CHAPTER 1

Storytelling, Old and New

STORYTELLING: AN ANCIENT HUMAN ACTIVITY

Storytelling is a magical and powerful craft. Not only can it transport the audience on a thrilling journey into an imaginary world, but it can also reveal the dark secrets of human behavior or inspire the audience with the desire to do noble deeds. Storytelling can also be pressed into service for other human goals: to teach and train the young, for example, or to convey important information. Although digital storytelling is humankind’s newest way to enjoy narrative entertainment, it is part of this same great tradition.

Digital storytelling is narrative entertainment that reaches its audience via digital technology and media. One of its unique hallmarks is interactivity: back-and-forth communications between the audience and the narrative material. Digital storytelling is a vast field. It includes video games, entertainment content for the Internet, and even intelligent toy systems and electronic kiosks—at least 11 major and very different areas in all. On the vast timetable of human achievements, this type of storytelling is a mere infant, only coming into being in the mid-twentieth century with the development of computer technology. As to be expected with something so young, it is still growing and evolving. Each new development in digital media—broadband, wireless signals, DVDs, virtual reality—sees a corresponding development in digital storytelling.

The biggest difference between traditional types of narratives and digital storytelling is that the content of traditional narratives is in an analog form, whereas the content in digital storytelling comes to us in a digitized form. Digital data is made up of distinct, separate bits: the zeroes and ones that feed our computers. Analog information, on the other hand, is continuous and unbroken. The oldest stories were conveyed by the human voice and actors; later, narratives were printed on paper; more recently, they were recorded on audiotape, film, or videotape. All these older forms are analogue.

To distinguish between these older forms of content and the computerized forms, people coined the term “new media.” New media content includes the words and images we see on our computer screens, streaming audio and video, and material that comes to us on DVDs, CD-ROMs, video game consoles, and mobile phones. All of these forms are digital. The difference between analogue and digital can easily be seen by comparing an analog clock to a digital clock. An analog clock displays time in a smooth sweep around the dial, while a digital clock displays time in specific numerical increments of hours, minutes, and seconds.

Digital information can be stored easily, accessed quickly, and transferred among a great variety of devices. It can also be readily reassembled in an almost infinite number of ways, and thus it becomes a viable form of content for interactivity. The digitizing of content is what makes digital storytelling possible.

Yet, as new as digital storytelling is, it is part of a human tradition that stretches back to preliterate times. Furthermore, it has much in common with other forms of narrative: theatrical performances, novels, movies, and so on. (A narrative is simply an account of events that are interesting or exciting in some way; the word is often used interchangeably with “story.”) In essence, all stories have the same basic components. They portray characters caught up in a dramatic situation, depicting events from the inception of the drama to its conclusion. “Story,” of course, does not necessarily mean a work of fiction, something that is make-believe. Descriptions of things that happen in real life can be stories, too, as long as they are narrated in a dramatic manner and contain characters. Newspapers and TV news shows are major vehicles for nonfiction stories. And documentaries, which are long-form explorations of true events, are also stories.

Scientists believe that storytelling can be traced back to sometime in the Pleistocene age (1.8 million to about 11,000 years ago) and was developed as a critical survival tool. Manuel Molles, Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of New Mexico, theorizes that storytelling was used to communicate important information about the environment, behavior of wildlife, and availability of food (from his paper An Ecological Synthesis: Something Old, Something New, delivered at a 2005 ecology conference in Barcelona).

INTERACTIVITY AND STORYTELLING

One of the things that distinguishes digital storytelling from classical storytelling is that members of the audience can become active players in the narrative and can even have a direct impact on it. Surprising as it may seem, however, interactive narrative experiences like this existed long before the invention of computers.

Some professionals in interactive media hypothesize that the earliest forms of interactive storytelling took place around the campfires of prehistoric peoples. I can remember this theory being enthusiastically touted back in the early 1990s, when the creative community in Hollywood was first becoming excited about the potential of interactive media. At almost every conference I attended at the time, at least one speaker would allude to these long ago campfire scenes. The prehistoric storyteller, according to this theory, would have a general idea of the tale he planned to tell but not a fixed plot. Instead, he would shape and mold the story according to the reactions of those gathered around him.

