PGA: TRANSMEDIA PRODUCERS HAVE ARRIVED | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog

PGA: TRANSMEDIA PRODUCERS HAVE ARRIVED

By Scott Macaulay

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Okay, I guess it’s official now.

As Deadline Hollywood is reporting, the Producer’s Guild of America has officially created a new category for the “transmedia producer.”

From Nikki Finke’s piece:

I’ve learned that a significant All-Boards meeting for the Producers Guild of America took place tonight. Sources tell me that the members voted on a series of amendments that qualify individuals as professional producers. More importantly, for the first time in the guild’s history, they voted on and ratified a new credit — that of the Transmedia Producer — which had been shepherded by such Hollywood names as Mark Gordon, Gael Anne Hurd, Jeff Gomez, Alison Savage, and Chris Pfaff.

Jeff Gomez, who spoke this weekend at DIY Days, was a big part of the push to institute this credit. What’s a Transmedia Producer? From the PGA:

A Transmedia Narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe on any of the following platforms: Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, Mobile, Special Venues, DVD/Blu-ray/CD-ROM, Narrative Commercial and Marketing rollouts, and other technologies that may or may not currently exist. These narrative extensions are NOT the same as repurposing material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms.

A Transmedia Producer credit is given to the person(s) responsible for a significant portion of a project’s long-term planning, development, production, and/or maintenance of narrative continuity across multiple platforms, and creation of original storylines for new platforms. Transmedia producers also create and implement interactive endeavors to unite the audience of the property with the canonical narrative and this element should be considered as valid qualification for credit as long as they are related directly to the narrative presentation of a project.

Transmedia Producers may originate with a project or be brought in at any time during the long-term rollout of a project in order to analyze, create or facilitate the life of that project and may be responsible for all or only part of the content of the project. Transmedia Producers may also be hired by or partner with companies or entities, which develop software and other technologies and who wish to showcase these inventions with compelling, immersive, multi-platform content.

To qualify for this credit, a Transmedia Producer may or may not be publicly credited as part of a larger institution or company, but a titled employee of said institution must be able to confirm that the individual was an integral part of the production team for the project.

For thoughts on the PGA’s rules, visit Christy Dena’s blog. Among her specific critiques: the three storyline rule.

From Dena:

The minimum of three (or more) narrative storylines. This is bad. I know Jeff Gomez has been pushing for the 3 media-platform rule for a few years now. But that was because it was an effective pedagogical device to get new practitioners to understand the need to think expansively. Making this official is a mistake. Although Jeff Gomez and Henry Jenkins focus their studies and energy on franchises, franchises are only type of transmedia project. There are tons of different implements of transmedia projects. What about all the transmedia producers for special television episodes that includes the web in a special two-screen experience? Gosh, simultaneous media-usage with TV shows especially created to work with the web or mobile are one of the biggest growth areas in broadcasting. And books with websites or DVDs? The minimum-of-three rule applies to franchises easily, but it shows how little these people know about how big the area is. I hope it won’t be strictly observed.

From an interview last month with Jeff Gomez on the PGA New Media Council blog:

What’s so powerful about transmedia implementation is that it maximizes the potential of your story or message, while both building intense brand loyalty and opening up multiple revenue streams.

The loyalty is derived from giving fans more of what they want from your story: more character background, more story mythology, more opportunities to dialog with the story’s creators and with one another. When you know that Samuel L. Jackson will be playing Nick Fury in the next nine Marvel super hero movies, you’re delighted because this ties that whole universe together. It’s a richer and deeper entertainment experience for the fan.

Revenues may be increased dramatically, because you are furnishing fans with more product. The storylines of major films like The Dark Knight, Wolverine and Watchmen are being supplemented by direct-to-DVD animation releases, each of which are selling quite well. The Watchmen videogame serves as a prequel to the movie and contains “valuable” story developments that fans want to know about. New stories set in the same world are alluring, as opposed to repurposed content, so the products become more attractive and in many cases more lucrative.

For more on transmedia and how it might affect you as a narrative storyteller, check out this piece by Lance Weiler in Filmmaker on extending your story worlds.

tips Ryan Fitzgerald for sending me this - looks like the official credit for 'transmedia producer' is here, stateside at least

INVISIBLE CHILDREN PRESENTS [+] THE RESCUE

'Overview: This site is part of a yearly event to raise awareness and take action against Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla group in northern Uganda that has abducted an estimated 30,000 children since its rebellion began in 1987. On April 25, 2009, Invisible Children staged a mass abduction during which participants would simulate abducting each other. While informing people of the event and providing them with the tools to organize one locally, this bold, graphic presentation—with compelling video as the backdrop—also clarifies the complexity of the problem and the group’s mission.

• The site’s primary content is a 36-minute video divided into segments that allow users to learn without being overwhelmed by the subject matter.
• Leading up to April 25, a pre-event landing page with a countdown generated buzz and a reason to return.
• An interactive map allowed users to click on a city and find out details about how they could get involved with a local event.'

http://www.commarts.com/interactive/cai10/invisiblechildren.html

Memory to Action: Eyewitness Interactive Table

'Overview: In a space that evokes urgency, expediency and action, the Eyewitness Interactive Table is part of an intimate experience that brings visitors face-to-face with the modern genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. The exhibit’s center is the personal experience of survivors, activists and even perpetrators of genocide and how they acted in the face of the atrocity; the table communicates their stories, providing an ongoing human soundtrack and an atmosphere of action. When drawn in closer, visitors who are moved to touch the words they have heard or read, are rewarded with an in-depth look at the evidence that supports that person’s story, and the opportunity to share it.

• From concept to completion, the table took eighteen months to produce.
• The installation uses 4 high-definition 1400 X 1050 projectors, 15 LCD 23" displays, 12 barcode readers, 1 Mac Pro and 1 Windows PC.
• The exhibit distributes a “bookmark” to each visitor for saving stories and profiles from the exhibit to an online account. They use its access code to retrieve their saved content at a later time.'

http://www.commarts.com/interactive/cai10/memorytoaction.html#

Body Collective Sacrifice - Christian Bannister

The Body Collective Installation at the Portland Art Museum - super cool:

Overview: This free-standing installation in the Portland Art Museum was deployed in concert with the museum’s exhibition Marking Portland: the Art of Tattoo. Integrated into an alcove adjacent to one of the museum’s busiest thoroughfares, this two-sided experience literally merges the community and the museum’s collection. On a large display on the inner side of the unit, visitors see themselves with details of artwork blended onto their likeness. After a few seconds an image is captured of the composite and added to the Body Collective collection. On the outer side of the unit, visitors can browse through thumbnails of every image captured since the exhibition opened.

• Proximity sensors on both sides of the kiosk facilitate gestural navigation of images and textures and the collection side has a Point Gray Chameleon digital camera to composite high-res video in real-time.
• Images are collected by the kiosk automatically; as long as someone is standing in front of the installation the camera will continue to collect images at a set interval.
• The quantity of images is indeterminate and the system will continue to capture them with no limit to the number that can be collected.

http://www.commarts.com/interactive/cai10/bodycollective.html

James Harkin welcomes the arrival of 'cyber-realism'

Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film The Killing follows a prickly collection of gangsters as they plan to rob a racetrack of millions of dollars. The way that it follows them, however, was considered most unusual at the time. Right from the outset the film shifts to and fro between the multiple different points of view of its protagonists, and leaps back and forth in time to tell the story. Its circuitous structure deliberately plays around with linear chronology, as if throwing out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and forcing the viewer to put them back together again. At test screenings, the reaction of audiences was disappointing, and their chief gripe was its confusing structure. In the end studio executives became convinced that audiences wouldn't have the patience for it, and The Killing was quietly buried.

The Killing was one of the first films to use nonlinear, multi-perspectival storytelling in the mainstream cinema. Forty years after it bombed, however, there began to appear a slew of films that looked very much like it. Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) can be seen as an early example of the form. Hammering together as it does three completely different stories in a resolutely non-chronological order, Pulp Fiction is now considered to have been at least partly inspired by The Killing. The films were aimed at different audiences in different periods, but both aimed to zigzag around the truth and confuse the viewer into engaging more fully with the story. Explaining the thrill he gets from telling stories in cryptic, nonlinear fashion, Tarantino has claimed that he finds it fun "to watch an audience in some ways chase after a movie". But whereas Kubrick's film died a death, Pulp Fiction cleaned up. Why?

