Hello!
I’m @mattsheret

One of them, Gril, plays the role of a dwarven student named Grok
while the other -

Quinns - is a thug. And in our roleplaying game he’s also a thug.
We were taken there by Kieron Gillen, who'd been Game mastering
the journey the rest of us had been on for about a year by the time we
reached Altdorf.

Now Altdorf is a big place, filled with murder and politics and intrigue,
and of course we mixed mixed up in all that, but the thing that
fascinated me about Altdorf was the map.
Now, our party never saw the map, not really, we had to draw our own
for memory as we went, but Kieron had this incredible master map,
filled with layers and reference points and all kinds of different venues.
Kieron's map helped us to feel the life of the city. Through pub names
and hotel names we got a real sense of each of the town's districts,
along with a bewildering variety of choice when it came to our actions
in this fictional city. And we never saw it

So when we wanted to find new ways of investigating a house new the
wizards quarter we had a choice of sewers and storm drains to
navigate, a genuine living network that had serviced Altdorf's
inhabitants for centuries.
And when looking for a master blacksmith we knew which part of town
to head to to get something of quality. We got a sense of where in town
might just be filled with showy artisans, and actually managed to get
some beautiful iron work for our troubles.
Kieron's master map, which was the product of many hundreds of GMs
and hundreds of hours of reference and checking made us feel a little
closer to the city's lifeblood and its mood. We no longer had to think
about it in the abstract, but as a space filled with people doing work
and going about their lives.

Another friend of mine, Tom Armitage, built a toy a couple of years ago
that does a similar thing to augment the behaviour of people in a city.
Only he used a real city.
The Tower Bridge Twitter account gave a single part of the city a voice.
His twitter bot did one thing; it tweeted information about when it was
going to open and when it was going to close.
Tom wanted to give that part of the city a voice, to have it surface as
part of the flow of daily conversation. Twitter's a great medium for that;
general conversation space, utterly unforced, and something that can
be quite low attention too as we learn to dip in an out.

In the past I've described stuff like this in fairly hippy-like terms,
connecting each of us to little bits of the city's soul, but there were also
big practical applications for this toy that Tom built.
He found the account being followed by a surprising number of cab
drivers, who had started to incorporate the bridge's movements into
their routines for crossing the river. By having these gentle alerts as to
Tower Bridge's status they could work out whether or not the bridge
was a smart route to use at different times in the day, and how likely
the chances of heavy traffic in the area are.
Imagine a city filled with talking buildings. These things which have a
spiritual quality for hippy internet types but deeply practical and
meaningful applications for others. We'll never know which buildings
are the best candidates, I mean we might be able to guess, but we
know until we've played with them and let them into the world for
people to muck about with we'll never really know.

Tom’s a game designer by nature, he loves playing with things. In
twitter he’s found a material to work with that plays to his strengths as
someone who mucks about with things.
His latest diversion is Markov Chocolates. Every four hours a short
piece of copy is generated by a Markov chain, an algorithm which uses
a series of given outputs to predict or, in this case, generate an output.

This Markov chain uses fragments of English to tweet wonderful
descriptions of chocolates, and it’s inspired by those brilliant, insipid
bits of writing you get on the back of chocolate boxes over Christmas.

It’s generative satire; a robot roleplaying as a piece of text on the back
of a chocolate box. It suits Twitter wonderfully because of its erratic
output.

Both Markov chocolates and Tower bridge are super-low attention, but
they exist as part of a ticker of conversation, giving voice to objects
and jokes in a way that’s been previously impossible.
Like Kieron’s map of Altdorf, they augment our interactions but don’t
overwhelm them; they add a flavour to our interactions in a space that
we’re constantly reacting and adapting to.