This model evokes an inviting image of a warm, crackling fire and comfortable conviviality. It was no doubt a reassuring scenario to attendees of these first interactive media conferences, many of whom were intimidated by computers and the concept of interactive media. But to me, this model never sounded particularly convincing. For one thing, how could anyone really know what took place around those smoky old campfires? And even if it were true that ancient storytellers constructed their tales to fit the interests of their listeners, how much actual control or participation in the story could these campfire audiences have had? At best, it would have been an extremely weak form of interactivity.

But no matter what one thinks of this campfire model, it is unquestionably true that a form of interactive stories—a far more profound and participatory form—dates back to extremely ancient times. According to the renowned scholar Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), one of the earliest forms of story was the myth, and storytellers did not merely recite these old tales. Instead, the entire community would reenact them in the form of religious rituals.

PARTICIPATORY DRAMAS

These ancient reenactments of myths were a form of participatory drama. Campbell and other scholars in the field have observed that the myths acted out by a community generally contained deep psychological underpinnings and that one of their most common themes was death and rebirth. Campbell noted that participants who took part in myth-based rituals often found the experience so intense that they would undergo a catharsis, a profound sense of emotional relief. (The word catharsis comes from the Greek katharsis and means purgation, or purification.)

In agrarian communities, these rituals would often commemorate the death of the earth (winter) and its joyous rebirth (spring). One such ritual, well known to scholars of Greek drama, was called the Festival of Dionysus. Celebrated twice annually throughout ancient Greece, these festivals were a ritual retelling of the myth of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fertility. (See Figure 1.1.) They not only depicted important events in the deity’s life, but they were also closely connected to the cycle of seasons, particularly the death and rebirth of the grapevine, a plant closely associated with Dionysus.

Figure 1.1 The Greek god Dionysus, pictured on this ancient vase (ca. 500 BC), was honored in intense ritual ceremonies that were an early form of interactive storytelling. Note the grapevine and clusters of grapes in the decoration; Dionysus was closely associated with grape cultivation and wine.

Photograph by Maria Daniels, courtesy of University Museums, University of Mississippi.

While some details of the Dionysian rituals have been lost over time, a fair amount is still known about them. They involved singing and dancing and the playing of musical instruments. The male participants would dress as satyrs, drunken creatures who were half man and half goat (the goat being one of the animal forms associated with the god), while the women would play the part of maenads, the god’s frenzied female attendants. In some Greek communities, the festival included a particularly bloodthirsty element—the participants would take a live bull (symbolizing another animal form of the god) and tear it apart with their teeth.

Ultimately, these festivals evolved into a more sedate ceremony, the performance of songs called dithyrambs that were dedicated to Dionysus. These choral performances in turn evolved into classic Greek drama, both tragedy and comedy, which continued to retain the influence of the early rites. The word “tragedy,” in fact, comes from the Greek word tragoidia, which means “goat song.”

MYTHOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM AND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

The Greeks were by no means the only ancient community to reenact its myths in dramatic performances. The ancient Egyptians also held religious rituals based on their mythology. Over time, they evolved into staged performances, with actors playing the role of various gods. These early forms of drama actually predated Greek theatre. Campbell asserts that the reenactment of myths was a common element of all preliterate societies. Even today, in regions where old traditions have not been erased by modern influences, isolated societies continue to perform ceremonies that are rich in mythological symbolism.

One such group is the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa, who live in clay dwellings tucked into the steep cliffs of the Bandiagara Escarpment, not far from the Sahara desert. Because this region is so remote and relatively inaccessible, the Dogon have managed to preserve their ancient traditions and spiritual practices to this day. Many of the Dogon’s beliefs are reenacted in elaborate dance ceremonies, during which participants don masks and full body costumes. Unlike dancers in Western culture, where troupes are made up of a select few talented individuals who perform for an audience of nonparticipants, in Dogon society, every member of the community takes part in the dances put on by their clan.

One of the most dramatic of these ceremonies is the Sigui dance, which takes place just once every 60 years. It contains many of the elements that Joseph Campbell noted as being customary in important ritualistic ceremonies, such as a representation of death and a rebirth. In this case, the Sigui dance symbolizes the passing of the older generation and the rebirth of the Dogon people.

Although the actual ceremony is performed at such great intervals, every so often a version of it will be presented to visitors who make the difficult trek to the Dogon’s cliff dwellings. Some years ago, I had the great privilege of witnessing the Sigui dance. It was an extraordinary sight to see the costumed dancers appear, as if from nowhere, and make their way into the center of the village where we waited. A number of them danced on stilts, making them as tall as giants and all the more impressive.