At least part of the answer must be that, in an age defined by our intense involvement with electronic information, the kinds of stories that we want to hear have subtly changed. In her speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in December 2007, for example, Doris Lessing delivered a sermon warning against the dangers of spending too much time on the net. What we urgently need, she argued, was a new appreciation of the ancient art of storytelling, which was, under the weight of all this new technology, in danger of being forgotten. "The storyteller," she insisted, "is deep inside every one of us... It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best - and at our most creative."

Lessing was right about the power of storytelling. The ability to tell a story properly, after all, requires that the teller should not be waylaid by the wanderings of the audience. Stories are everywhere, and the reason they are so popular is that they offer us meaning and a way of making sense of the world and our place in it. For as long as we humans have existed, stories have entertained us and helped us hand down knowledge and lore from generation to generation; they are so fundamental to us that they must somehow be hard-wired into our brains.

Isn't it possible, though, that Lessing was too pessimistic? Isn't it possible that the greater freedom for manoeuvre afforded us by electronic information is simply altering the kind of stories that we want to listen to? Might our cybernetic urge to forge our own path through electronic information, as the media guru Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s, now be too restless to cope with the traditional one-thing-after-another plot lines that we're used to in mainstream culture? If stories are hard-wired into our brains, in other words, isn't it possible that the wiring is subtly changing?

For many years now, just as McLuhan prophesied, the habit of reading books has slowly been losing its grip on many of us. At the same time, many of us have slowly become highly skilled at pressing buttons and adjusting ourselves to a constant stream of electronic feedback on computer games, the internet and our mobile phones. In itself, that need not be a problem. There is, as McLuhan pointed out, nothing particularly natural about the act of reading or writing stories in books. What the invention of the book did manage to do was to impose a certain kind of order over how readers made their way through the story, and, over time, the wiring of our brains adjusted to catch up.

The control of the book's author over how we read is not absolute; tire of a bad book and one can always turn its pages to find the sexy or interesting bits, like the owner of a video recorder pausing or fast-forwarding a dull film. Compared to the computer gamer or the internet user, however, the reader of a book has long been seen as passive and utterly at the mercy of the storyteller - he or she, after all, has precious little power over how the story is told. On the other hand, it's the humble reader who chooses how to interpret the work. Even in the most straightforward of novels, it's up to the reader to reassemble the component parts of the story in their minds and then scan it for meaning.

Those of us who have got used to doing things on screen, however, have a much more powerful way of taking the reins from an author or an authority. Armed with our computer mouse, what would have been a book appears to us as a stream of messages on a loop, a loop that usually encourages us to hop around nimbly from one place to another. What kind of stories do people brought up like this want to hear?

Look carefully at mainstream television and cinema: a new kind of storytelling that deliberately engages our restless, cybernetic imagination already exists. Stories like this seem to allow the audience to adjust and zigzag their way through the story - not by giving away some physical control of the narrative, like a computer game, but by adjusting themselves to a sensibility that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time sending out messages and batting back feedback on an electronic information loop.

These new stories are not structured in the traditional way - they are oblique and elusive enough to allow for a wide variety of interpretations, and broad enough to allow the reader more freedom of manoeuvre to follow their own path through the narrative. For the most part, the plots of these new stories emphasise chance, coincidence and random connections. They don't have an obvious beginning, middle and end; if they are thrown forward at all, it is by bad luck, freakish twists of fate, and the systematic inability of characters to take things into their hands and make sense of their own lives. Like all good stories, these new stories are invested with morals and meaning, but more often than not the meaning is that meaning itself is difficult to decipher. What is special about this new kind of storytelling in cinema and television is that it is becoming increasingly nonlinear.

Let's call it cyber-realism. A cyber-realist story contains at least one of four different elements - the puzzle, the loop, multiplicity and the tie. Sometimes a film comes along that showcases all four, and in 2003 that film arrived in the form of 21 Grams.

This bleak film marked the arrival in Hollywood of the celebrated but now defunct Mexican writer-director team of Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro Iñárritu. Its plot revolved around a tragic hit-and-run road accident that resulted in the death of a father and two small daughters. As far as that goes, 21 Grams isn't particularly different from the usual Hollywood fare. The way the story was written and filmed, however, was novel. Just as in Amores Perros, the previous film by Arriaga and Iñárritu, and their subsequent star-studded blockbuster Babel (2006), 21 Grams dealt with the overlapping, strangely myriad connections between three characters who - if their lives had not become intertwined through a random tragedy - would not otherwise have met.

Then there was the filming itself. 21 Grams was shot in chronological order and subsequently edited into a nonlinear arrangement of sections that flicker back and forth between events before, after, and during the accident. Watching it was a deeply confusing experience, and deliberately so. 21 Grams set out to chop itself up into "digital bits" so as to challenge viewers and keep them on the edge of their seat. The disparate pieces of the story fitted back together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a puzzle whose real meaning became clear only when all the pieces were in place. Like a computer game it zigzagged back and forth, forcing its audience to constantly adjust its antennae to bring the plot closer into focus.

Films like 21 Grams are now all the rage in cinema, and not only in the art house. In more or less artful ways, storytellers of all kinds have been queuing up to stoke our suspicion that secret codes and patterns might exist, tantalisingly out of reach, and taunt us with possible solutions.

Yet another example of the type of paranoid puzzle that is becoming more and more common in film and cinema is Lost, an American TV series that began airing in 2004. This follows the tribulations of a group of air-crash survivors on a mysterious desert island. Twenty-five episodes into Lost, the viewer is witness to a conversation between John Locke, a bald-headed mystic, and Jack Shephard, the programme's nearest thing to a leading man. Locke, whose enigmatic demeanour leads one to suspect that he understands more about their predicament than he is letting on, is berating Jack for his lack of faith. "Do you think this is an accident? That we, a group of strangers, survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? You think we crashed on this place by coincidence, especially this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us."

Some years and many series later, viewers are still in the dark about what that purpose might be. Lost boasts a huge cast of characters and a breathtaking number of plot lines; it works by piling puzzle upon impenetrable puzzle while stubbornly refusing to solve them.

In search of a little enlightenment, its diehard fans have flooded on to the internet for clues on how to crack its determinedly labyrinthine plot. Dip your toe into the blogosphere and you will be floored by a wave of riffs on the meaning of Lost; musings on the significance of the different shades of light used, the colours of black and white, even the clothes worn by the characters. Some have suggested that the island might be a tropical purgatory, that the plight of the characters might be an allegory for the state of contemporary America, that they might have got themselves caught in a time warp, that they are unwitting island mates in some reality TV show, and - that old chestnut - that it all might be a dream. One intriguing interpretation of the series is that everything within it is part of a giant computer game.

The second hint to the viewer that they are watching a piece of cyber-realist storytelling is the appearance of a narrative loop that suggests that the story, rather than moving forward, might be about to turn full circle. Just as McLuhan predicted that linear, one-after-another processes would soon be replaced by continuously looping circuits of information, storytellers have begun to use narrative loops as a neat way to flip the expected chronology of their stories. The end of 21 Grams, for example, reverts straight back to the beginning, as if all its events have been playing on a giant loop and are fated to be replayed again and again.

A common way of inserting a narrative loop is to play around with memory. The film Memento (2000), for example, told the story of a man who has lost his memory and who lives only in the present, but who is obsessed with finding out who murdered his wife. The movie begins near the chronological end of the story - the protagonist's slaying of what he takes to be his wife's killer - and then gradually loops its way backwards, a few scenes at a time, to tease us with what really happened. Like 21 Grams, Memento has been systematically chopped up and rearranged to entice a modern audience that needs more of a challenge; what it amounts to is a classic and very conventional murder-mystery zapped into cyber-realist form.

Asked why he so often slices up his stories into bits and rearranges them in a different order, Memento's director, Christopher Nolan, paid tribute to the greater sophistication of his audience. "I think people's ability to absorb a fractured mise en scène," he said, "is extraordinary compared to 40 years ago."

