactive experience: motivation, action and reward.

It’s a mistake to expect or assume your audience will or even want to interact. It’s your job – the job of your storyworld – to motivate them to do so. Ask yourself ‘what compels my audience to interact’? What is at stake? What is at risk? What will be lost or gained by their actions?

Once motivated the audience will then have specific actions and tasks to perform. What are those actions? Be specific not abstract. What are you asking them to do and how will they do it? These actions come directly out of the role you have asked them to play and the actions should be a direct consequence of the storyworld’s pressures. The audience’s actions should be specific to achieving a clear goal and be made dramatic by the obstacles that prevent them from achieving those goals.

The last crucial element for engaging interactive story experiences is reward. If you’re going to ask your audience to take part in your storyworld, to role play and take action, then you will need to reward them for doing so and thus motivate them to continue to interact and role play. How are your audience rewarded? is the story advanced? New knowledge unlocked? New spaces opened to explore? New mysteries revealed or questions answered? Of course reward systems can also involve traditional ‘game’ ideas of points, leveling-up, or any combination of the above.

Communities

The dominant mistake writers often make when developing and submitting their storyworld project is to focus on a single character with a single goal and subsequently a singular plot. But we’re not looking for ‘a’ story, we’re looking for a whole world of stories. In terms of character this often means shifting the emphasis away from an individual character and onto communities of characters.

Any storyworld – whether it’s real-world, intimate and contained, or other-worldly, fantastical and huge – will be home to groups of character that share common goals and obstacles; in other words communities.

Communities of characters can often be described and articulated in much the same terms we might use to describe an individual. What are the goals of that group of characters? What are the obstacles they face together? Communities will even share a personality, an attitude and a perspective. The group will collectively believe certain things and be in opposition to others.

This goes the same for antagonists as much as for protagonists in your world. Storyworld antagonists are often institutions, collective entities or forces that may comprise numerous individual characters but who all reflect a consistent set of traits. Take the much loved ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ – a project spanning TV, video games, comic books and more. The Buffy storyworld is rich and full of near countless demons, ghosts, monsters and vampires. Yet the antagonist is a singular entity – the Hell Mouth that spawns an ongoing ‘community’ of antagonistic characters for Buffy and her own ‘community’ of friends, family and comrades to face, fight and overcome. The Hell Mouth has collective goals, obstacles and perspective that is opposition the collective goals, obstacles and perspectives of the Slayers.

Within such communities of characters there are of course tensions, disputes and a mix of character archetypes. But identifying the collected traits of the different groups that exist in your storyworld is a crucial step in being able to define a world with the potential for numerous, varying and ongoing storylines and characters that can be experienced across platforms and technologies.

Points of View

The last element of points-of-view is about the different perspectives that exist for the characters and the audience in your world. Where a feature film generally offers just one point-of-view, the vibrancy of a storyworld can often be measured by the range of possible points-of-view that may be experienced. This speaks to the different platforms the world may be presented on, the different paths audiences may take through the world, the ability for the storyworld to generate multiple points of entry and audience revisitation.

Compelling points-of-view stem from compelling characters and this should prompt you to ask questions of your storyworld – What different points of view exist in your storyworld? Are they balanced and equally compelling? Does each POV effect the experience of the world and change audiences perceptions of it? Do different POV’s challenge, contradict or confound each other? Do certain points of view lend themselves more to one platform or another? Are certain points of view more conducive to being experienced interactively?

Summary

A storyworld may be full of great conceptual ideas, intrigues and fascinations, it may be visually beautiful, terrible or sublime, but it will often fail to be compelling for an audience until it is richly populated characters; characters we can care about, empathise with, cheer for or be in fear of.

Doing this of course aint easy! But the ideas here should help guide you towards the particular demands of characters in a storyworld as opposed to a character in a plot.

Goals & Obstacles

Audience Role-Play

Motivation Action and Reward

Communities

Points of View

—

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

#1 How To Create A Storyworld here
#3 How to Create Plot, 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?

Photo © Christopher Hauke

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 first guide explains how to create a storyworld.

Storyworld – Logline, Timeline, Dramatic Pressures, Genre

Storytelling is intrinsic to human culture yet writing compelling stories is far from easy. As such the very idea of a storyworld that may encompass numerous stories from multiple points of view across multiple media is undoubtedly daunting.

This series of writers’ guides covers five major elements that comprise a storyworld project to guide your thinking and help you articulate your big ideas into form.

– World

– Character

– Multi-stranded Plot

– Audience

– Memories

The first of these, ‘World’, is where we’ll begin – the high-level expression of the central concept and spine of your creation.

The writing of a storyworld project and proposal is as much about convincing the reader of the brilliance of your ideas as it is about expressing the detail of your storyworld. It’s crucial to remember that the first Audience for your project is the Reader of your proposal. You need to convince them and excite them, challenge and provoke them. But most importantly of all, you need to express your storyworld to them with clarity, specificity and efficiency.

