Participatory Fiction (Updated)
Feb. 19, 2019•0 likes•1,327 views
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An updated version of my guest lecture on Participatory Fiction for upcoming Experimental Writing class at OCAD University.
Carrie CutforthFollow
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Participatory Fiction (Updated)
- 1. Participatory Fiction CO-CREATED WORKS, SHARED STORYWORLDS, AI, ARGS, TWITTER RPGS, NORDIC LARPS, IMMERSIVE THEATRE, & TRANSMEDIA etc.
- 2. What Participatory Fiction is Not:
- 3. “Interactivity is mainly an illusion. My favorite Castle gimmick was for his 1961 film “Mr. Sardonicus” — the audience were handed out little cards with a glow-in-the-dark thumb that he called The Punishment Poll. Near the end of the film, the audience had a chance to vote: thumbs up if you want to show Mr. Sardonicus mercy, and thumbs down if you want to see him punished. The audience was picking the ending of the film. Except, Castle says the “mercy” ending was never once shown, as the audience always voted for the punishment. But Castle was having a gag on all of us, as TCM explains: “Although Castle asserts in his book that there was an alternate ending filmed — one where Sardonicus lives — the consensus among horror film scholars is that it wasn’t actually filmed. No different ending has turned up, even in these days of unearthing every scrap of unused material in extra features for DVD releases.” ~ Brian Clark
- 4. Interactive Fiction/Interactive A branching narrative where the reader/ audience wayfinds their way through the narrative by making a series of choices:
- 5. Examples of Interactive Fiction/Theatre
- 8. Interactive Fiction Engines/Platforms Twine One More Story Games Texture Writer Ren’Py Unity -- modules
- 10. Simulations & Video Games
- 11. The Dood Show It all starts with a blank page… or in this case a blank wall
- 22. The Sandbox Model for Participation What are the constraints? (physical, temporal, organizational, bureaucratic, legal) How are you going to encourage participation? How can you lead participation? What are the rules? (what are the rules of your world/experience) Enforcing the rules? Community moderation? Have you thought of everything? Have you REALLY thought of everything? Worst case scenarios? Logistics: i.e. How are you paying for this? Strike/Documentation
- 23. What’s this got to do with Story?
- 24. Enter Social Media Platforms #wotw2
- 25. Welcome to Sanditon
- 26. Broadcast model
- 27. Storyworld Building: Welcome to Nightvale “Because it’s an on-demand thing, you can do stuff that requires people to listen to everything you’ve done up to this point,” explains Fink. “You can do a lot of stuff that demands more of an audience, in terms of making references without having to explain them — if they want to go back and figure it out, that’s on them. You can also do structural stuff — we had one story that was told from two perspectives, which you can do when you can release episodes at the same time.”
- 29. SHARED STORYWORLDS Sharedstoryworlds.com Clockwork Watch This tumblr Post
- 30. Clockwork Watch
- 32. Transmedia & Extensions “I believe that transmedia actually reflects aboriginal storytelling methods where there was a lot of room for intersection between different communities, and different voices and different narratives” – Loretta Todd, at Merging Media 2012
- 35. Immersive Theatre, Nordic Larp & Alternate Reality Games
- 36. Sleep No More
- 37. Westworld Experience
- 39. Total Immersion: Conspiracy for Good
- 40. Zed.To/Byologyc
- 42. AI STORYTELLING
- 43. PARTICAPATORY AI STORYTELLING
- 45. DANGER WILL ROBINSON You have legal responsibilities for your immersive works: Do not put people in danger Do not be careless or negligent about people’s welfare Do not break the law (including bylaws and OCAD’s code of conduct) Have necessary permits Do not hoax Do not be careless with your “fiction”
Editor's Notes
- While all participatory fiction is by nature interactive, interactive fiction is not inherently participatory; the distinction of audience versus author or production might be blurred but still distinct
- The user is being led through a series of choices or nodes. “Choice-Filled Adventure”: To Be or Not To Be “Choose Your Own Adventure” “Interactive Film”: Bandersnatch Interactive Text-Adventure/Game: Glitchhikers
- Sleep No More – notice ‘interactivity’ is really a wayfinding/exploratory journey where your choices are really where you chose to explore
- Interactive, fictional, non-text based choices
- BEFORE THE YELLOW STAIRCASE CRCP PROGRAM -- i thought I wanted to be a curator, i love facilitating and community building, and organizing, but it pulled me away from storytelling My first co-created work in collaboration with curating partner Patrick Phillips and the entire school Around this time, late 2006? → copyleft which is now the creative commons was barely a new thing I was fascinated by both doodles, and drawing book sketches and the collapse of authorial intent So we came up with what was somewhat a radical idea for 2006: HOW ARE WE GOING TO GET PEOPLE TO PARTICIPATE?
