I Am User Generated

One of the most exciting parts of interactive storytelling is that it’s uncharted territory but this can also be its downfall because it’s uncharted for the viewer as well. To put them at ease we need to give as much context for the experience as possible. Most users have no idea how they got there, where they’re going or how to get where you want them to go.

When we read a book we immediately know how long it is and and how to move through the experience. Most movies are between 90mins and 120mins and all we really have to do is sit there and turn off our cellphones. But have you ever landed on a site or fired up an app and immediately forgotten why you’re there? If we add some global context into the experience that reminds the user how they got there then they’re more likely to keep moving through the experience without thinking that they should be doing something else.

We also need to hint at where the user is going. This is usually done with a master nav that is broken into chapters or a timeline of sorts. The user wants to know that they are a third of the way through the story or they have two more hours to go. How often do you look at the run time of a YouTube video before you click play? You want to know what you’re in for.

Users also want to know how they’re going to get through the story. Do I have to click a hundred times, do I have to scroll to the bottom to see the next chapter? The easier the user-experience, the more seamless the story can become. Just read the press when a popular website switches their user-interface. Everyone hates it, because it’s unfamiliar. If we’re telling an unfamiliar story that requires some mental effort then don’t make user-interface a barrier. The less templates and the more repeatable the experience is, the more likely the user will move through the to an end game. Sorry interface designers it’s not about the interface it’s about the story so the interface should disappear.

These three interactive storytelling tricks will add context and give the best chance to tell the most complete story.

Today concludes my ten part series on my exploration into Walter Ong’s classifications of orality and how I see them relating to an emerging social media language. The posts can be read as individual posts or as a series starting on November 1st. For now I’ve also put them all into a category called Orality.

As Walter J. Ong tells us in his book Orality and Literacy,”oral societies live very much in the present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.” This is as true now as it was in an oral tradition. The format of blogging is set up to push stories down the webpage visually as new stories are published. These stories are archived but in a visual hierarchy they are seen as lesser to more recent posts. As aggregator sites collect stories they often automatically refresh and cull in more recent stories thus “sloughing off” the older stories. The algorithim of Digg.com, one of the more popular story aggregators is such that stories that are ‘digged’ by readers or in other words rated highly are shown more on the landing page, but the time of publication is also factored in to show highest rated and most recent. There are social booking sites such as del.icio.us that serve as online tools for bookmarking or remembering stories however the greatest value of these sites is for sharing of stories that are important to the individual. For example, del.icio.us/radarddb tells my audience stories that are important to me at my workplace, but always displayed in chronological order with the visual hierarchy being that of most recent at the top. In a social media landscape that perpetuates new stories being published every second, stories that are not memorable are in the past and likely to be forgotten.

Walter Ong separates these into two separate points, however as they relate to social media in the same way I’ll group them together. In an oral tradition the audience is known and the audience is human. It is humans in dialogue with other humans in a live physical space. This is very different from the unknown audience of a book or the abstract world that many films present. Social media abides by the same principles of human-to-human interaction, albeit through technological mediation. This is a main reason that Second Life will only be seen as a blip on the Web 2.0 radar in years to come. Humans are being asked to relate to each in an interface that is a mere simulation of a lifeworld, with the abstraction of avatars. Second Life will remain for an elite crowd of computer users who feel most comfortable interacting in an abstraction of reality. This does not hold true for the majority of broadband users.

That being said the gaming industry has been saved by the advent of Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). MMORPGs took the convention of gaming, which was not of a real lifeworld and was situationality abstract and infused a human element by allowing users to play and communicate with each other worldwide over a broadband connection. Users started to create new forms of storytelling in a social media language over these broadband connections. Machinima, one such emergent form of storytelling, was born out of a filmic electronic age but operates in the language of social media storytelling. Over the broadband connection users control video game characters to act out small short films. These films are recorded to a hard drive from which the footage is edited, scored and ultimately produced in a similar tradition to digital filmmaking. The most popular of these films is the series Red vs. Blue where the soldiers of Halo, controlled and voiced by a group of gamers, simply pontificate on life, a departure from the narrative of the original video game which included the abstract narrative of saving the world from alien invasion.

Another example of apply to new concreteness to un-situational and abstract form of storytelling is Alternate Reality Games or ARGs. One such example is the promotional ARG for the film The Bourne Supremacy where contestants are given clues online to the physical location in their home city to more clue in order to solve part of the mystery that takes place in the film. Another example of cross-platforming, but also a clear indication of infusing a situational element to an otherwise abstract story of a super agent trained to kill by an unknown government body.

In an oral culture the tradition of verbal jousting remains still to this day where an orator verbally challenges his audience sometimes in an intellectual debate or simply in vilifying ones mother. This language of combat is again evidenced in most forums and chat rooms, so much so, that moderators are often put in place to monitor the litany of barbed insults. Even in a relatively tame forum such as a computer repair forum, users often call out other users lack of knowledge on the particular topic. Often the original question is lost to the combat of users. Visit a Sci-Fi forum where the users are experienced chat room users and the forked tongues are everywhere. This is seen less in print and electronic storytelling because the audience is unknown and there is no immediate response. Insulting someone’s mother in a novel loses it’s impact when the novel takes years to write, years to be release and months to read. This should not be seen as childish immature behavior but rather a return to antiquity. So get out there and craft a yo momma diss to the next forum user who rubs you the wrong way in support of the return to orality.