Now, to warm our group up for Altdorf, our party spent time in the town
of Bogenhafen. It's a couple of days ride south of Altdorf, and it too
was filled with talking buildings.
Bogenhafen seemed like a really nice place until we realised it was
riddled with a mystical plague and that part of it had been quarantined
while dark forces roamed the streets. The talking buildings had, in fact,
been warped by chaotic rituals and strange, twisted faces were fused
into the walls.
Most of the smart people were hightailing it out of town, but you might
have picked up by now that Quinns, Gril and I aren't that smart, so we
decided to stick around.

I discovered a few things about my friends during my time in
Bogenhafen. One is that Quintin is exquisitely stupid. Before we were
about to head into the plague quarter Gril and I made sure that we'd
tended to our minor wounds and boosted our immunity to whatever
was inside. While we were preparing like that Quinns was learning how
to juggle.
That kind of emergent behaviour is exquisite. It’s been a brilliant source
of humour for our group for months now, and it also tells you a little bit
about Quintin and the way he thinks about the world.

At Last.fm, my job is all about spotting emergent behaviour. And early
on it became clear that one of the best spaces for watching that was
our tagging system.

My favourite band are Joy Division.

Atmospheric and
expansive
- Matt, 2012
I think they’re expansive and atmospheric.

Gloomy and
depressing
- Matt’s sister, 2012
My sister thinks of them as gloomy and depressing. On Last.fm all of
these descriptions would be considered tags. lots of tags are genres,
like rock or pop. But some of them are much more abstract; summer
days and barbeque for example.
Being open to this means that any quirk or meme or in-joke has space
to breathe on Last.fm. Sometimes that’s annoying

- Katy Perry pop rock

My favourite tag is “a campire and a tent and a flashlight and some
matches and a tree and that river and my glasses and a spaceship
and a really really big bear but the bear is really really far away”
There are three great things about this tag;
1) it’s a beautiful station, filled with artists like Mount Eerie and The
Rural Alberta Advantage
2) more than four hundred people have used it
3) every single one of those people has mis-spelled “campfire.”
After the first few people did it the rest all had to mis-spell it too.
Otherwise they’d break the spell, and shatter this beautiful station. It’s
a wonderful behaviour pattern.

The robot voyager is a similar emergent construction. Last year,
Noweigian broadcast NRK live-streamed the voyage of it’s costal ferry
service, the Hurtigruten. For five days and nights viewers around the
world could tune in and soak up the journey.
When the whole trip was finished NRK released the footage - all of it -
to the public under a creative commons license. They wanted people
to play with it.
Voy, a creative studio based in Oslo, created this ambient coastal-
shuffler, which picks bits from the Hurtigruten’s voayage and displays
them quietly and unassumingly. It’s a lovely thing to have on a second
screen or shared screen.

Weird constructions like this are exactly why NRK threw the footage
open. They wanted people to build whatever came to mind with it;
even with the biggest budget in the world they’d never cover every use
case. Better to let the people with imagination have a play with the raw
materials.
By being open to Quinns learning how to juggle our roleplaying game
had a rich, character-filled atmosphere. The colourful tapestry of tags
Last.fm and the highly specific, beautiful construction of toys like Robot
Voyager are great examples of how systems that are open to
development and engagement can build mighty things that totally
change your investment in the service. They allow you to tell your own
stories around it.
But back to Bogenhafen.

Despite Quinn's attempts to get us killed we did actually manage to
save the town of Bogenhafen. We drove out the evil evil forces, killed
some demons, burned a few talking buildings and totally saved the
day.
Kieron's face was a picture. He told us afterwards that he'd been taken
to Bogenhafen as a kid quite a few times, but that every single time his
party had failed whatever they were trying to do; the city had burned
down in flames.
By saving it we'd given him new perspective, and it also made sense
of why we'd gone through hell there; Kieron really cared about what
went down in Bogenhafen, and he'd used his connection to the place
to fuel our encounter.
Some of the most compelling storytelling mechanics I’ve seen online
are all about altering our perspective of events very very slightly.