In this way there are four elements that define and express your world:

Logline, Genre, Dramatic Pressures and Timeline

A Logline is a common device used in all forms of media; books, movies, TV shows. It is a concise and very short distillation of the essence of your story. In a feature film this is most often a sentence focused on a particular Character, in a particular Place with a particular Problem. But when the canvas is a multi- platform and interactive World, rather than just a single plot feature film, we need to paint in bigger strokes. Yet, at the same time, a good logline should always be a focused distillation, an encapsulation of the central burning idea. An idea so bright it compels the reader to want to read more.

Your logline should present the fundamental conflict in your storyworld. Not the conflict or predicament of an individual character but a conflict and predicament that impacts upon EVERY character in your world.

The logline might express;

– the ‘what if’

– the extraordinary circumstance

– the forces in opposition

– a unique combination of events

Think of the Logline as a tool; something you will write and re-write to continually refine your storyworld’s essence.

As an example; the winner of our Immersive Writing Lab competition last year was BLACKOUT by Laura Grace & Elizabeth McGuane and their logline of one short paragraph sums up the world in a very compelling way.

“After a series of terrorist attacks the government’s temporary lockdown on public access to the internet has been in place for ten months. The outside world is screaming at the UK to end Blackout, but the taste of absolute power is proving hard to shake for some and an underground movement of hackers known as the Network are a flame that cannot be put out.”

In five lines we know a lot about the world – the problem, the forces in conflict, the social groups and the dramatic challenge. And yet we are not locked into a single plot or an individual character. This is a world in which many stories may be told and the potential is huge.

High fantasy and science fiction seem obvious candidates for storyworlds but the idea is not genre specific. A satirical situation-comedy scenario is as much a specific storyworld as the universe of Star Wars. But in this, defining and being specific about the Genre of your storyworld is vitally important. Genre is not a set of rules or a formula, it’s recognising the longstanding mythologies of human experience that shape the stories we tell. Thriller, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Comedy, Satire, Romance – these are all platforms on which your story can stand. Moreover, Genre speaks to audience expectations, what your audience will recognise, desire and anticipate from the experience of entering your storyworld.

Ultimately we engage with stories because we like to worry. Intrigue, mystery, suspense, horror, hope are all emotions we feel when we are made to care about the fate of characters within a given world. This is just as vital in a storyworld as it is in a feature film, and the ability for the storyworld to generate these feelings and make your audience Care is driven by the dramatic pressures you exert upon the world; these pressures create the Stakes of the narratives. What is at risk? What might be lost? This idea is fundamental to all stories but the difference in a storyworld is that they require 2 vital properties;

1) the stakes need to be high enough and big enough that they can sustain the drama for multiple characters, multiple plots across multiple media.

and

2) the problems of the storyworld need to be virtually unresolvable.

If the world and its characters can easily or quickly solve their problems then the storyworld is unsustainable. High-drama genres generally deal with this issue by having huge antagonists that are all- powerful. More comedic and lighter genres often solve this problem by ‘reset’ where the problems are continually overcome but reset themselves. Think of how the TV series Battlestar Galactica has the constant threat of the Cylons that can never be overcome but only ‘escaped’ and evaded – versus the way a comedy storyworld like The Simpsons where all its characters, circumstances and antagonists have continual ‘reset’. The Simpson family may overcome the failings of modern American society each episode, but they can never ‘win’ and the comedic forces of the storyworld will always reset. In either case, the dramatic pressures need to be powerful, compelling and sustainable. they need to apply to the whole storyworld and generate high stakes for all the characters who live there.

The final thing to consider is the timeline of your storyworld. Defining the ‘here and now’ of a world is more conceptually focused if you can clearly articulate how the ‘here and now’ came to be? It’s useful to think of your storyworld timeline as not just a series of things that happened but rather as moments in time that fit three broad types.

INFLUENCING EVENTS

– things that happen that alter behavior from that point on or which shape, redefine or alter a character, entity or institution. In other words, an event that has profound influence on world.

DECISIONS

– specific choices taken by a character, society, organization or entity which represent a fork in the road. Points on the timeline where there was a clear choice and a decision was made that altered the trajectory of the ‘storyworld’ forever.

MILESTONES

– a moment or event in the timeline where a threshold was passed and from which there was no goingback for a character, institution or society. A timeline milestone is a saturation point, a moment of critical mass and transformation.

These three different event types allow us to think through the storyworld timeline in a more specific way and see the dramatic rather than just Intellectual appeal of the world. We can see influencing events and decisions as being dramatic triggers that lead to milestones, thresholds of no return in the storyworld. And it is the constructing of Milestone thresholds that are the foundation of your Storyworld – the rules in which it will function.

How did your storyworld come to be the way it is…? And what about that timeline makes the ‘here and now’ of your storyworld dramatic..?

A Storyworld is not an easy thing to conceive or write but these 4 things should set you on your way – Logline, Genre, Dramatic Pressures and Timeline

—

For further reading please see Mike’s guides to:

#2 Character – Protagonists, Antagonists, Communities, Points of View
#3 Multi-stranded plot – Dramatic Questions, Events, Thresholds and Inversions
#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?