The third sign of cyber-realist storytelling is when a story runs to a multiplicity of disparate strands or plot lines that the storyteller manages to keep spinning at the same time. Hosting a variety of different protagonists is nothing new in cinema; what is novel is when all of those protagonists are pursuing multiple, parallel goals that seem to have nothing at all in common for most of the film. Moving across these multiple, scarcely overlapping stories, the film forces the viewer to hop from one jarring piece of information to another to make sense of it all. The result of the decision to chop up 21 Grams into little bits and rearrange its chronology, for example, is that its disparate plot lines are thrown into a crazed juxtaposition even before it becomes clear what has happened and to whom.

Another example is the fearsomely fidgety 2005 geopolitical thriller and George Clooney vehicle, Syriana. In the first half hour, the befuddled viewer is introduced to a total of six different plot lines, which, for most of the film, seem to have nothing in common with each other.

Then there is the surprise 2004 hit Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, which switches not only between different levels of the consciousness of its hero, Joel (Jim Carrey), but between different time zones in the present, past and future. Fittingly for an audience that has grown up hitched to computers, the film turns on an attempt by Joel and his former girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) to undergo a medical procedure to erase the memory of their failed and mutually painful relationship.

Like Memento, Eternal Sunshine's narrative structure is a perfect loop. It begins where it might normally end, when the two former lovers encounter each other on a train, after having erased their memories of each other and with no inkling of their previous relationship. But it does something else, too. The result of superimposing different layers of Joel's consciousness on the story - his recovered memories, his observations of himself from within his memories, and the world outside his memories - is to present the story from a dizzying range of different perspectives that all happen to come from within the tortured psyche of the same character.

Essential to the idea of multiplicity is that the story's many different viewpoints do not necessarily arrive at the same kind of truth about events. The reason for watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman explains, is to see what Joel thinks about his relationship with Clementine, not what actually happened. "You don't really know what their relationship is," says Kaufman. "You only know what Joel thinks about their relationship."

The fourth and last element of cyber-realist storytelling follows from the third. The way in which a cyber-realist story brings together the different perspectives and goals of its myriad protagonists is through random or unlikely ties or connections, a device that often ends up framing the entire story. Holding together the whole messy edifice of 21 Grams, for example, is a single accident that catapults its many characters into one another's lives. The tie that brings together all three different stories in Pulp Fiction is a stick-up in a diner, which begins and ends the film's narrative loop.

Thanks to a multiplicity of different protagonists and a hornet's nest of random ties and connections, cyber-realist stories do not so much move forward as spread out to ricochet around whole neighbourhoods, cities and beyond, pointing up the interconnectedness of just about everything.

"People lead very fragmented lives," Iñárritu told one journalist, justifying why he should want to tie together such different stories in 21 Grams. "We can be on the cellular phone and on the computer and in many places in a short time. We are more conscious of things happening at the same time that can affect us."

In a similar way, the Oscar-winning 2004 film Crash features a wide range of protagonists from different walks of life in contemporary Los Angeles. The story proceeds to bring all of them together through an apparently random series of car accidents, shootings and hijackings. The result is to build random ties and connections between very different characters and thereby illustrate a rich and open-ended fable about racial tensions, hypocrisy and the sharply divided American class system.

One last example: the title of the popular American TV show The Wire initially referred to a wire-tap that the Baltimore police were using to try to nail an outfit of local drug dealers, but soon became a metaphor for the premise that a wide variety of organisations and individuals in the city of Baltimore were connected. The series started out as a cops-and-gangsters story but soon spread out to tie together cultures that appeared to have little in common - drug dealers, the police, government and political lobbyists, schools and the media. In The Wire no single character or story line takes precedence; many are kept spinning at the same time, and its different worlds are brought together via unlikely connections to illustrate how everything is quietly tied to everything else. Interviewed by the New Yorker in 2007, its creator, David Simon, insisted that The Wire "was never a cop show. We were always planning to move further out, to build a whole city."

The new cyber-realism and its constituent elements - the puzzle, the loop, multiplicity and the tie - tempt us with more freedom to negotiate our way through stories in film and cinema, and discover our own path. It does so, for the most part, by making us constantly adjust our expectations in response to a rich and continuous loop of jarring information.

Playing around with chronology to suggest that the story is not really moving forward at all is not new to avant-garde artists and film-makers. As Jean-Luc Godard famously quipped, a story should have a beginning, middle and end - but not necessarily in that order. Long before the worldwide web was widespread, many of our best novelists and film-makers - from James Joyce to Salvador Dalí - were experimenting with non-traditional ways to tell stories within the confines of books and films.

This kind of storytelling, however, is entirely fresh to mainstream cinema. Maybe the only thing new about it is that it has found itself at home among a mainstream audience.

Another way of making sense of the best of these new stories is to say that they are beginning to take on all the weight and complexity of those sumptuous, many-layered novels much loved by the Victorians, which seemed to contain the whole world within their covers - and which, like the box-set TV series that we huddle over our computers to watch today, were often produced in smaller gobbets for serialisation, and consumed a little at a time.

The promise of cyber-realist storytelling is that viewers are tired of formulaic narratives and are looking instead for richer stories that allow them greater freedom of manoeuvre. The danger is that they fail to decipher any meaning in this explosion of information and perspective, that they end up going around in circles, and that they are left - like those suspiciously well-preserved characters from that daft American TV series - utterly, utterly lost.

• Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are by James Harkin is published by Little, Brown;
cyburbia.tv

While I don’t entirely agree with Harkin’s argument as to how contemporary fragmented narratives have evolved, his is an interesting take on how social media are impacting narrative design.

Scope | Issue 4| Film Reviews

Issue 4: Film Reviews

Memento

Dir: Christopher Nolan, USA, 2001

Switching

Dir: Morten Schøjdt, Denmark, 2003

A Review by Siobhan O'Flynn, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada

Christopher Nolan's neo-noir thriller, Memento, has generated polarized responses: fans who love the challenge of grappling with the puzzle of the film's fragmented structure and those who are turned off by either the frustration of the effort required to piece the story together, or a dissatisfaction with the story that is or is not eventually recovered. Within new media studies, Memento's non-linear structure has received a flutter of comments because, in Jon Dovey's words, the film is an example of what he has suggested is "a narrative structure that might respond to a spatial analysis….[as] a film that is of the cultural moment of hypertext". Dovey's comment, offered in "Notes Towards a Hypertextual Theory of Narrative" (2002), is predicated on the opposition of film as a passive medium set against the active, immersive, involvement of the interactive piece. What he does not pursue in depth is an exploration of the spatial, interactive experience of this "passive" film that occurs in the viewer's active decipherment of the film. Paradoxically, the lessons gained from a "spatial analysis" of the film occur despite Memento's supposedly "passive" medium. Watching Memento can be highly interactive, and the more adept the viewer is at maintaining multiple story lines, the more involved in the story recreation, the more satisfying the experience can be. As such, the film can in fact model an alternative focus to the current, reductive approach to narrative in new media studies and a key insight into the authoring challenges of writing narratives for new media works.

For the filmmaker working in new media, interactive movies are the Holy Grail, where interactivity is at once the gimmick with the potential to lure curious users, and the potential cause of the alienation of those users. Easy to imagine, interactive cinema suggests the combination of the gut-wrenching, emotion twisting, edge-of-your-seat power of cinema with the addictive thrill of action/reaction found within games. What could be better? We get a story and we get to play with it: "You choose what will happen next!" Or, as the recent X-Box game, Fable, announces: "For every choice, a consequence." The idea of combining the attractions of film and game is clearly heard in Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for the Twenty-First Century (2004), the new how-to work by interactive screenwriter and theorizer, Andrew Glassner, in his call to new medium creators: "In our quest to develop a new medium, I believe we should aspire to something that is capable of deep human expression….I am excited by the idea that we can develop a new form of expression that is capable of not just entertainment but depth". Why then, haven't interactive movies become as ubiquitous as cell-phones? The challenge for creators of interactive movies is how to overcome the inherently disruptive act of interactivity, of shifting from one story line to another. In giving up control of the plot, the interactive filmmaker must relax the control of the disclosure of information necessary for traditional plots. The absence of a tightly controlled structure presents the creator with the problem of how to construct a narrative that can generate the same (or similar) effects of the traditional plot (drama, suspense, conflict, climax, and character arc, to name a few) when the sequence of the telling is constantly disrupted. If we follow a story that no longer adheres to a linear, author-driven sequence, we risk losing the impact or suspense of the masterfully plotted thriller or melodrama or comedy.