Each dancer plays a highly symbolic and specific role. Their masks and costumes represent important animals, ancestors, and spirit figures in their belief system. (See Figure 1.2.) In the eyes of the community, the dancers are more than mere human beings; each is an avatar for a mythological being or spirit— the embodiment or incarnation of an entity who is not actually present.

Figure 1.2 This Dogon dancer on stilts represents a female tingetange, or waterbird. Dogon dancers don masks and costumes to portray mythological beings or spiritual figures in much the same way as game players control avatars to play character roles in digital dramas.

Photograph courtesy of Stephenie Hollyman.

Odd though it may seem, the rituals performed by the Dogons and ancient Greeks have a great deal in common with modern day digital storytelling. After all, they involve the use of avatars; they are a form of role-play; participants interact with each other and work toward accomplishing a particular goal; and they play out scenes that have life and death significance. To me, these ritual reenactments are a far more intriguing model of interactivity than that of the old campfire stories.

FAMILIAR RITUALS AND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Closer to home, and to our own lives, we can examine our own holidays and traditional religious practices and discover other surprising similarities to digital storytelling. These celebrations are often forms of participatory drama and contain items of important symbolic or mystical value, just as works of digital storytelling do. And in some cases, they are also multisensory. In other words, they involve the senses in a variety of ways.

The Jewish holiday of Passover is a particularly good example of this. Passover commemorates the exodus of Jews from Egypt and their liberation from the slavery imposed on them by the pharaoh. The traditional way to observe Passover is at a ceremonial meal called the Seder, where the dramatic story of exodus is recounted and recreated by the symbolic foods that are part of the ritual.

For example, one eats a flat unleavened bread called matzo, which recalls the bread hurriedly made during the exodus, when the escaping Jews had no time to let their bread rise. One also eats a bitter herb called maror (customarily horseradish), which symbolizes the bitterness of slavery, together with charoset, a sweet chopped mixture of apples, nuts, and spices, which represents the mortar the Jews used to build the pyramids and also hints at the sweetness of freedom to come. These are among the many symbolic foods eaten during the ritual. And in addition to the foods consumed, a traditional Seder includes another sensory element: the participants recline on pillows instead of sitting upright in chairs. This is a reminder of another aspect of the exodus story (through body position and the softness of the cushions): Once the Jews were liberated, they were free to eat like noble families, in a reclining position.

Many forms of digital storytelling are multisensory in this way, involving tactile feedback, aromas, motion, and other stimuli. The addition of multisensory components adds to the immersiveness and emotional power of works of digital storytelling.

RITES OF PASSAGE AND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Joseph Campbell, the scholar who did the groundbreaking work on mythology, also noted that traditional myth-based rituals frequently reflected major life passages, such as a coming-of-age for young boys and girls. According to Campbell, the ceremonies held for boys typically required them to undergo a terrifying ordeal, during which they would “die” as a child and be reborn as an adult. Girls also went through coming-of-age ceremonies, he found, though they tended to be less traumatic.

Campbell discovered that cultures all over the world and across all cultures told myths about this universal coming-of-age experience, a type of mythology he analyzed in 1949 in his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This genre of myth is often referred to as the hero’s journey. As we will see in Chapter 5, its core elements and recurring characters have been incorporated into many popular movies and, most importantly for us, the hero’s journey has also served as a model for innumerable works of digital storytelling, particularly video games.

GAMES AND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

We can look back at a very different type of human activity and find another important precursor to digital storytelling: the playing of games. As we will see later in this book, many works of digital storytelling are either full-fledged games or include gamelike elements. And like rituals, games date back to ancient times and once served important functions.

The earliest games were developed not for idle amusement but for serious purposes: to prepare young men for the hunt and for warfare. By taking part in games, the youths would strengthen their bodies and develop athletic skills like running and throwing. By playing with teammates, they would also learn how to coordinate maneuvers and how to strategize. Over time, these athletic games evolved into formal competitions. Undoubtedly, the best known of these ancient sporting events are the Greek Olympic games. We can trace the Olympic games back to 776 BC, and we know they continued to be held for more than 1000 years.

