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The Future of Storytelling
Donna Lichaw, Gabe Paez (WILD), Krystal South (Oregon Story Board)
  • There is a sense of competition for our attention to tell those stories. YouTube mixes ads with story. TiVo lets us fast-forward through things we don’t want to see. What does competition do to storytelling in general?
    • Donna: Lots of media organizations looking to other channels. NY radio: they have terrestrial radio, tweeting, website. The power of storytelling is that we create stories in our head, and our brains are wired to create stories. Is it hot or cold. Are people dumb and just passively consuming stories, or are they actively creating the story in their head? Science tells us actively creating. If we’re spanning multiple channels, watching TV and surfing the web, we’re still the same people, creating stories in our head.
    • Gabe: We’re not so much competing for attention. But the consumer has more choice of what they want to give their attention to. The storyteller has to captivate the attention in every moment, so that the audience wants to know what’s going to happen next. We present a question, they want to know the answer. We give a choice, they make a decision. Online game: Candy Box 2, starts with a very simple question: You have a box with 3 candies in it. And then you begin to interact. It doesn’t capture my attention with a flashing screen, it captures my imagination.
  • Is story telling changing, because of the internet? Becoming more visual?
    • Krystal: Of course. It’s still about finding an emotional connection between content and audience, but what creates it is changing all the time. As Donna said, there’s the opportunity to tell stories across all the platforms. But then there are stories that are specific to each platform. What you can tell in a game is different than what you can tell in a TV show or webisodes.
    • You can create a large audience with just a couple of minutes of video. Short form episodic communication is so hot right now.
  • How has technology started to enable storytelling?
    • Gabe: It’s enabled interactive storytelling. It’s a whole new medium, and it’s being actively explored and innovated on. How do you take a traditional story arc and turn splice that up into an interactive story? Everyone is taking different approaches. No one has an answer yet.
    • Krystal: So much potential. Even in the way people produce content on the web, it’s changed journalism. When I was researching this panel, I gathered a lot of information. Where to put? I put it all on medium, where it is well-received.
    • Donna: Another model that’s fun to think about: How do people consume stories at different times? Michael Lease, a social media guy, talks about stories — he has a chart that shows soap opera viewership declining, intersecting with the rise of Facebook. Social media feels the same role as soap operas. It turned out to be designed just like soap operas: you can tune in all the time, or just sometimes, and it works either way. We’re all the stars of our own soap operas, and we’re just consuming soap operas all day long.
  • Is there a confusion between stories and media and news? Once upon a time, in the fifties, the news was completely different than stories. Now there is a mix.
    • Gabe: It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or fake. It’s just about being entertaining.
    • Donna: Newscasters are master storytellers, and are meticulous about how they craft narratives. It’s always been there.
    • Krystal: Reality TV nailed that coffin shut.
  • Who are the storytellers of the future?
    • Krystal: Storytelling is a real buzzword right now, but story has always been part of our lives, of being human. There’s a better chance to tell your stories now. Story has a real power, because people relate to it on a really deep level. your Facebook friends are your audience. People engaged in what they say in public now. People are aware of what they say in public much more now.
    • Gabe: it’s no different. Some people make a life and a career out of refining the skill of telling a story. There’s so many more mediums now, and you can pick and choose the medium that’s best for a story. A tweet? A youtube video? The side of a building? The storyteller has tools that previously we have not had.
    • Donna: The storytellers of the future are you.
    • Krystal: Robots are the storyteller of the future.
    • Gabe: Algorithmically generated stories are the future. AI will write stories in the future.
  • Q: Traditional story arc, beginning and end get subverted. Is there a role of non-linear storytelling in our products and services?
    • Donna: When I arrived in my program, the faculty were all done with traditional narrative and film. They were all about interactive narrative. I got bored with doing films too, did an interactive narrative for her thesis project. What I found with my own artsy work with interactive narrative and with other projects….when we work with what we consider to be interactive narrative, we get a systems view of it: it branches, it’s a web. But when we look at experience, experience is always narrative. We don’t get to travel back through time, and even if we did, we still have our memories. Experiences have to design for linearity. On the other hand, there are so many possibilities, each person experiences differently. But each person experiences one linear narrative.
    • Gabe: When I think about non-linear storytelling, I give the user a choice. You’re either designing a huge decision tree, or you’re doing behavioral based storytelling. The huge decision tree becomes something the storyteller has to develop the whole thing. It’s huge. If you program in behaviors, then you might have a super-complex algorithm behind each behavior, but you don’t have to pre-map the entire decision tree. The viewer is more truly crafting their own experience. <— Wow. Future storytellers could design characters like AI personalities, define the setting, inciting incident. Then the reader chooses the plot in essence by interacting with the AI characters.
  • Q: Is storytelling more important than marketing? Is there a backlash to story? Do you have a favorite story you can share with us?
    • Donna: On the one hand: “You’re a roller coaster designer, not a story teller.” but then if you look at the roaster coaster experience: it starts slow, then rises slowly, then gets crazy, then there’s a big loop, and then you come back down, and then it ends slowly and you come back home. Everything is a story. But that doesn’t mean that everything is storytelling.