The emphasis on an Aristotelian notion of the function of story and plot established what has been a long-standing opposition of narrative and database within new media criticism and practice. Lev Manovich declared, in an oft-quoted statement from The Language of New Media (2001), that:

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.

Manovich's distinction between database and narrative defines narrative as a sequence of events held together by a discernable sense of causal relationships thereby generating an understanding of consequence and meaning. This definition has remained consistent in most critical examinations of the problem of narrative in new media, wherein "narrative" and "story" are used interchangeably. Yet the Aristotelian distinction between story as the chronological sequence that can be reconstructed from the plot and plot as the often non-chronological sequence of events found in the telling, does nothing to resolve the problem of interactivity, and in fact places the focus of attention on the wrong element. Creators are faced with a vista of either random, user-generated, causally unconnected plotting or the nightmare of endless branching vistas of obsessively plotted multi-stream stories.

The major stumbling block for creators of interactive works has been working with the two central elements of story and plot, and story has been the focus of much recent critical writing on narrative and new media. The paradox of this new medium is, however, that while the technology is constantly improving, amazing graphics, mobility within a virtual space, interaction with beautiful graphics and a fully realized virtual world are potentially meaningless without a good story. However, the contemporary critical focus on story, or as it is often phrased, narrative in new media, will never adequately overcome the problem of interactivity disrupting the "story" because of the reductive approach to story adapted consistently via the same ur-texts of literary theory. When new media theorists or creators turn to literature as an old media modeling a "passive" textual experience, almost universally, discussions focus on the Aristotelian opposition of story and plot. What has been left out are discussions of the non-traditional novel, of the function of language, style, and the poetics of metaphor, symbolism, etc.

Memento's noir story and cast of characters are entirely conventional. A man, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pierce) seeks revenge for the rape/murder of his wife (Jorja Fox), only to find himself duped by the corrupt cop (Joe Pantoliano) and the femme fatale (Carrie Ann Moss). Even the dual function of the protagonist as the detective/criminal, which the audience is confronted with in the opening sequence, is as old as Oedipus Rex. Nolan's innovations within the genre are the "condition" of his protagonist who is unable to create short-term memories and the disruptive structure of the film that replicates Leonard's fragmented experience of time and the world for the viewer. Even Leonard's condition is arguably a new twist on Oedipus' fatal flaw of ignorance. The structure, however, has received critical praise, and Nolan received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. The film disrupts chronological time by intercutting multiple time lines and possible-alternate story lines. The first, "Z" to "M" backward time-line is established in the opening sequence and Nolan makes this story line instantly recognizable by shooting it in colour. This sequence starts chronologically after the key violent encounter that opens the film and Leonard's significant change into a tailored suit. The colour sequence further functions as Leonard's "external" journeying through a benighted urban landscape of diners, bars, abandoned buildings, and various motel rooms. The second, b/w sequence, moves from "A" to "M" in a forward moving time-line that is intercut with the colour sequence. In this claustrophobic, increasingly paranoid sequence, Leonard, in his original "grunge" clothes, sits in a motel room, surrounded by the maps, polaroids, notes, and tattooing equipment, he "scripts" his world from. The reconstructed "A" to "Z" story which the viewer reassembles from the disruptive shifting between seemingly distinct yet connected stories, is complicated by suggestions of contradictory details that destabilize the "truth" of Leonard's limited perspective. One such instance is the story of Sammy Jenkis, a man with a mirror condition to Leonard's. This story is embedded in the b/w sequence as a story that Leonard tells repeatedly in order to explain his own "condition." Yet as cinephiles will know, Nolan destabilizes the "truth" value of this story with a subliminal superimposition of Leonard's face on that of the bug-housed Sammy, suggesting that Sammy's story is Leonard's own. This fleeting vision, more readily accessible on the DVD, leads to the unhinging conclusion that Leonard's "story" and the action of the film may exist only within his mind.

Despite its traditional format, Memento has earned a level of cachet in discussions on how to theorize interactive cinema because of its fragmented, dislocating structure. By rights, the film's constant disruptions of the story line(s) should alienate viewers, and in fact, it often does. For some viewers, however, the experience is arguably more immersive because the engagement with solving the puzzle demands that the viewer maintain three or more separate and interconnected story lines simultaneously. What the viewer assembles is a spatial mobile of suspended story fragments that intersect and alter each other through the course of the viewing. Dovey's emphasis is on the viewer's "contemplation [of] the static reality of a number of events that have already occurred and then to try and make sense of them". The focus here is on the reconstruction of the static "story" from the fragmented plot. This Aristotelian approach to "story" is pervasive in writings on narrative in new media.

Memento's structural challenge is also no innovation. Literary works such as Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, Annie Dilliard's For the Time Being, and V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World all present fragmented narratives constructed of intersecting story lines and/or thematic threads that challenge the reader to create a sense of a unified whole, in answer to the question, how do all these discrete and seemingly different fragments relate? In the viewing experience of the film, however, a viewer is forced to consider not just the story or narrative but the question of how meaning is generated on various levels that can exist independent of the linear story, more usefully thought of as narrativity. When the access to or comprehension of an horizontal, chronological story line is complicated or blocked by the fragmented work (traditional or interactive), the reader/user is forced back to a consideration of what Dovey and many others have termed the vertical axis of narrative that is concerned with the generation of meaning at the level of theme, symbol and metaphor. From the standpoint of the creator, all of these devices are again as old as storytelling itself, as much a part of Beowulf's "word hoard" as the epithets, similes, metaphors, and ritual set pieces that formed the "database" of the epic poet.

Within the disrupted text, the reader/user engages with the text/world hunting for patterns, echoes, repetitions and inversions, much like Leonard Shelby, all of which function to create associative links between otherwise distinct fragments or episodes. Contrary to Dovey's assertion that Memento "invites us to contemplate the static reality of a number of events that have already occurred," Nolan's film offers not a contemplation of static elements but of narrative fragments that are dynamic, mutually affecting and unstable in terms of the meaning attached to each. This understanding of the interrelation of story and narrativity also counters a long-standing opposition within new media theorizing.

Morten Schjødt's interactive feature film, Switching, winner of The Cyberloup-IPL New Media Award 2003, also challenges the user to reconstruct a story from a fragmented narrative. In this made-for-DVD work, the viewer/user can "switch" from moment to moment by hitting the "enter" button. The film is designed to suggest an intuitive "switch" window in moments where characters become introspective. Schjødt's decision to use the cinematic moment in which a character turns from external interaction to internal contemplation as the "natural" moment to switch nicely integrates the content with the interface technology, while also suggesting an implicit belief in moments of narrative closure in which we will naturally be ready to move on. However, the DVD allows the user to "switch" at any moment; the user decides when to "end" the experience. The switching experience itself allows the user to move chronologically through short temporal sequences that move forward, then loop back and then move forward again with variations. Some sequences are highly realistic, others hallucinatory, and reactions to the piece read it variously as one story with variations, or multiple parallel story lines with minor differences. Either way, because the sense of temporal relation and causality is unhinged, particularly by the combination of realistic scenes with hallucinatory ones, the question of narrativity resurfaces in terms of what other elements can generate meaning within but especially across fragments.

The story, however, is again entirely traditional. We follow a Danish couple, Frida (Laura Drasbæk) and Simon (Rasmus Botoft) in encounters before and after their break-up. The cast of characters include Frida's sister, Anna (Kaya Brüel), who has designs on Simon, and an oddly knowing waitress (Lærke Winther Andersen) who works in the café all the characters habituate, and who is also interested in the rejected and downcast Simon. The wolfish Patrick (Johan Widerberg), a Swedish DJ in the café, introduces further sexual tension, as he too becomes involved with Anna. Nationalist tensions are also raised in a scene at the urinals in which Patrick derides the size of Simon's "little cock".  Clearly, Patrick's self-satisfaction has as much to do with a sense of Swedish superiority over the Danish Patrick as with the relative size of their organs.

