Tag: stories

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:

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

Helping users retell experiences

A frame from a Second Life machinima

I talked about the difference between emergent and embedded narrative in games a while ago. I also introduced my Interaction 08 talk in a previous post. I’d like to now follow up with some thoughts on the storytelling that happens outside of a user’s direct interaction with a product or service – the storytelling she engages in when recounting the experience of use to other people.

Obviously, supporting the retelling of experiences is important. After all if you’re offering a cool product or service, you want others to know about it. A passionate user is probably your best advocate. It only makes sense for you to create easy ways for her to share her experiences with others. It can also deepen a user’s own experience – making the product or service part of a story wherein she is kicking ass can create a positive feedback loop.

Games have picked up on this, of course. They’ve employed numerous ways for users to retell their play-sessions. In Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman list a number of them:

  1. The replay – found in racing games for instance – literally replays the actions of the player after she completes a track, stage or level. Sometimes this is done in ways that wouldn’t be practical in the game itself1 in all cases it is done in a way that fits the feel of the game, the experience the game aims for.
  2. Other games take this one step further and allow players to control the view of the replay themselves. They’ll also allow users to redistribute the recording of their actions. Doom did this, it was called the recam.
  3. A logical progression is found in the machinima phenomenon, where the play of a game takes a back-seat to the retelling of play, effectively making the game a tool for personal creative expression. A famous example are the many soap opera episodes produced by players of The Sims.
  4. Finally, with the advent of more embodied interactions in gaming there’s an upsurge of online videos of game-play. Having an embodied interface makes it much easier for bystanders to ‘read’ what’s going on, effectively opening the way for play to become like performance2.

How does this translate to the design of user experiences in digital and physical products? I think there are a few things that are important in the retelling of experiences:

  • The protagonist is the user, not your product. Your product or service is the enabler for the user to look cool in a story.
  • The way in which you enable retelling should be well-integrated with the experience you’re aiming for. The recam made sense for Doom because it allowed players to boast about their achievements.
  • You don’t have to create all the storytelling tools yourself. You should try to play nice with the stuff that’s already out there, such as pod-casting services, video-blogging tools, sketch-casting, photo-sharing etc.

Have good examples of products and services that help their users tell stories about their experiences? Let me know in the comments!

  1. For instance using different camera angles, lenses or filters for a more dramatic look. [↩]
  2. My favorite example being this video of a couple of guys playing Guitar Hero. [↩]