After interviewing Andrew Stern, I realized that our approach to story is very different than most when dealing with interactive narratives. This has a deep impact on what we want our Drama Princess to become. I tended to make it easy on myself by just saying that we don’t care much about plot, but given, amongst others, the answers I got from Mr. Stern in response to this, I guess the impact of such an attitude is not clear.
So to make it clear, once and for all, at least for myself: 😈PLOT CAN GO TO HELL! 😈
Thank you. 😉
It’s not that we are satisfied with a weak plot, or half a plot or a plot that is co-authored by the user. No. It’s that we really don’t give a damn about plots or story arcs. This wouldn’t be surprising if we were game developers of the more traditional kind -the kind that says “gameplay first”- but we’re not. We do think story is at the very center of a satisfying interactive experience.
When we remove Plot, according to Aristotle, we’re left with five elements of drama:
Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle and Melody.
That’s more than enough to tell a compelling story! Especially given that Aristotle had no idea about what would happen if you add interactivity and personalisation (an audience of one) to the toolset!
Auriea and I are very visually inclined and we like the sensual connection with the nervous system that visual elements can make. Interactivity, for us, is almost like a direct way of modeling this connection. And this is where stories happen for us.
We like how stories feel, we’re not necessarily interested in the facts and the flow of a story but much more in the associations in the reader’s mind, in the interpretation, in how narrative elements connect with the spectator’s background, culturally and emotionally.
That’s probably why we’re drawn to stories that everybody knows already: religious texts, fairy tales, myths. You might not know the exact story, but the characters, actions and situations, and in some cases the images and style, connect to something inside of you (whether this is cultural or psychological, conscious or subconscious, we don’t know and it doesn’t matter). It’s not about the story as linear tale anymore, it’s about the storytelling and more importantly the “storyhearing“. You know how Little Red Ridinghood or the New Testament is going to end. That’s not why you read it. You read it because, once again, you want to feel the emotions involved in the tale, and learn the lessons that it teaches you -perhaps the very repetition is part of the experience (rituals, dancing, learning, etc).
Interactive media can allow you to live inside a story, something I dream of every time I close a wonderful novel after reading the last page as slowly as possible, postponing the inevitable ending. With interactive media, things don’t need to end, goodbyes are obsololete, life is forever. Forever is a tiny bit of data, resting in the palm of your hand.