The film "begins" in the conventional sense of having a clearly articulated beginning, with a fade-in to the POV of Frida, driving through an underground, fluorescent lit tunnel in the title sequence. The film then alternately cuts to a close-up of Frida washing her face in the café washroom or Frida waking up in the daylight looking for Simon who then brings a cup of undrinkable coffee, or Frida waking up at night with Simon beside her. Other scenes are also presumably possible "beginnings," but these seem to be the common "start" scenes. The website for the film describes the relationship of these two waking scenes as a "vicious circle in which they [Frida and Simon] are trapped." In an optimal user experience, the user "switches" in an anti-linear way through various moments of the chronological "story," building a reasonably coherent sense of the spatial story outside of the iteration itself. As with Memento, the user then builds a spatial cognitive mobile of suspended story fragments that interact and reconnect with each additional story fragment. In extended viewings, the film's disrupted chronology plays with our sense of relationships as functioning simultaneously within and without time. Memories return and invade the present, the future is disrupted by the past. As Simon tells Frida, "Time is relative. It's always related to before and after." Further, the notion of time as a constrictive force, as the cycle of suffering, death and rebirth or samsara is introduced in Frida's gift of The Buddhist Bible to Simon after their break-up. The idea of samsara emphasizes the interactive experience as a "vicious circle" without an ending.

The interactivity can be intriguing, particularly with certain scenes that seem to remain unexplained within the overall trajectory of the film: a hallucinatory bug experience of Frida's in the woods; and a waitress who serves coffees then begins to strip. The film seems, however, to not use fully its potential for narrativity in the way that recurrent details, like bugs, washing, and showering echo across fragments but don't seem to resolve into any more meaningful, or insightful relationship to the story. This gap may simply be an obfuscating directorial choice in the same territory as David Lynch's hallucinatory, meaning-resistant films. "Switching" can also trap the film in increasingly constricted loops so that one is forced to watch sequences over and over in decreasing units of time until through some seeming haphazard stroke of luck, the film releases the viewer and switches into a new sequence. Another dissatisfaction arises from the DVD's scene selection function. Here, as on a standard DVD, the user can choose to watch the story scene by scene. Unfortunately, this option can also reveal scenes which the user missed in the creation of his or her narrative. This "reveal" can leave the user in the ticked-off position of being made aware that she or he has missed potentially crucial scenes and/or sequences.

These structural "bugs" can seriously disrupt the user's immersion in the film and unfortunately, whatever spatial model of the narrative the user has created up until that point can get metaphorically jettisoned with the shift to frustrated compulsive pressing on the "enter" key. This is a serious flaw that presumably interactive filmmakers want to avoid. When Switching works, the experience can be as immersive as viewing Memento. At its worst, I'd stick with the more "passive," traditional, director-controlled form of Memento any day of the week.

my essay on Memento as a model for designing interactive narratives

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia Storytelling

Several years ago, I asked a leading producer of animated features how much creative control his team exerted over the games, toys, comics, and other products that deployed their characters. I was reassured that the distribution company handled all such ancillary materials. I saw the movement of content across media as an enhancement of the creative process. He saw it as a distraction or corruption.

This past month, I attended a gathering of top creatives from Hollywood and the games industry, hosted by Electronic Arts; they were discussing how to collaboratively develop content that would play well across media. This meeting reflected a growing realization within the media industries that what is variously called transmedia, multiplatform, or enhanced storytelling represents the future of entertainment.

Let's face it: we have entered an era of media convergence that makes the flow of content across multiple media channels almost inevitable. The move toward digital effects in film and the improved quality of video game graphics means that it is becoming much more realistic to lower production costs by sharing assets across media. Everything about the structure of the modern entertainment industry was designed with this single idea in mind-the construction and enhancement of entertainment franchises.

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And the push isn't just coming from the big media companies. The kids who have grown up consuming and enjoying Pokemon across media are going to expect this same kind of experience from The West Wing as they get older. By design, Pokemon unfolds across games, television programs, films, and books, with no media privileged over any other. For our generation, the hour-long, ensemble-based, serialized drama was the pinnacle of sophisticated storytelling, but for the next generation, it is going to seem, well, like less than child's play. Younger consumers have become information hunters and gatherers, taking pleasure in tracking down character backgrounds and plot points and making connections between different texts within the same franchise. And in addition, all evidence suggests that computers don't cancel out other media; instead, computer owners consume on average significantly more television, movies, CDs, and related media than the general population.

While the technological infrastructure is ready, the economic prospects sweet, and the audience primed, the media industries haven't done a very good job of collaborating to produce compelling transmedia experiences. Even within the media conglomerates, units compete aggressively rather than collaborate. Each industry sector has specialized talent, but the conglomerates lack a common language or vision to unify them. The current structure is hierarchical: film units set licensing limits on what can be done in games based on their properties. At the same time, film producers don't know the game market very well or respect those genre elements which made something like Tomb Raider successful. We need a new model for co-creation-rather than adaptation-of content that crosses media. 

2003 but the key ideas of Convergence Culture are here

Henry Jenkins - Game Design as Narrative Architecture

GAME DESIGN AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
By Henry Jenkins

The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media.(1) Consider some recent statements made on this issue:

"Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power" --Ernest Adams (2)

"There is a direct, immediate conflict between the demands of a story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story's path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player's freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game." --Greg Costikyan (3)

"Computer games are not narratives....Rather the narrative tends to be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness of the game." --Jesper Juul (4)

"Outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories."
--Markku Eskelinen (5)

I find myself responding to this perspective with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I understand what these writers are arguing against - various attempts to map traditional narrative structures ("hypertext," "Interactive Cinema," "nonlinear narrative") onto games at the expense of an attention to their specificity as an emerging mode of entertainment. You say narrative to the average gamer and what they are apt to imagine is something on the order of a choose-your-own adventure book, a form noted for its lifelessness and mechanical exposition rather than enthralling entertainment, thematic sophistication, or character complexity. And game industry executives are perhaps justly skeptical that they have much to learn from the resolutely unpopular (and often overtly antipopular) aesthetics promoted by hypertext theorists. The application of film theory to games can seem heavy-handed and literal minded, often failing to recognize the profound differences between the two media. Yet, at the same time, there is a tremendous amount that game designers and critics could learn through making meaningful comparisons with other storytelling media. One gets rid of narrative as a framework for thinking about games only at one's own risk. In this short piece, I hope to offer a middle ground position between the ludologists and the narratologists, one that respects the particularity of this emerging medium - examining games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility.

Let's start at some points where we might all agree:

1) Not all games tell stories. Games may be an abstract, expressive, and experiential form, closer to music or modern dance than to cinema. Some ballets (The Nutcracker for example) tell stories, but storytelling isn't an intrinsic or defining feature of dance. Similarly, many of my own favorite games - Tetris, Blix, Snood - are simple graphic games that do not lend themselves very well to narrative exposition.(6) To understand such games, we need other terms and concepts beyond narrative, including interface design and expressive movement for starters. The last thing we want to do is to reign in the creative experimentation that needs to occur in the earlier years of a medium's development.

2)Many games do have narrative aspirations. Minimally, they want to tap the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences. Often, they depend on our familiarity with the roles and goals of genre entertainment to orientate us to the action, and in many cases, game designers want to create a series of narrative experiences for the player. Given those narrative aspirations, it seems reasonable to suggest that some understanding of how games relate to narrative is necessary before we understand the aesthetics of game design or the nature of contemporary game culture.

3) Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive, even if some narratologist - Janet Murray is the most oft cited example - do seem to be advocating for games to pursue particular narrative forms. There is not one future of games. The goal should be to foster diversification of genres, aesthetics, and audiences, to open gamers to the broadest possible range of experiences. The past few years has been one of enormous creative experimentation and innovation within the games industry, as might be represented by a list of some of the groundbreaking titles. The Sims, Black and White, Majestic, Shenmue; each represents profoundly different concepts of what makes for compelling game play. A discussion of the narrative potentials of games need not imply a privileging of storytelling over all the other possible things games can do, even if we might suggest that if game designers are going to tell stories, they should tell them well. In order to do that, game designers, who are most often schooled in computer science or graphic design, need to be retooled in the basic vocabulary of narrative theory.

4) The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story. Many other factors which have little or nothing to do with storytelling per se contribute to the development of a great games and we need to significantly broaden our critical vocabulary for talking about games to deal more fully with those other topics. Here, the ludologist's insistence that game scholars focus more attention on the mechanics of game play seems totally in order.

