A Fascinating Series On Storytelling

People like Henry Jenkins and other talking heads pontificating on the changing nature of storytelling due to technological innovation in today's age. I've just watched five of the short clips (4-8 minutes each) in a row.

Storytelling Part 1: Change of Storytelling from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

Every Day The Same Dream

Another brilliant casual, artistic, and thought-provoking game.

Every Day The Same Dream.

Simple Flash game, but the idea is along the lines of The Graveyard, or Dear Esther.

Although the music is appropriate, I find Nine Inch Nails - Every Day Is The Same somehow eerily appropriate.

[Chorus:]
Every day is exactly the same
Every day is exactly the same
There is no love here and there is no pain
Every day is exactly the same

Wikipedia
Lyrics

I Went To Synecdoche NY

And all I got was this lousy blog post.

SPOILER ALERT

Seriously, the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman (writer: Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich) is going to be considered in one of two possible categories: a sprawling incoherent mess, or a brilliant work of cinema.

I will argue that it is a brilliant work of cinema for exactly the reason that it is a sprawling incoherent mess. It is trying to recapitulate all of the twists and turns of life, or at least life as seen through the eyes of a weepy hypochondriac playwright, Caden, who is wonderfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. His attempt to create an epic play in a Manhattan warehouse is a microcosm of life itself.

Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole or the whole for a part.

Exactly. Or inexactly to be more precise.

Possibly more convoluted than David Lynch's Inland Empire (talked about here), the constant shifts in the narrative might leave many viewers nauseated, which is a shame. Roger Ebert seems to get it. Too bad so many others do not.

The act of creation, or its attempt, is not talked about in many of the reviews I've read. Left adrift on the sea of life, the attempt by Caden to control his creation ultimately fails for the exact same reason that life is not a video game with a neat and tidy ending. But the attempt of control and creation, however messy the results, however Caden tries to treat his actors/characters as nothing more than puppets (notice how almost none of the cast and crew has a voice), is everything. Many times the character asks "what should I do?", as if somewhere offstage is a director with script in hand ready to jump in with a line. But life is not like that. Funny that the sprawling play Caden envisions is an attempt to create that control, exerted in that microcosm, and that it too ultimately fails.

I think I will have to see this one again.

On a tangent, I wonder if Kaufman would be better off in animation instead, completely unconstrained, or whether the constraint of reality is a necessity.

Distributed Narratives

An excellent post on the Workbook Project on distributed narratives tying together film, alternative reality games (ARGs), comics, and games by Christy Dena (cross-mediaentertainment, Writer Response Theory). From Australia? Is all the cool stuff happening down under these days (Post - Machinima Down Under). I previously talked about the future of narratives (and disrupted narratives), so this excellent post presents a lot of ideas on the fragmentary nature of many story-telling initiatives these days that I find absolutely fascinating. I was surprised that although the article centered on film that there was no mention of similar attempts in television (like ABC's Lost websites and the Dharma initiative - although on one of the other blogs TV is mentioned). Perhaps a future article is in the works.

There are a few things that can come of this shattered narrative concept. One in which by using multiple forms of media for storytelling a greater audience can be reached by content creators (the shotgun approach - those who read the comic might watch the movie). Another is similar to what happens in a game like World of Warcraft, wherein the worlds become so immersive that players/viewers completely lose themselves digesting the various threads. And of course the most interesting is wherein players/viewers take the core ideas of the narrative and produce their own content (Star Wars fan flicks, Middle Earth festivals, Star Trek conventions) and push the story in new directions. Of course all three can occur simultaneously.

Why do the more successful participatory distributed narratives all seem to involve fantasy, mysticism, magic, and superheroes? Is audience participation more enjoyable when it takes place in worlds/stories where anything can happen or do these worlds and stories simply resonate emotionally with the audience? Is religion the ultimate distributed narrative?

Whither The Future Of Narrative

During all the commotion of the 48 hour movie project, for some insane reason I decided to repaint my entire place. Since that meant spending significant amounts of time away from the computer, I decided to catch up on a long list of podcasts. I queued them up and listened to approximately 16 hours of podcasts and now my brain is frazzled (but that's always the most interesting state to be in).

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Narrate:

to tell a story
to give an account of events

ARGGHs!

Overman posted about the ARG associated with the release of the newest Nine Inch Nails CD, Year Zero. ARGs are becoming popular, and Perplex City is probably one of the most famous. It was recently solved, and the winner took home $200 K. There is an excellent article via Re:Text with a 14 page PDF of an article titled "Let's Be Serious: Non-Casual Investigations Into Alternate Reality Gaming". See also this wiki white paper.

Machinima?

There have been many discussions and posts lately about what machinima is or is not (see sections of my previous post). Rasmussen, nomad, etc. No matter what you think it is, where it is going, or even if it should be called machinima, for the most part the end result of any production is a 'film' where the audience sits and watches. Although feedback in the web 2.0 social networking age can be instantaneous the ability of the audience to alter the narrative is extremely limited.

Funny, that. Machinima grew out of video games, a place where the user is fully in control (somewhat) of what is happening. Although limited by the designer's intentions, the four dimensions of the gameworld can be explored at the player's whim, not the designer's (except for cutscenes). In almost free form games like GTA or The Sims, or virtual worlds like Second Life, where is the narrative? It's whatever the player wants it to be. If the player records themselves, uploads it, and somebody watches it, then what is it? A story? An autobiography? A documentary? What if a second player records the first player? Biography, documentary, expose? What if both record? What if both record while interacting? What if every single avatar in SL recorded themselves during every moment in world? What if every single prim recorded it's existence? What would you have besides a lot of disk space? Many narratives? A single story? Wasted space?

What if that vast media space were culled, cut-up, mashed, disrupted, merged, and remixed? Would that narrative have meaning any more? Would it be a new story to tell? Would the 'making of' be more interesting than the media itself? Would the 'making of' the 'making of' be a shoddy sequel? How far can the network of narratives be pushed? Is narrative to the power of 'N' useful? Entertaining? Fodder for the vast ad machinery in the broadband world?

The ability to produce content is vast. Our attention span is not. There will be a backlash after this explosion slows, and eventually stops. Will it collapse on itself? Probably not. At that point new ideas will emerge. New forms of narrative. When resources are vast everything gets eaten. Everything grows and balloons as far as it can. When resources are scarce innovation occurs. Must occur! When the balloon pops some exploding bits will disappear, some will grow again, some will collide and produce new media, new ideas, new attention-grabbing headlines.

How long since the first cave painting? The first story told around a fire? The first 'word of mouth'? The first Sumerian story? The first Egyptian hieroglyphics? The first papyrus rag paper? The first printed novel? The first tragedy? The first comedy? The first tagicomedy? The first stand-up comedian on stage? The first radio play? The first silent film? The first film that should have been silent? The first blockbuster? The first documentary? The first investigative journalism piece? Which ones died out? Which ones lived?

One narrative or many? Infinite threads spun by The Fates?

What's your narrative?

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Podcasts listened to during the formation of these rambled thoughts:

Overcast.
Workbook Project.
Science Friday.
Bruce Sterling's Rants And Lectures. SXSW, etc.
Filmspotting.

Other fun:

The Second Wave.
Observations on film art and Film Art.
Serial Storytelling.
Beyond Machinima.
The Oldest Story Ever Written.
This book looks interesting, but I have not read it. Hamlet on the Holodeck (Murray).