Athletic competitions were also held in ancient Rome, India, and Egypt. In many old societies, these competitions served a religious function as well as being a form of popular entertainment. In Greece, for example, the games were dedicated to the god Zeus, and the athletic part of the program was preceded by sacred religious rites.

Religion and sporting games were even more intricately mixed in the part of the world that is now Mexico and Central America. The Olmecs, Mayans, and other peoples throughout Mesoamerica played a ball game somewhat like basketball. We now know this game had great spiritual and symbolic significance to them, and it was a central ritual in their culture. The game served as a conduit to the gods they believed dwelt beneath the earth and was a way of communicating with divine powers.

The game was played by two competing teams in an outdoor court marked by a set of high parallel walls. The players had to keep the ball in the air and could use any part of their body to do this except for their hands. As in a modern ball game, the two teams vied to lob the ball into a specific target to make a goal, in this case the target was a high stone ring. However, unlike modern ball games, once a goal was scored, the game ended, and so did the life of at least one of the players. Scholars still are debating whether this fate fell to the captain of the winning team or the losing team. They do agree, however, that the leader of one of the teams was ritually executed by decapitation and that this action was meant as a religious sacrifice to please their gods. Visitors to the excavated ball court at Chichén Itzá, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, can still see a stone relief depicting the decapitation ceremony. (See Figure 1.3.)

Figure 1.3 This carving at Chichén Itzá of a Mayan postgame decapitation ritual illustrates that games can play a deadly serious role in the spiritual life of a culture, and they can carry a deep symbolic meaning. The circle in the carving represents the ball, and the figure inside the ball is the skull of the decapitated player.

Photograph courtesy of E. Michael Whittington, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Over 1500 years ago, all the way across the ocean in Asia, players faced each other in another athletic competition with deep spiritual significance. In this case, the country was Japan and the game was sumo. Sumo is closely tied to Japan’s Shinto religion, and it symbolizes a legendary bout between two gods, a contest upon which the fate of the Japanese people rested. The Japanese emperor himself is believed to be a descendent of the victor. As different as sumo and the Mesoamerican ball games are, they both illustrate that games can have intensely meaningful significance. The same can be true for the games found in works of digital storytelling, where game and narrative can be closely interconnected, and where the players can be enormously invested in achieving a positive outcome.

Board Games and Digital Storytelling

Athletic competitions are not the only type of game that has come to us from ancient times and that have strong similarities to many works of digital storytelling.

Board games dating back to 2700 BC have been found in the temples of the Egyptian pharaohs. They were also highly popular in ancient China, Japan, and Korea, and the people of India played chess and card games thousands of years ago. According to mythologist Pamela Jaye Smith of MYTHWORKS, some board games were used in ancient and premodern times to train players in strategy and diplomatic skills. She cites chess as a prime example of this, saying they called for “the need to analyze the other player’s move, to think three, four or more moves down the line, to recognize feint, and to know when and how to make sacrifices.” The ancient Chinese board game of go is another game that demands strategic skills.

Another type of game, distantly related to board games, are tabletop war games. The earliest forms of such games were war game simulations developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These games were used to train officers in strategy, and they were typically played on tabletops with miniature soldiers made of metal. (See Figure 1.4.) In the latter part of the twentieth century, games like these, married to elements of improvisational theatre, morphed into computerized role-playing games.

Figure 1.4 War game simulations played with miniature soldiers like these were the precursors of today’s Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs).

Photograph courtesy of Lloyd Pentacost.

Many board games involve a mixture of skill and luck, and the element of chance is one of the things that makes them particularly enjoyable. The draw of a wild card or the throw of the dice can dramatically change one’s fortunes. Also, many people are attracted to board games primarily because of the social interactions that are a major part of the experience. And although board games can be competitive, they offer a safer, less stressful playing environment than athletic games. And these are all features that attract players to works of digital storytelling as well.

Children’s Games and the “Fun Factor”

In addition to the structured games played by adults, children in every era and every culture have played games of all sorts. Many of them are more free-flowing and less formalized than adult games. Children’s pastimes range from “quest” games, like hide-and-seek, to games that are more social in nature, like jump rope, to games of skill, like jacks. Children also enjoy make-believe activities like fantasy role-play. Two old favorites, for example, are cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers.