5) If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories. Stories are not empty content that can be ported from one media pipeline to another. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to translate the internal dialogue of Proust's In Remembrance of Things Past into a compelling cinematic experience and the tight control over viewer experience which Hitchcock achieves in his suspense films would be directly antithetical to the aesthetics of good game design. We must, therefore, be attentive to the particularity of games as a medium, specifically what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. Yet, in order to do so requires precise comparisons - not the mapping of old models onto games but a testing of those models against existing games to determine what features they share with other media and how they differ.

Much of the writing in the ludologist tradition is unduly polemical: they are so busy trying to pull game designers out of their "cinema envy" or define a field where no hypertext theorist dare to venture that they are prematurely dismissing the use value of narrative for understanding their desired object of study. For my money, a series of conceptual blind spots prevent them from developing a full understanding of the interplay between narrative and games. First, the discussion operates with too narrow a model of narrative, one preoccupied with the rules and conventions of classical linear storytelling at the expense of consideration of other kinds of narratives, not only the modernist and postmodernist experimentation that inspired the hypertext theorists, but also popular traditions which emphasize spatial exploration over causal event chains or which seek to balance between the competing demands of narrative and spectacle.(7) Second, the discussion operates with too limited an understanding of narration, focusing more on the activities and aspirations of the storyteller and too little on the process of narrative comprehension.(8) Third, the discussion deals only with the question of whether whole games tell stories and not whether narrative elements might enter games at a more localized level. Finally, the discussion assumes that narratives must be self-contained rather than understanding games as serving some specific functions within a new transmedia storytelling environment. Rethinking each of these issues might lead us to a new understanding of the relationship between games and stories. Specifically, I want to introduce an important third term into this discussion - spatiality - and argue for an understanding of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects.

SPATIAL STORIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING
Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation. A prehistory of video and computer games might take us through the evolution of paper mazes or board games, both preoccupied with the design of spaces, even where they also provided some narrative context. Monopoly, for example, may tell a narrative about how fortunes are won and lost; the individual Chance cards may provide some story pretext for our gaining or losing a certain number of places; but ultimately, what we remember is the experience of moving around the board and landing on someone's real estate. Performance theorists have described RPGs as a mode of collaborative storytelling, but the Dungeon Master's activities start with designing the space - the dungeon - where the players' quest will take place. Even many of the early text-based games, such as Zork, which could have told a wide array of different kinds of stories, centered around enabling players to move through narratively-compelling spaces: "You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all of the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees." The early Nintendo games have simple narrative hooks - rescue Princess Toadstool - but what gamers found astonishing when they first played them were their complex and imaginative graphic realms, which were so much more sophisticated than the simple grids that Pong or Pac-Man had offered us a decade earlier. When we refer to such influential early works as Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros. as "scroll games," we situate them alongside a much older tradition of spatial storytelling: many Japanese scroll paintings map, for example, the passing of the seasons onto an unfolding space. When you adopt a film into a game, the process typically involves translating events in the film into environments within the game. When gamer magazines want to describe the experience of gameplay, they are more likely to reproduce maps of the game world than to recount their narratives.(9) Before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about game spaces. Across a series of essays, I have made the case that game consoles should be regarded as machines for generating compelling spaces, that their virtual playspaces have helped to compensate for the declining place of the traditional backyard in contemporary boy culture, and that the core narratives behind many games center around the struggle to explore, map, and master contested spaces.(10) Communications in Cyberspace (New York: Sage, 1994); Henry Jenkins, "'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Playspace," in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Ed.) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Here, I want to broaden that discussion further to consider in what ways the structuring of game space facilitates different kinds of narrative experiences.

As such, games fit within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which have often taken the form of hero's odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives.(11) The best works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Homer, L. Frank Baum, or Jack London fall loosely within this tradition, as does, for example, the sequence in War and Peace which describes Pierre's aimless wanderings across the battlefield at Borodino. Often, such works exist on the outer borders of literature. They are much loved by readers, to be sure, and passed down from one generation to another, but they rarely figure in the canon of great literary works. How often, for example, has science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making at the expense of character psychology or plot development? These writers seem constantly to be pushing against the limits of what can be accomplished in a printed text and thus their works fare badly against aesthetic standards defined around classically-constructed novels. In many cases, the characters - our guides through these richly-developed worlds - are stripped down to the bare bones, description displaces exposition, and plots fragment into a series of episodes and encounters. When game designers draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap those genres - fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war - which are most invested in world-making and spatial storytelling. Games, in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds. Anyone who doubts that Tolstoy might have achieved his true calling as a game designer should reread the final segment of War and Peace where he works through how a series of alternative choices might have reversed the outcome of Napoleon's Russian campaign. The passage is dead weight in the context of a novel, yet it outlines ideas which could be easily communicated in a god game like Civilization.

Don Carson, who worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, has argued that game designers can learn a great deal by studying techniques of "environmental storytelling" which Disney employs in designing amusement park attractions. Carson explains, "The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell....Armed only with their own knowledge of the world, and those visions collected from movies and books, the audience is ripe to be dropped into your adventure. The trick is to play on those memories and expectations to heighten the thrill of venturing into your created universe."(12) The amusement park attraction doesn't so much reproduce the story of a literary work, such as The Wind in the Willows, as it evokes its atmosphere; the original story provides "a set of rules that will guide the design and project team to a common goal" and which will help give structure and meaning to the visitor's experience. If, for example, the attraction centers around pirates, Carson writes, "every texture you use, every sound you play, every turn in the road should reinforce the concept of pirates," while any contradictory element may shatter the sense of immersion into this narrative universe. The same might be said for a game like Sea Dogs which, no less than The Pirates of the Caribbean, depends on its ability to map our pre-existing pirate fantasies. The most significant difference is that amusement park designers count on visitors keeping their hands and arms in the car at all times and thus have a greater control in shaping our total experience, whereas game designers have to develop worlds where we can touch, grab, and fling things about at will.

Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.

EVOCATIVE SPACES
The most compelling amusement park attractions build upon stories or genre traditions already well known to visitors, allowing them to enter physically into spaces they have visited many times before in their fantasies. These attractions may either remediate a pre-existing story (Back to the Future) or draw upon a broadly shared genre tradition (Disney's Haunted Mansion). Such works do not so much tell self-contained stories as draw upon our previously existing narrative competencies. They can paint their worlds in fairly broad outlines and count on the visitor/player to do the rest. Something similar might be said of many games. For example, American McGee's Alice is an original interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alice has been pushed into madness after years of living with uncertainty about whether her Wonderland experiences were real or hallucinations; now, she's come back into this world and is looking for blood. McGee's wonderland is not a whimsical dreamscape but a dark nightmare realm. McGee can safely assume that players start the game with a pretty well-developed mental map of the spaces, characters, and situations associated with Carroll's fictional universe and that they will read his distorted and often monstrous images against the background of mental images formed from previous encounters with storybook illustrations and Disney movies. McGee rewrites Alice's story, in large part, by redesigning Alice's spaces.

Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests, "you clearly can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game," where-as a film version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines of the plot.(13) This is a pretty old fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia story-telling, one which depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy. The Star Wars game may not simply retell the story of Star Wars, but it doesn't have to in order to enrich or expand our experience of the Star Wars saga. We already know the story before we even buy the game and would be frustrated if all it offered us was a regurgitation of the original film experience. Rather, the Star Wars game exists in dialogue with the films, conveying new narrative experiences through its creative manipulation of environmental details. One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels. In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.

ENACTING STORIES
Most often, when we discuss games as stories, we are referring to games that either enable players to perform or witness narrative events - for example, to grab a lightsabre and dispatch Darth Maul in the case of a Star Wars game. Narrative enters such games on two levels - in terms of broadly defined goals or conflicts and on the level of localized incidents.

Many game critics assume that all stories must be classically constructed with each element tightly integrated into the overall plot trajectory. Costikyan writes, for example, that "a story is a controlled experience; the author consciously crafts it, choosing certain events precisely, in a certain order, to create a story with maximum impact."(14) Adams claims, "a good story hangs together the way a good jigsaw puzzle hangs together. When you pick it up, every piece locked tightly in place next to its neighbors."(15) Spatial stories, on the other hand, are often dismissed as episodic - that is, each episode (or set piece) can become compelling on its own terms without contributing significantly to the plot development and often, the episodes could have been reordered without significantly impacting our experience as a whole. There may be broad movements or series of stages within the story, as Troy Dunniway suggests when he draws parallels between the stages in the Hero's journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell and the levels of a classic adventure game, but within each stage, the sequencing of actions may be quite loose.(16) Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player's reaching their final destination, though, as Mary Fuller notes, not all travel narratives end successfully or resolve the narrative enigmas which set them into motion.(17) Once again, we are back to principles of "environmental storytelling." The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward movement towards resolution. Over the past several decades, game designers have become more and more adept at setting and varying the rhythm of game play through features of the game space.

