First week of the World of Story is behind us – well, the first and the last, I suppose? The intensive programme structure is really refreshing, but I can already see it will require a bit of practice to get used to it.
The two intensive days meant being quite positively overwhelmed with inputs, prompts, recommendations and inspiration – that’s all great, but other courses (and also the mundane realities of life outside of EFI) will make it tricky to now repeatedly find the headspace to process what the World of Story gave us and follow-up on some of the many threads teased. Indeed, it feels like the two days were meant to broaden our horizons into new directions, show us new door to be opened, open them, but without venturing beyond their doorsteps – that will be our own responsibility.
That said, I am grateful for the two days for hinting at what is coming in the next media-specific courses, and for gently pointing at where my focus should go with the final project. It is not a difficult reflection: inevitably, each of us must have found ourselves more or less intrigued by the different individual sections of the intensives, with ideas of what could be done with that particular medium floating in our heads.
Interactive & traditional storytelling – those two tickled my imagination by far the most; alongside a persistent interest in creative writing and a curiosity in what AI storytelling will offer. When it comes to performative and visual storytelling, I suspect I will remain just an avid receiver for now.
Interactive storytelling
Making a choice, to me, is key for being immersed into a fictional world in a way that translates to value-creation and real-world action. It puts the audience member into the shoes of someone who can change the future for better – in the case of enacting the future where the world’s ecosystems are restored and closely lived with (let’s call that my in-progress vision statement for the project), making the audience conscious of their agency and comfortable with it is absolutely essential. Where a good book or a movie about ecosystem restoration might make a reader sympathetic to ecosystem restorers (restorators? restorationists?), an interactive game can make a player want to be one.
I am a fisherman. I have a family to care for but the fishstock are ever-more depleted and floods are getting out of hand. Should I choose to build a floodwall around my house and be on the safe side? Or invest in revitalising the mangrove forest on our shore with the rest of the community? […1 hour of gaming later…] Well, that was a tough choice, but it seems to be paying out now. The fish are returning to the village. All thanks to that risky, but in the end rewarding mangrove restoration! I wonder if I could contribute to something similar in the real world as well…
Traditional storytelling
Traditional stories are moral compasses, aren’t they? Religious mythologies indirectly (and sometimes quite directly) tell us what is right or wrong. Legends underline the virtues we should aspire for or avoid, giving role models that we all sometimes lack. Fairy tales support our core value systems in early childhood and continue to be a mirror for us into adulthood.
And I don’t think this needs to be exclusive to oral storytelling, in the sense that the story needs to be carried mouth to mouth. I know that, while I never heard a purely “oral” myth/legend/fairy-tale as a child, the stories of children’s books and films that shared the same elements still impacted me deeply.
After all, these very often include the same motifs which prevailed across cultures and centuries, tested and proven by history as impactful. I am not surprised to find with a quick Google search that The Lion King borrowed elements not just from Shakespeare but also a story from the Bible. Star Wars, often referred to as a religion of the modern age, takes archetypes and symbols from several mythologies at once, to deliver a story whose popularity spans cultures in every corner of this world.
The vision for my project (future where the world’s ecosystems are restored and closely lived with) has one big catch: it requires people to feel to be a part of nature, one with it, connected to it, loving nature even. And that is not the case, at least not for the majority. Nature is a disappearing element in the stories children are growing up with, it is not cited by people as a value close to them, and it is increasingly othered – seen as something outside of humanity, a nice bonus to have, but something we are always separated from. If I want to help change this, and put nature at the core of our value-systems / moral compasses, I think it will take a bit more than “just a story” – it will take a story that has the power of a myth, a legend, or a fairy tale.
Intersections between the two
1) Children play with fairy tales
When children listen to fairy tales, they play with them, almost as with a game. “Don’t go into the forest!” they can shout at their parent when they read them the story book, ordering the characters with pre-written decisions and feeling like their choice in that moment matters. Skilled performers of fairy tales might even go as far as to ask the listeners: “Did the princess see Noah as the carpenter, painter, or the monch?” when the answer is “safe” enough, playing into the story’s interactivity. I still feel a little echo of this today, the wish of a choice in dramatic moments of a story with traditional elements in it (“Anakin, kill the chancellor, please, don’t join him!”), even though the illusion of that choice being possible is long broken. Should such a choice be indeed possible, the fairy tales would still maintain its essences: the motifs. So, to me, traditional tales seem to really invite interactivity and choice.
2) Little Red Riding Twine
Traditional stories have evolved, changed. As time went, and they travelled mouth to mouth, culture to culture, earlier age to a later age, or even author to author (in case of adaptations), they were molded to reflect the context. A frog got thrown at a wall, but now it is kissed. Two out of three pigs were devoured by the wolf, but now they go to help each other. Little Red Riding Hood sometimes ends with the hunter slicing the wolf open and the wolf falling full of rocks into a well, sometimes the girl goes to bed with the wolf, which sometimes leads to her dying and sometimes she escapes. There are always key story points, but they also branch out into alternative pathways and endings.
Just like interactive games (twines and beyond). If we remove present the evolution of the Little Red Riding Hood through time onto a schematic map that tracks the deviations of the story, we will get a much similar picture to a design of a twine- (or telltale- etc.) style game. Thinking about traditional stories in this way again invites interactivity to be brough in the genre, and perhaps it might be one of the possible keys to keep traditional tales alive.
Hints for my project?
While I am still undecided as to what my project will be, reflecting on the power of interactive & traditional storytelling hints at possible directions – branches.
Perhaps I could scout the world’s mythologies, legends and tales, to find those where the protection and restoration of nature play a major role in the narrative, and borrow these for a more future-based re-telling?
Perhaps these tales can provide structures for game scenarios, with players being the traditional heroes that bring live back to both the ecosystems of the world and their respective mythologies – an interactive (board) game with a traditional storytelling influence?
Or, vice versa, perhaps I can collect and retell those nature-oriented tales in a way that is both relevant for today’s ecological challenges as well as interactive – a children’s book of branching/reader-engaging narratives?
If only I didn’t have to choose between those two equally exciting ideas…
Unless there’s a way to create something that strikes a perfect balance, something that is neither a game nor a book, a children’s artefact where minifigures and tokens meet words and paragraphs. Something to think about next week!