Even adults engage in fantasy role-playing activities, as evidenced by the popular Renaissance Faires, which are elaborate reconstructions of Elizabethan England, complete with jousting, a royal court, and someone playing the part of Queen Elizabeth I. Many attendees come to these faires dressed in period costumes and attempt to speak in Elizabethan English.

Fantasy role-play activities are not strictly games because they are not competitive in nature. They also don’t follow a fixed set of rules or have a clear-cut end goal. But though they differ from more formalized games, the two pursuits have an important element in common: Both activities are experienced as “play.” In other words, people engage in these activities for pleasure, and they perceive them as fun.

The expectation of having fun is one of the primary reasons that both adults and children have traditionally engaged in games and other play activities. This continues to be true in contemporary society, even when the playing is done on game consoles or computers instead of on a ball field or in a school yard. The importance of this fun factor was underscored in a survey that was conducted a few years ago by the Entertainment Software Association, a professional organization for publishers of interactive games. In the survey, game players were asked to name their top reason for playing games. Over 85% said they play games because they are fun.

NONLINEAR FICTION BEFORE THE COMPUTER

Traditional entertainment, especially material that is story based, is almost always linear. In other words, one event follows another in a logical, fixed, and progressive sequence. The structural path is a single straight line. Interactive works, on the other hand, are always nonlinear. Plot points do not necessarily follow each other in fixed sequence, and even when interactive works do include a central storyline, players or users can weave a varied path through the material, interacting with it in a highly fluid manner.

Nevertheless, a few innovative individuals working in long-established media— printed fiction, the theatre, and more recently in motion pictures—have attempted to break free of the restrictions of linearity and have experimented with other ways of presenting story-based material.

One of the first was Laurence Sterne, author of the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The nine-volume work was published between 1759 and 1766, not long after the first English novels were introduced to the public. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne employs a variety of unconventional ways of presenting the narrative flow, starting down one story path only to suddenly switch over to an entirely different one, and then a short while later turning down still another path. He also played with the sequence of chapters, taking chapters that had allegedly been misplaced and inserting them seemingly at random into the text. Sterne asserted that such unexpected narrative digressions were the “sunshine” of a novel and gave a book life.

Several mid-twentieth century authors also experimented with nonlinear narrative. William Burroughs caused something of a sensation when he introduced his “cut up” works, in which he took text that he had cut into fragments and reassembled it in a different order. He believed that these rearrangements enabled new meanings to emerge. His technique was akin to the making of collages in the art world—works composed of bits of assorted materials.

As for the brilliant modern author James Joyce, many now consider his novels to be a precursor of digital hypertext, where words are linked to other related “assets,” such as photographs, sounds, video, or other text. The user who takes advantage of these links is rewarded by a deeper experience than would have been possible by following a simple linear thread. Joyce, particularly in his sweeping novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, used a similar technique of associations, allusions, word pictures, and auditory simulations, though all on paper and within the covers of his novels. Entire websites are now devoted to the topic of the hypertext aspects of Joyce’s work.

Joyce died in 1941, long before the development of modern computers, but contemporary writers are now using digital technology to compose short stories and novels utilizing hypertext. Their works are available online, and electronic books are published by several companies. Most prominent among them is Eastgate, an evangelist for serious works of hypertext.

But dropping back for a moment to books that are printed the old-fashioned way, on paper, another example of interactive narrative should be mentioned: a series of books introduced in 1979. Going under the general heading of Choose Your Own Adventure, and primarily written for the children’s market, these unusual books actually presented a form of interactive fiction. At various points in the novel, the narrative would pause and the reader would be offered a number of different ways to advance the story, along with the page number where each option could be found. Many of these books offered dozens of alternate endings. Do these novels sound a little like works of digital storytelling with branching story lines? Well, not surprisingly, this type of structure has been used in many interactive narratives, as we will see.

NONLINEAR DRAMA IN THEATRE AND MOTION PICTURES

Writers and directors of plays and motion pictures have also experimented with nonlinear methods of telling stories. The Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) wrote a number of plays that probed the line between reality and fiction. His plays deliberately broke the fourth wall, the invisible boundary that separates the audience from the characters on stage and divides reality (the audience side) from fiction (the characters’ side). In his play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello breached the wall by having actors in an uncompleted play talk and refer to themselves as if they were real people. They fretted about the need to find a playwright to “complete” their plot lines, or lives. Pirandello won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1934 for his groundbreaking work, and his dramas influenced a number of other playwrights, including Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee.