Narrative can also enter games on the level of localized incident, or what I am calling micronarratives. We might understand how micronarratives work by thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potempkin. First, recognize that, whatever its serious moral tone, the scene basically deals with the same kind of material as most games - the steps are a contested space with one group (the peasants) trying to advance up and another (the Cossacks) moving down. Eisenstein intensifies our emotional engagement with this large scale conflict through a series of short narrative units. The woman with the baby carriage is perhaps the best-known of those micronarratives. Each of these units builds upon stock characters or situations drawn from the repertoire of melodrama. None of them last more than a few seconds, though Eisenstein prolongs them (and intensifies their emotional impact) through crosscutting between multiple incidents. Eisenstein used the term, "attraction," to describe such emotionally-packed elements in his work; contemporary game designers might call them "memorable moments." Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word, attractions, broadly to describe any element within a work which produces a profound emotional impact and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicate across and through these discrete elements. Even games which do not create large-scale plot trajectories may well depend on these micronarratives to shape the player's emotional experience. Micronarratives may be cut scenes, but they don't have to be. One can imagine a simple sequence of preprogrammed actions through which an opposing player responds to your successful touchdown in a football game as a micronarrative.

Game critics often note that the player's participation poses a potential threat to the narrative construction, where-as the hard rails of the plotting can overly constrain the "freedom, power, self-expression" associated with interactivity.(18) The tension between performance (or game play) and exposition (or story) is far from unique to games. The pleasures of popular culture often center around spectacular performance numbers and self-contained set pieces. It makes no sense to describe musical numbers or gag sequences or action scenes as disruptions of the film's plots: the reason we go to see a kung fu movie is to see Jackie Chan show his stuff.(19) Yet, few films consist simply of such moments, typically falling back on some broad narrative exposition to create a framework within which localized actions become meaningful.(20) We might describe musicals, action films or slapstick comedies as having accordion-like structures. Certain plot points are fixed where-as other moments can be expanded or contracted in response to audience feedback without serious consequences to the overall plot. The introduction needs to establish the character's goals or explain the basic conflict; the conclusion needs to show the successful completion of those goals or the final defeat of the antagonist. In commedia del arte, for example, the masks define the relationships between the characters and give us some sense of their goals and desires.(21) The masks set limits on the action, even though the performance as a whole is created through improvisation. The actors have mastered the possible moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain character actions. No author prescribes what the actors do once they get on the stage, but the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary of possible actions and from the broad parameters set by this theatrical tradition. Some of the lassi can contribute to the plot development, but many of them are simple restagings of the basic oppositions (the knave tricks the master or gets beaten). These performance or spectacle-centered genres often display a pleasure in process - in the experiences along the road - that can overwhelm any strong sense of goal or resolution, while exposition can be experienced as an unwelcome interruption to the pleasure of performance. Game designers struggle with this same balancing act - trying to determine how much plot will create a compelling framework and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally derailing the larger narrative trajectory. As inexperienced storytellers, they often fall back on rather mechanical exposition through cut scenes, much as early film makers were sometimes overly reliant on intertitles rather than learning the skills of visual storytelling. Yet, as with any other aesthetic tradition, game designers are apt to develop craft through a process of experimentation and refinement of basic narrative devices, becoming better at shaping narrative experiences without unduly constraining the space for improvisation within the game.

EMBEDDED NARRATIVES
Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or Syuzhet) which refers to, in Kristen Thompson's terms, "the structured set of all causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself," and story (or fabula), which refers to the viewer's mental construction of the chronology of those events.(22) Few films or novels are absolutely linear; most make use of some forms of back story which is revealed gradually as we move through the narrative action. The detective story is the classic illustration of this principle, telling two stories - one more or less chronological ( the story of the investigation itself) and the other told radically out of sequence (the events motivating and leading up to the murder). According to this model, narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble and make hypothesis about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues.(23) As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the game world itself. If you are wrong about whether the bad guys lurk behind the next door, you will find out soon enough - perhaps by being blown away and having to start the game over. The heavy-handed exposition that opens many games serves a useful function in orienting spectators to the core premises so that they are less likely to make stupid and costly errors as they first enter into the game world. Some games create a space for rehearsal, as well, so that we can make sure we understand our character's potential moves before we come up against the challenges of navigating narrational space.

Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information. The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the narrational process by distributing the information across the game space. Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential narrative information must be redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts, since one can not assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any given element. Game designers have developed a variety of kludges which allow them to prompt players or steer them towards narratively salient spaces. Yet, this is no different from the ways that redundancy is built into a television soap opera, where the assumption is that a certain number of viewers are apt to miss any given episode, or even in classical Hollywood narrative, where the law of three suggests that any essential plot point needs to be communicated in at least three ways.

To continue with the detective example, then, one can imagine the game designer as developing two kinds of narratives - one relatively unstructured and controlled by the player as they explore the game space and unlock its secrets; the other pre-structured but embedded within the mise-en-scene awaiting discovery. The game world becomes a kind of information space, a memory palace. Myst is a highly successful example of this kind of embedded narrative, but embedded narrative does not necessarily require an emptying of the space of contemporary narrative activities, as a game like Half Life might suggest. Embedded narrative can and often does occur within contested spaces. We may have to battle our way past antagonists, navigate through mazes, or figure out how to pick locks in order to move through the narratively-impregnated mise-en-scene. Such a mixture of enacted and embedded narrative elements can allow for a balance between the flexibility of interactivity and the coherence of a pre-authored narrative.

Using Quake as an example, Jesper Juuls argues that flashbacks are impossible within games, because the game play always occurs in real time.(24) Yet, this is to confuse story and plot. Games are no more locked into an eternal present than films are always linear. Many games contain moments of revelation or artifacts that shed light on past actions. Carson suggests that part of the art of game design comes in finding artful ways of embedding narrative information into the environment without destroying its immersiveness and without giving the player a sensation of being drug around by the neck: "Staged areas...[can] lead the game player to come to their own conclusions about a previous event or to suggest a potential danger just ahead. Some examples include...doors that have been broken open, traces of a recent explosion, a crashed vehicle, a piano dropped from a great height, charred remains of a fire."(25) Players, he argues, can return to a familiar space later in the game and discover it has been transformed by subsequent (off-screen) events. Clive Barker's The Undying, for example, creates a powerful sense of back story in precisely this manner. It is a story of sibling rivalry which has taken on supernatural dimensions. As we visit each character's space, we have a sense of the human they once were and the demon they have become. In Peter Muleneux's Black and White, the player's ethical choices within the game leave traces on the landscape or reconfigure the physical appearances of their characters. Here, we might read narrative consequences off mise-en-scene the same way we read Dorian Grey's debauchery off of his portrait. Carson describes such narrative devices as "following Saknussemm," referring to the ways that the protagonists of Jules Verne's Journey to The Center of the Earth, keep stumbling across clues and artifacts left behind by a sixteenth Century Icelandic scientist/explorer Arne Saknussemm, and readers become fascinated to see what they can learn about his ultimate fate as the travelers come closer to reaching their intended destination.

Game designers might study melodrama for a better understanding of how artifacts or spaces can contain affective potential or communicate significant narrative information. Melodrama depends on the external projection of internal states, often through costume design, art direction, or lighting choices. As we enter spaces, we may become overwhelmed with powerful feelings of loss or nostalgia, especially in those instances where the space has been transformed by narrative events. Consider, for example, the moment in Doctor Zhivago when the characters return to the mansion, now completely deserted and encased in ice, or when Scarlet O'Hara travels across the scorched remains of her family estate in Gone With the Wind following the burning of Atlanta. In Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, the title character never appears, but she exerts a powerful influence over the other characters - especially the second Mrs. DeWinter who must inhabit a space where every artifact recalls her predecessor. Hitchcock creates a number of scenes of his protagonist wandering through Rebecca's space, passing through locked doors, staring at her overwhelming portrait on the wall, touching her things in drawers, or feeling the texture of fabrics and curtains. No matter where she goes in the house, she can not escape Rebecca's memory.