- My aunt owns a shoe store, which I worked at as a kid, one day she came into the store and started tossing all the shoes off displays into a pile…. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? …she says “Watch this”…moments later the store was filled with women digging through the piles. NOTE: activity breeds activity another concern by the OCAD administration: what if it’s shit? How could we ensure it wasn’t going to be crappy SETTING THE BAR 10 days -- ten teams, staggered in different shifts each day -- THESE ARE CALLED SHILLS a little story about Frank Sinatra – first concerts girls were paid to faint (the shills); which is precisely why in gaming there is freemium models – people pay for free becoming the attractor for people willing to pay (the whales)
- what if it spills out into the hallways? WHAT IF IT TAKES OVER THE SCHOOL containment –each day removed another panel MOVING THE GOAL POSTS TELESCOPIC MODEL -- Participation starts small and grows like a snowball
- TEAM NAMES -- GAMIFY, SPIRIT OF OUTDOING ONE ANOTHER, COMPETITIVE SPIRIT
- the other concern was moderation -- keeping within policy of behavior of the school – moderation only based on school policy all else reactive, community self regulated – since it was participatory anyone could alter anything they found offensive YOU MUST THINK EVERY SCENARIO THROUGH FIRST BEFORE COMMUNICATING RULES: people do not respond well once you suddenly change the rules cause you havent thought this through
- Everyday: the dood was documented and posted online with e-newsblasts to the teams to share with their friends: 100’s of photos daily by the end having 32 artists as key participants meant there was built in marketing word of mouth
- half-way both student and faculty not originally part of teams are now contributing 100s of doodles
- implicit rules: the tubs of pencils/crayons served as a call to action – since it was only pencil/pencil crayons in the tub provided people followed suit and didn’t feel the need to bring additional materials in that could be destructive/permanent BRANDED CONTENT – Curry’s was our sponsor and supplied materials
- CALL TO ACTION
- Clean up and strike-- memoralize, closing parting, ceremonial
- Having high anxiety a plus
- So the Dood show was a co-created participatory work: but it was not a shared storyworld because it lacked the fundamental ingredient: narrative
- 2008 Keep in mind: during this time Facebook, twitter and youtube were all new. Social media was like barely a phrase…. during the Dood show we documented on Livejournal Early examples of participatory fiction on twitter: http://askawizard.blogspot.ca/2008/10/war-of-worlds-20.html 10,000 NOTE: THE CALL TO ACTION, PARAMETERS, ORGANIZATION – SIGNAL http://cthalloween.pbworks.com/w/page/787923/FrontPage
- https://vimeo.com/97877305 A few years later, there are now twitter RPG communities who are ready and able to jump in; Sanditon town was still going over a year later
- But most people are familiar with not the participatory fiction model on twitter but the broadcast one i.e. Emo Kylo Ren, Shit My Dad Says, on and on and on
- Incidental shared storyworlds/participatory fiction: demanding more from audience to fill in the blanks; playing with the sublime –audio also demands more https://youtu.be/6K9TjjKxpP4?t=6m36s “Buckminster Fuller, while contemplating the nature of humanity and existence, once famously wrote, “I am not a thing – a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.” Bucky was, in fact, arguing that we are all verbs, that we’re defined by our actions and come to know ourselves through those actions. This is the heart of the phenomenological concept of intentionality, retold in a more poetic way. Sometimes, we might think of the audience as someone we can strap into a chair and force to witness our work, like poor Alex undergoing the Ludovico technique in “A Clockwork Orange,” like an empty vessel that we can fill with meaning. Meaning doesn’t actually come into being that way, shoved from the media object into the brain without interpretation or synthesis or reflection. Instead, if we treated them as a verb, we might help them get to that realization that Fuller was describing with “I seem to be.” Shepard Fairey is a great example of that perspective, all the way back to his earliest “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” stickers. In his 1990 manifesto, he explicitly called his work phenomenological and described it as: “The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker. Because OBEY has no actual meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities.” Parse the words of Fairey, and you know exactly the verbs he was hoping to help bring to the surface: react, contemplate, search for meaning, interpret, reflect. The language of those words is very different than what you often hear among designers, who are more likely to talk about use, watch, view, click, listen. Before the age of interactivity in design, this would have been an obscure philosophical dialog, but today it isn’t. Today, I can see the verb of the audience clearly. I can see them react and interpret and search for meaning, on Twitter or their blogs or the Facebook posts. To create phenomenal work, we have to think more like Fuller and Fairey, and embrace that we are all verbs.” ~ Brian Clark, Phenomenal Work, The Audience is a Verb
- Just one example from how this played out with Welcome to Nightvale and scout badges
- Fans co-creating with creators facilitating, harken back to sandbox method Note the tumblr post – who is the facilitator? The one who made a shitty homophobe comment? Shared storyworld created by active participation taking life of its own //co-created–a collaboration between authors/participants or participants/participants based on constraints and facilitation D&D http://danuep.tumblr.com/post/133541267279/lynati-lectorel-hazel-the-space-ace#notes? http://jaybushman.com/Welcome-To-Sanditon Spy Whores
- Talk about transmedia
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79U8YXndpp4 https://www.lorettasarahtodd.com/ PRIMER: story/narrative was once uncontained, it was pervasive, immersive, interactive, participatory, co-created, in a shared storyworld (and in many cultures it still is) through multiple media: performance, text, architecture, etc. to contain a story was a radical idea, experimental… ‘the novel was so radical’ it was well novel, new the early novelists were experimenting with form borrowing from conventions of reality collection of letters in sequence serial note both are linear so transmedia is actually a return, a renewal of uncontained narrative: Trans means across and beyond, so transmedia means across and beyond media… telling a story that crosses multiple media channels (text, film, live events, etc.) the participants/audience/users inform the narrative somehow by their active participation
- Argnet review: https://www.argn.com/2017/03/resistance_radio_fighting_fascists_over_pirate_radio/
- When I was a kid-- CAN anything be a story? immersive– user/audience embedded inside the story world as self or character video games VR ARGS Immersive theatre: Sleep No More Nordic Larp
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k12NZLh_Xvg
- https://campfirenyc.com/work/hbo-the-westworld-experience
- http://www.insidehamlet.com/
- http://carriecutforth.com/spies-like-me-my-response-to-iarpas-rfi-uarehere/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHenBO_MAxE
- https://kotaku.com/the-best-moments-from-a-twitch-conversation-between-two-1790907744
- http://frankenstein.ai/
- Break: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNcMnV9DGh0