Derby [2061] very subtly altered my relationship with an unremarkable
city in the midlands.
It’s a meme, started by the developers of Mudlark, in which people
tagged their Foursqaure content, Flickr photos and instagram shots
with content related to their vision of Derby some fifty years in the
future. This is my contribution; it's an Instagram photo taken at Derby
Monorail Station.
Mudlark wanted to see if people who enjoy subtly shifting their
relationship with the city around them. They wanted to see if you could
manipulate services like Foursquare or Instagram into story platforms,
and what kind of things might happen in them.

Derby [2061] challenged people to roleplay the future, and then to use
the present to shape it. If you believe that in fifty years time the Minatur
Wunderland is going to be a drone deployment centre, or a prison,
then you can roleplay that. You’ve got the technology in your pocket to
do it now.
Instantly we’re in a spot where we’re reframing the future through a
familiar lens, and that’s incredibly important if you want to design or
build for how people are going to live.
And You don’t have to take it too seriously, you just have to play a little
game.

Meanwhile I’m watching the past get more real by the day over on
Twitter. Real Time WW2 does exactly what it says on the handle. It
sends updates about what’s happening right now in 1940.

It started tweeting last year, beginning in 1939, and it’s now being
translated into thirteen languages, though it looks as through the
German one went dormant back in December.

Every person I know who’s following it experiences that same
disquieting, atemporal feeling when they read a post that resonates.
It’s a fragment from history that short-cuts a lot of our analytical
processes because it surfaces in a conversational space.

We think about the event playing out Right Now. Think about how our
friends might be engulfed in it, and think about how this information
might have flowed, and whether it would have flowed at all.

While I was writing this a service called Twitshift enjoyed its one-year
anniversary. Twitshift is a hacked-together service that publishes your
tweets from twelve months ago to another twitter account.
It’s built by James Wheare, who used to work at Last.fm, and it
becomes such a gentle reminder of yourself that it can be dangerous; I
almost burst into tears when I watched myself having a bike accident
and remembering my girlfriend rushing to meet me in hospital.
Twitshift is totally native to its surrounds. You RT it, scroll past it,
unfollow it; it’s replication of a familiar behaviour pattern, and it works.
But it’s not the only service doing things like that.

On the surface Timehop isn’t a million miles away. It’s a lifestreaming
aggregation system that throws back your content from a year ago on
a bunch of services, namely facebook, twitter foursquare and
instagram.
It’s too much. To have that land in your inbox on a daily basis is often
to invite a bit of introspection into your daily routine as you try and
unpick too much of your life. It’s a monolith.
Of course they’re agile, they’re learning how to tweak and scale the
service, and that’s great. It’s certainly less hacky a service than
Twitshift. But it doesn’t enable ambient storytelling in quite the way it
wants to.

Reframing monolithic events through a medium like Twitter helps you
to see it in a new light. Like Derby [2061], it sparks emotional
resonance when there might simply have been cynicism before, and
empathy when there might have been contempt.
That’s why Kieron’s face lit up when we saved Bogenhafen; we weren’t
supposed to. It was like an exorcism for him. He saw this place in a
brand new light.

That’s in stark contrast to Kieron at the beginning of our campaign.
Keen to show us just how grim and unforgiving this new land could be
he set us on a mission to rescue a young child, Johan, only to kill the
boy off shortly afterwards.
It did serious damage to our morale; at such an early juncture it left us
feeling like without agency and without control over our actions. Very
quickly Kieron shifted the focus of this early adventure, and eventually
we brought Johan’s killer to justice. But that hadn’t been what he
planned.

Besides Last.fm my freelance projects include writing comics, some for
fun, some for profit. Last year I scripted several short comics for
Dentsu’s Suwappu characters, a range of prototype toys that use near-
field technology and facial recognition software to overlay stories and
landscapes onto three-inch figurines.
They’re still prototypes, and as a result there are little to no rules
governing their use and interaction, making writing for them hard.