A game like Neil Young's Majestic pushes this notion of embedded narrative to its logical extreme. Here, the embedded narrative is no longer contained within the console but rather flows across multiple information channels. The player's activity consists of sorting through documents, deciphering codes, making sense of garbled transmissions, moving step by step towards a fuller understanding of the conspiracy which is the game's primary narrative focus. We follow links between websites; we get information through webcasts, faxes, e-mails, and phonecalls. Such an embedded narrative doesn't require a branching story structure but rather depends on scrambling the pieces of a linear story and allowing us to reconstruct the plot through our acts of detection, speculation, exploration, and decryption. Not surprisingly, most embedded narratives, at present, take the form of detective or conspiracy stories, since these genres help to motivate the player's active examination of clues and exploration of spaces and provide a rationale for our efforts to reconstruct the narrative of past events. Yet, as my examples above suggest, melodrama provides another - and as yet largely unexplored - model for how an embedded story might work, as we read letters and diaries, snoop around in bedroom drawers and closets, in search of secrets which might shed light on the relationships between characters.

EMERGENT NARRATIVES
The Sims represents a fourth model of how narrative possibilities might get mapped onto game space. Emergent narratives are not pre-structured or pre-programmed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself. Game worlds, ultimately, are not real worlds, even those as densely developed as Shenmue or as geographically expansive as Everquest. Will Wright frequently describes The Sims as a sandbox or dollhouse game, suggesting that it should be understood as a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories. Yet, unlike Microsoft Word, the game doesn't open on a blank screen. Most players come away from spending time with The Sims with some degree of narrative satisfaction. Wright has created a world ripe with narrative possibilities, where each design decision has been made with an eye towards increasing the prospects of interpersonal romance or conflict. The ability to design our own "skins" encourages players to create characters who are emotionally significant to them, to rehearse their own relationships with friends, family or coworkers or to map characters from other fictional universes onto The Sims. A quick look at the various scrapbooks players have posted on the web suggests that they have been quick to take advantage of its relatively open-ended structure. Yet, let's not underestimate the designers' contributions. The characters have a will of their own, not always submitting easily to the player's control, as when a depressed protagonist refuses to seek employment, preferring to spend hour upon hour soaking in their bath or moping on the front porch. Characters are given desires, urges, and needs, which can come into conflict with each other, and thus produce dramatically compelling encounters. Characters respond emotionally to events in their environment, as when characters mourn the loss of a loved one. Our choices have consequences, as when we spend all of our money and have nothing left to buy them food. The gibberish language and flashing symbols allow us to map our own meanings onto the conversations, yet the tone of voice and body language can powerfully express specific emotional states, which encourage us to understand those interactions within familiar plot situations. The designers have made choices about what kinds of actions are and are not possible in this world, such as allowing for same sex kisses, but limiting the degree of explicit sexual activity that can occur. (Good programers may be able to get around such restrictions, but most players probably work within the limitations of the program.)

Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck might describe some of what Wright accomplishes here as procedural authorship.(26) Yet, I would argue that his choices go deeper than this, working not simply through the programming, but also through the design of the game space. For example, just as a doll house offers a streamlined representation which cuts out much of the clutter of an actual domestic space, The Sims' houses are stripped down to only a small number of artifacts, each of which perform specific kinds of narrative functions. Newspapers, for example, communicate job information. Characters sleep in beds. Bookcases can make your smarter. Bottles are for spinning and thus motivating lots of kissing. Such choices result in a highly legible narrative space. In his classic study, The Image of The City, Kevin Lynch made the case that urban designers needed to be more sensitive to the narrative potentials of city spaces, describing city planning as "the deliberate manipulation of the world for sensuous ends."(27) Urban designers exert even less control than game designers over how people use the spaces they create or what kinds of scenes they stage there. Yet, some kinds of space lend themselves more readily to narratively memorable or emotionally meaningful experiences than others. Lynch suggested that urban planners should not attempt to totally predetermine the uses and meanings of the spaces they create:"a landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories"(28) Rather, he proposes an aesthetic of urban design which endows each space with "poetic and symbolic" potential: "Such a sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages the deposit of a memory trace."(29) Game designers would do well to study Lynch's book, especially as they move into the production of game platforms which support player-generated narratives.

In each of these cases, choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences. In the case of evoked narratives, spatial design can either enhance our sense of immersion within a familiar world or communicate a fresh perspective on that story through the altering of established details. In the case of enacted narratives, the story itself may be structured around the character's movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory. In the case of embedded narratives, the game space becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot and in the case of emergent narratives, game spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players. In each case, it makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects.

(1) The term, Ludology, was coined by Espen Aardseth, who advocates the emergence of a new field of study, specifically focused on the study of games and game play, rather than framed through the concerns of pre-existing disciplines or other media.
(2) Ernest Adams, "Three Problems For Interactive Storytellers," Gamasutra,
(3) Greg Costikyan, "Where Stories End and Games Begin," Game Developer, September 2000, pp. 44-53.
(4) Jesper Juul, "A Clash Between Games and Narrative," paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Bergen, November 1998, http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/DA%20Paper%201998.html. For a more recent formulation of this same argument, see Jesper Juul, "Games Telling Stories?", Game Studies, http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/juul-gts
(5) Markku Eskelinen, "The Gaming Situation," Game Studies, htttp:cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen

(6) Eskelinen, op cit., takes Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997) to task for her narrative analysis of Tetris as "a perfect enactment of the over tasked lives of Americans in the 1990s - of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught." Eskelinen is correct to note that the abstraction of Tetris would seem to defy narrative interpretation, but that is not the same thing as insisting that no meaningful analysis can be made of the game and its fit within contemporary culture. Tetris might well express something of the frenzied pace of modern life, just as modern dances might, without being a story.
(7) "A story is a collection of facts in a time sequenced order that suggests a cause and effect relationship." Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, chapter one, http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.html . "The story is the antithesis of game. The best way to tell a story is in linear form. The best way to create a game is to provide a structure within which the player has freedom of action." Costikyan, op cit.
(8) "In its richest form, storytelling - narrative - means the reader's surrender to the author. The author takes the reader by the hand and leads him into the world of his imagination. The reader has a role to play, but it's a fairly passive role: to pay attention, to understand, perhaps to think...but not to act." Adams, op. cit.
(9) As I have noted elsewhere, these maps take a distinctive form - not objective or abstract top-down views but composites of screenshots which represent the game world as we will encounter it in our travels through its space. Game space never exists in abstract, but always experientially.
(10) Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller, "Nintendo and New World Narrative," in Steve Jones (ed.)

(11) My concept of spatial stories is strongly influenced by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 1991).
(12) Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned From the Theme Park Industry," Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm
(13) Juul, op. cit.
(14) Costikyan, . For a fuller discussion of the norms of classically constructed narrative, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
(15) Adams, op. cit.
(16) Troy Dunniway, "Using the Hero's Journey in Games," Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20001127/dunniway_pfv.htm.
/> (17) Fuller and Jenkins, op. cit.
(18) Adams, op. cit.
(19) For useful discussion of this issue in film theory, see Donald Crafton, "Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy," in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (Eds.) Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge/American Film Institute, 1995); Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Gare" in Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (Eds.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990); Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and 'The Frenzy of the Visible' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
(20) "Games that just have nonstop action are fun for a while but often get boring. This is because of the lack of intrigue, suspense, and drama. How many action movies have you seen where the hero of the story shoots his gun every few seconds and is always on the run? People loose interest watching this kind of movie. Playing a game is a bit different, but the fact is the brain becomes over stimulated after too much nonstop action." Dunniway, op. cit.
(21) See, for example, John Rudlin, Commedia Dell'Arte: An Actor's Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1994) for a detailed inventory of the masks and lassi of this tradition.
(22) Kristen Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp.39-40.
(23) See, for example, David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989) and Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992).
(24) Juul, op cit.
(25) Carson, op. cit.
(26) "..." Murray, p. .
(27) Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p 116.
(28) Ibid, p. 6.
(29) Ibid, p 119.

still worth reading as understanding spatial narrative design is even more relevant now