Pirandello’s boldness at smashing the fourth wall is also echoed in Woody Allen’s film, The Purple Rose of Cairo. In this picture, Mia Farrow plays the part of a woebegone filmgoer with a passionate crush on a character in a movie (played by Jeff Daniels). Much to her astonishment and delight, her film hero speaks to her as she sits in the audience watching the movie, and he even steps out of the screen and into her life.

This breaking of the fourth wall, while relatively unusual in the theatre and in movies, is a common occurrence in interactive media. Video game characters address us directly and invite us into their cyber worlds; fictional characters in Web-based stories and games send us emails and faxes and even engage in instant messaging with us; smart toys joke with us and remember our birthdays. This tunneling through of the fourth wall intimately connects us with a fictional universe in a way that is far more personal than was ever possible in older media.

Another revolutionary technique that first appeared in theatre and films, and was later employed more fully in interactive entertainment, is the use of multiple pathways or points of view. The play Tamara, written by John Krizanc, utilized a multiple pathway structure, and it created quite a stir in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Instead of being performed in a theatre, Tamara was staged in a large mansion, and multiple scenes were performed simultaneously in various rooms. Members of the audience had to choose which scenes to watch (which they did by following characters from room to room); it was impossible to view everything that was going on during a single performance.

Tamara had a direct influence on the producers of the CD-i (Compact Disc-interactive) mystery game Voyeur. Like the play, the game also made use of multiple pathways. It, too, was set in a mansion with many rooms, and simultaneous action occurred throughout the mansion. But as a player, you could look through only one window of the mansion at a time (much like a member of the Tamara audience, who could only observe the action in a single room at a time). To successfully play the game, you had to select a sequence of windows to peer through that would give you sufficient clues to solve the mystery.

Writers and directors of feature films have also experimented with narrative perspective. One notable example is the Japanese film Rashomon, made in 1950 by the renowned director–screenwriter Akira Kurosawa. Rashomon is the story of a woman’s rape and a man’s murder, but what made the film so striking was not its core story but Kurosawa’s use of multiple points of view. The story is told in flashback by four different characters, each of whom was a witness to the crimes, but each giving a different version of what really happened. In the end, we are not told which is the “correct” version; we are left to puzzle out which person’s perspective is the most plausible. Kurosawa’s concept of offering multiple points of view has been borrowed by a number of works of interactive cinema, as we will see later in the book.

The American film director Robert Altman often uses another narrative approach, that of multiple overlapping and interconnecting storylines. Nashville and Gosford Park are two of his films that do this. A viewer watching them has the impression of multiple events occurring simultaneously and sometimes wishes for the freedom offered by interactive media to jump from one storyline to another.

THE SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING

As we can see from the various examples we’ve examined here, ranging from ancient rituals to twentieth century films, many of the techniques that are characteristic of today’s digital storytelling can actually be found in far earlier forms of storytelling and other human activities. Yet, thanks to computer technology, we can incorporate these techniques into interactive stories in a much more fluid and dynamic fashion to give us quite a new way to experience narrative.

Let’s now take a look at the special characteristics of digital storytelling to see what makes it unique as a form of narrative. Some of these characteristics have already been mentioned, and some will be discussed later in the book.

Works of digital storytelling are always

Works of digital storytelling often

CONCLUSION

As we have seen, two extremely old forms of social interaction—rituals and games—were two of the major precursors to digital storytelling. Despite the obvious differences between the activities that have come down to us from ancient times and today’s computerized narratives, rituals and games help to define some of the critical components of this new form of storytelling.

Namely, they are interactive; they are participatory; they facilitate role-play; they are dramatic; and they are deeply immersive. In addition, the type of myth known as the hero’s journey has served as a direct model for works of digital storytelling. But there is another significant aspect of rituals and games that has not yet become part of most works of digital storytelling: These ancient human activities aroused intense emotions in those who participated in them. Ancient rituals were capable of producing a powerful feeling of catharsis, or emotional release, in the participants, and communities that played ancient games felt a profound sense of being connected to the divine. In fact, this ability to elicit strong emotions is a characteristic of all classic narratives. The emotional potential of digital storytelling, however, is still largely untapped, waiting for a Shakespeare or a Sophocles of this new form of narrative to take it to a higher level.

IDEA-GENERATING EXERCISES