“Ideas”, for those beyond the CBC broadcast aura, is a weeknightly documentary program on … well, ideas. In 2000 they did a program on “Digital Storytelling”. It is a subject I’ve been thinking about, as a writer – this is my summary and reactions, written at the time as a post on the Hollylisle.com forum.

The program started with the observation that the readership of books, magazines and newspapers was declining. So too was the viewership of film, theatre, television. What seemed to be expanding was the internet: half of the Canadian population is now on line. So they looked at what was happening to storytelling in the digital age.

The key distinction between old and new media they seemed to identify on the program was interactivity, although they identified widespread uncertainty about what ‘interactive’ meant, aside from digital or computer-based.

The first form of interactive storytelling identified was hypertext, and they interviewed Michael Joyce as a pioneer of hypertext storytelling. He described the realization as he started first hypertext novel that he was actually going to have to instruct the reader as to how to read the story. Hypertext has implications for narrative, because it destroys the linear progression and requires the reader to navigate through the story. The incorporation of multimedia is attractive and disconcerting and further fragments the narrative. The fragmentation of the narrative is not seen as a problem by practitioners of the art but as an extension of real life — we are bombarded by media and stimuli and find it a familiar exercise to make meaning out of information overload.

[Parenthetically, I wonder about that. Am I simply a fossil, or am I right in thinking that the reason that life alone does not suffice is that life’s lack of coherence, plot and sometimes meaning bugs people and they actually WANT story. Is there a way to use hypertext and still construct order and story — and how would one do it?]

The next form identified was games, which are more advanced than digital storytelling because the market is driven that way. The program used Riven and Myst as examples, non-violent, riddle and mystery-driven with implicit storytelling. The narrator of the program however observed that there was little control and little character development; the scenery was beautiful but the player remained unmoved. These games failed the test of a good story: Do I care? What do empathy and identification mean in the computer world?

The Intruder is an adaptation in ten games (Brookton, a professor) of a story by Borges. The reader/player has to play a succession of games to hear the story, and the games themselves encapsulate a history of arcade games. They are also increasingly aggressive, paralleling a plot which features rape and murder. They are a comment on a violent story, and by their participation in those games the reader/viewer becomes complicit.

[Lots of stuff there. Is identification and empathy required, or is it overrated? Certainly it has been fashionable — particularly in literature for the young — to have characters with whom the reader can ‘identify’. The author of a book I have been reading Losing our Language would cite that as part of a specific social agenda, in which the teaching of reading was used as a means of socialization to acceptable values. Could one write a game in which the player was a character?]

The holodeck was cited as every computer geek’s fantasy, allowing users to interact, build story and progress narrative in any way they want. But do we want to have relationships with computer programs? Another interviewee (Wong) thought not; he thought readers still needed an authors’ craft to make the experience meaningful and exciting, and that an interaction with a program would become predictable.

The next instance was of a play, Sandeman’s Harvest (Yannek was the playwright’s name), about genetically modified food, performed on-line in a chat room, with lines from the play interspersed with chat, many of the audience having no idea what was going on. It was a case of political theater taking to the streets of cyberspace, and the audience’s interaction brought humour and perspective to the play. It did, however, meant that the play was not what the author had envisioned.

Then the program described LinguaMOO, a learning environment for linguistic students and a place for creative arts — poems, stories and performance — and talked about the fluidity of identity in the Internet (“On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog”) and how that encourages creative experimentation.

Glide is a story/maze/tool for composing music, set in an SFnal scenario 2000 years into the future when humanity has been infected by the i-virus for which the only cure is the dance of death. One has to learn a new language composed of glyphs, which are not only pictoral but musical. Text can be animated and language becomes increasingly visual. It doesn’t conjour image, it is an image. The word and the image renegotiate themselves. The program has a dictionary and can suggest concepts. This led into a discussion of the way we are becoming increasingly visual, and that possibly we are on the cusp of a transition between print and visual/interactive communication, and it would be a transition as profound as that between oral and written. Some people believe that reading is necessary for reflection, that it allows profound thought and makes democracy possible and that by losing it we risk losing our sophistication. Others say that this is absurd, that our minds will still function linguistically. Not everyone believes text will be weakened in a digital medium — certain qualities of language and narrative structure are global, and we will come up with new forms, just as rich.

[As a political aside: I confess to being not entirely sanguine. I mentioned Losing Our Language, in which the author describes the gradual decline in difficulty level of English language instruction over the past century, as evidenced by the reading primers in use, and states that translates into decreased reading attainment and a population less able to handle complexity in language. I’ve also been reading Deadly Persuasion , subtitled Why Women and Girls must resist the addictive power of advertising (or that’s close — the library wanted its book back — and I don’t have the author to hand) — it is entirely about advertising, and the extent and sophistication of manipulation is creepy. I’m aware of my own visual illiteracy and susceptibility — in comparision to text where I can recognize manipulation through language very easily. Images are more accessible and available and therefore more powerful than words. Seeing is inborn and easy; reading must be acquired. But this gets away from the creative arts].

And that was it for Ideas.

Dale Spender in Nattering on the Net forsees the replacement of the novel by a multimedia presentation which may be scripted by authors but will involve coordination by a team of collaborators, rather more like film making with the author in the position of director.

So form will storytelling take in the future? Is storytelling dispensible? How can we get these media to really work, as the best of writing works? Would writers give up your creative control for interactivity? Is there a way — without spending a lifetime on it — to create a hypertext/multimedia/interactive presentation which preserves a creative unity and meaning? This stuff is all hugely exciting and I’m beginning to nibble tentatively at the edges — but I don’t have the leisure time to go through a second apprenticeship. I feel like a silent film star (or at least minor character actress) at the dawn of the talkies.