So I started playing with the scale that the characters were operated
on, and wrote strips that instead focused on their place within a
tabletop world.
By getting the Suwappu to much about with teaspoons and pets -
familiar things in households - I was better able to access common
understanding of what makes a toy.

If I’m honest, it was rethinking the Suwappu that made me realise how
integral to storytelling that roleplay is becoming. I had to invest a lot of
imagination at that small scale in order to tell a story.
Learning that made me feel a bit like Kieron; like I’m crafting an
environment for successful interaction on the fly.
So far I’ve told you about how these examples made me feel like an
audience member - a roleplayer - so let’s look at them as if we’ve built
them;

With Tower Bridge Tom is finding a way to make buildings talk to us;

with Markov chocolates he’s letting a chocolate box feign sentience;

Last.fm’s tagging system is a platform for collective consensus and
make believe;

Robot voyager is a distraction engine designed to make us long for
fjords forever;

Debry [2061] explicitly calls on participants to imagine a future they
take part in;

Real Time World War 2 and twitshift cast us adrift in space and time;

All of it mirrors what Kieron is doing. As a successful GM Kieron is
using all of the tools available to him to build a world we can react to
and get lost in.
In the wise words of an anonymous Wikipedia contributor “A good
gamemaster draws the players into the adventure, making it enjoyable
for everyone. Good gamemasters have quick minds, sharp wits, and
rich imaginations. Gamemasters must also maintain game balance:
hideously overpowered monsters or players are no fun” I’d argue that’s
a perfect definition of what all of these other hacks and examples show
off.
I think that, surrounded by possibility, to be a successful storyteller now
you need to

1. Explore the limits
of the medium
1 - Work to the technical limits of their medium - they build toys to play
within them like Tom
Game master must know the full depths of a ruleset

2. Respond to
emergent behaviour
2 - Leave room for and track emergent behaviour - no plans are based
on a locked and stable understanding of the things that must happen
like Last.fm and NRK
“Quick mind, sharp wit, rich imaginations”

3. Allow people to
imagine contexts
3 - Allows people to extrapolate a future condition based on the current
condition - they’ll have a greater investment if they can think forwards
and backwards in relation to the world you’re creating like Mudlark and
Real Time WW2
“Drawing into the adventure”

4. Learn from your
failures and adapt
4 - Learns from failures and tweaks future scenarios appropriately. If it
doesn’t work then stop trying to make it work. Nothing lasts forever,
people move on, and you should too. Like me with the Suwappu
“Must maintain game balance”

Whether it’s me or others, whoever writes those stories needs to be
reactive to behaviour, test the limits of what mediums like Twitter are
capable of in terms of communication, needs to respect the make
believe contexts of the characters and needs to be ready to evaluate
every story’s “success”

More than ever the definition of what makes a story is stretching.
Sometimes it’s the by-product of your service, sometimes it’s the only
part you care about, but it’s definitely the bit that resonates in the
wider-world. To crack that you need tools wielded by people like
Kieron.
Stories don’t have to be multi-part epics spanning a transmedia
content franchise. Sometimes it’s as simple as building something that
sends a tweet.
Treat the people you’re building for like roleplayers. You’ll build
beautiful things.

Campire Stories
Thanks to @KieronGillen, @Quinns108,
@GriddleOctopus, @XING_de & @birgitgcom
www.matthewsheret.com
http://matthewsheret.com
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/
edge_minisite.asp?eidm=93
Tower Bridge http://twitter.com/#!/twrbrdg_itself
Markov Chocolate http://twitter.com/#!/markovchocolate
Robot Voyager http://robotvoyager.voyoslo.com
Derby [2061] http://www.wearemudlark.com/blog/derby-2061/
Realtime WW2 http://twitter.com/#!/realtimewwii
Twitshift http://www.twitshift.com/
Suwappu http://www.getsuwappu.com/