SXSWi: Interactive Narratives
This was just cool. And in my quest for a way to marry my love of writing and telling stories, with a way to make a living, this is fabulously appealing. In the session called “Interactive Narratives: Creating the Future of Storytelling” the panel discussed something incredibly cool: telling a multi-threaded story across social mediums to build an interactive experience between author and audience.
The similarities to both LARPing and fanfic are stark, and incredibly fascinating. I’m still organizing my thoughts about this, but it’s basically taking the kinds of things that fan groups have organically done and doing it in a structured way for either artists (as a simple narrative format, such as literature) or brands (as marketing entertainment).
The idea is to take a story, ideally one that is capable of standing on it’s own, and publishing it via one medium (e.g. a blog), and then to have interactive ‘sidebar’ stories that branch off as stand alone subplots around it, via alternate mediums — Facebook characters, Twitter interactions, text messaging, a smart phone app, etc. If each piece can stand alone (which is quite a feat of story architecture) while also contributing to the larger story as a whole, while also soliciting and incorporating audience feedback into the process, then you’ve basically got a whole new real time literary construct.
This is not dissimilar to what my friend Ryan from righteousMENACE and I talked about doing, but it was great to hear some specific examples of how it worked, and to see the test case that the panel constructed.
Very cool stuff. And the absolute embodiment of why SXSW is a constant source of pleasant surprises.
