narrative – Leapfroglog

Recess! 11 – Restate My Assumptions

Recess! is a correspondence series with personal ruminations on games.

Dear Alper and Niels,

My apologies, I fell off the Recess! horse there for a minute. But I’m back in the saddle. Let’s see, what were we talking about again?

Alper obsessively played Ultratron for a while, got bored, stopped and felt guilty for spending 11 hours on it.

Niels helped make Toki Tori 2, got all conflicted about his feelings for the game and went on about how elegantly its world conveys his story.

Sigh. I hope you’ll both excuse me while I don my schoolmaster’s cap and proceed to school you.

It’s telling Alper feels Moves offers more meaningful play than Ultratron. He’s stuck in what Sutton-Smith calls ‘the rhetorics of animal progress’. The idea that play is only meaningful when it contributes to ‘individual development and group culture’. Alper, you should lighten up and maybe submit to the rhetoric of frivolity. Put simply, you should allow yourself to play the fool. Because “unlike the rest of us, who are all losers in most of the conventional senses, and most surely in the mortal sense, the fool transcends triviality.”

Niels, on the other hand, should do himself a favor and read Remediation because he seems to think ‘immediacy’ is the holy grail of media. The medium should disappear, it should not get in the way of the audience’s experience of the message. Well Niels, I have news for you: immediacy is only one possible media mode and its drawbacks are considerable. Most importantly, it precludes critical engagement of an audience with a medium’s message. Hypermediacy, on the other hand, foregrounds the workings of media. It foregoes ‘immersion’ and ‘seamlesness’ in favor of bricolage and seamfulness (PDF). In doing so, it allows for active audience engagement. Don’t you wish that for your stories?

In short, let’s restate our assumptions. I’ll go first:

Play can be meaningful and useless at the same time.
Games can tell stories without being immersive.

Announcing a hybrid game opera for Monster

I never thought I would make an opera. But now I have.

In a few weeks time the above market square in the town of Monster will be transformed into an arena where fighters duel each other using their pet monsters. If this sounds familiar, it is no coincidence.

Mega Monster Battle Arena is one of 11 operas produced by Dario Fo to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Westland municipality. Dario Fo specialize in creating music theatre in close collaboration with the local community. They asked composer Daniël Hamburger to create the opera for Monster. The brief was to do ‘something’ with the town’s curious name, and to make it a production that would appeal to youth by referencing games culture.¹

Daniël in turn approached me, since he had little affinity for games, and wanted the piece to not only be about games, but to be a game itself. So that’s what I helped do. By turning the game design principle of embedded narrative inside-out, we’ve managed to create a structure in which we can both tell a story using a script, and have performers improvise using game rules. Those rules I designed as a proper game. I could give you those rules and you would be able to play it yourself.

So there will be fights, and they’ll not be scripted. You won’t know beforehand who will win, and neither will we. There will also be a story, about a heroine facing off with a bad guy, in the best game and martial arts film tradition. Sieger M.G. was our third man, the piece’s writer. A rapper turned poet with a life-long games addiction, there could be no better fit.

What’s probably most exciting to me is that on top of the improvisational choreography of the duels, a live band will use a rule set of their own, composed by Daniël, that takes the game as it unfolds as its input to improvise. How’s that for adaptive music?²

It might all go horribly wrong, or it might become a wonderful spectacle. If you are like me and would like to find out which it will be, head to Monster for one of the shows. They’re scheduled for:

Thursday 18 June 20:30 (tryout)
Friday 19 June 20:30
Saturday 20 June 20:30

Tickets are 15 Euro and can be bought at the venue. Once the show is over, I’ll post some more detailed stuff about the actual work I did. Stay tuned.

There would be tons of kids from local high schools to work with. They also wanted to use the local firemen choir. Oh, and aerial work platforms too… [↩]
One of the sources of inspiration for Daniël was John Zorn. [↩]

Play, story and recombination

“Dominant models in IA: space + story” was one of the notes I took while at this year’s Euro IA Summit. I’ll get into space some other time. Concerning story: Basically it strikes me that for a discipline involved with an interactive medium, so often designing is likened to storytelling. I’m not sure this is always the most productive way to approach design, I actually think it is very limiting. If you approach design not as embedding your story in the environment, but as creating an environment wherein users can create their own stories, then I’d say you’re on the right track. An example I tend to use is a game of poker: The design of the game poker was certainly not an act of storytelling, but a play session of poker is experienced as (and can be retold as) a story. Furthermore, the components of the game can be recombined to create different variations of the basic game, each creating different potentials for stories to arise. I’d like to see more designers approach interactive media (digital, physical or whatever) like this: Don’t tell a story to your user, enable them to create their own.¹ Realize users will want to recombine your stuff with other stuff you might not know about (the notion of seamful design comes into play here). When you’ve done a proper job, you’ll find them retelling those stories to others, which I would say is the biggest compliment you can get.

_{1. Or to put this in Marc LeBlanc‘s terms: Don’t embed narrative, let it emerge through play.}

Rough notes for Tom Armitage – What social software can learn from Homer, Dickens, and Marvel Comics

Dickens, cliffhanger on every page

Putting data on display = publishing

Blogs are fragmentary

Every single thing you do needs to be dated for context

In hindsight it’ll show you patterns

Example: Infovore and previous blog actually join

Collect data across boundaries (chronological, digital, physical)

Nostalgia, be fuzzy, looking back at old stories etc.

Analogy of reviews of books with comments on blog – making it livelier.

If something counts (comments, statistics) make them accessible and public.

Fin. serial narrative.

Next: epic

Homer

How can someone remember these huge stories?

Because they use known structures and formulas, conventions.

You can leave out stuff. Two tellings are never the same.

He doesn’t believe in single sign-up. Stuff will be different between sites.

Profiles of people should be different between sites.

Retroactive continuity (retcon)

“deliberately changing previously established facts in fiction”

Crisis on Infinite Earths (Marvel) starting anew

Social software: revising earlier versions.

E.g.: Flickr replace button.

Fiction – telling lies, no let’s tell untruths

“Truth: something with no deliberate dishonesty” — Andrew Losowsky, http://tinyurl.com/lug7c

The Doorbells of Florence (on Fiickr)

Identity

Give people the chance to use something else than their real name. Personas are important. Handle based culture has existed for a long time online.

Expect people to tell untruths.

Kaycee Nicole Swenson hoax Dying of leukemia, PayPal, blogging, died, but not really, she was an old woman.

No default for truth.

Fictional characters on Friendster.

Vincent Gallo on site – deleted too but it was really him…

Wikipedia should mix both fiction and truth

Telling the story (final section)

The language you use is important

(Jarhead is a great book.)

You should tell a tale and talk as little as possible in your own voice.

Breedster, art project, insect, eating, shitting and having sex. Sexual disease – everyone became infertile.

User experience is important.

Good storytelling can’t save a terrible story.

Conclusion

When you create social software, look to storytelling for inspiration.

Questions

Q We should have a debate about truth and fiction. A Internet doesn’t have a laughter track and it never will. We expect comm. media to be truthful but publishing media to be used for fiction. Internet is both… Friend that was evicted from WoW because of roleplaying a racist character. There is a risk that the net will get really po-faced.

Q How can we go about determining who’s really who? A Example of phishing (Paypal), lots of people will believe you when you just get the style right. With text it’s really easy to pretend to be someone else. Real names shouldn’t be forced to publish their real names.

http://reboot.dk/wiki/What_social_software_can_learn_from_Homer%2C_Dickens%2C_and_Marvel_Comics