The Nature of Narrative in the Age of Networks

There’s been a recent resurgence of activity around video-based “original web series” lately.  A couple of examples from Ken Rutkowski’s recent METAL discussion on the subject:

Gemini Division
NBC
http://www.geminidivision.com
5 Episode, decent production and the story line has some depth.
It’s a generic science-fiction thriller, in three-to-five-minute chunks, starring Rosario Dawson as a New York cop on vacation with her boyfriend, a vacation that goes bad in so far not very interesting ways. It’s also a series of ads for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, a futuristic version of which opens each episode, locating Ms. Dawson’s character on a 3-D map of Paris.

Stephen King’s N
CBS
http://www.simonsays.com/specials/stephen-king-nishere
“N” is entirely animated, and it’s great to look at, as you’d expect from the comic-book artists Alex Maleev (“Daredevil,” “The Crow”) and José Villarrubia (“Promethea,” “X-Factor”). For aesthetic or financial reasons, or both, their naturalistic, autumnal drawings don’t move; instead the camera slowly pans over or zooms in on them. This isn’t a problem, given the episodes’ roughly two-minute running time, but it gets tiring if you watch 20-some episodes in a sitting

Sorority Forever
WB
http://thewb.com

You may have seen the New WB called thewb.com was and will carry a serial called “Sorority Forever,” beginning on Sept. 9. Produced by the big-deal filmmaker McG it stars a familiar face from the short history of Web serials: Jessica Rose. In the compact timeline of the Internet, “lonelygirl15” has already become Ms. Rose’s Schwab’s drugstore.

Ah webisodes. We’ve seen it before, and broadband penetration doesn’t make it any better of a sustainable business model, at least in the current incarnation of the web.  It’s a perpetuation of television on the web… a-gain.  The “as long as you can convince an advertiser to sponsor/subsidize it, you should build it” business model.

I gotta say, I continue to be stymied as to why traditional media and advertising continues to perpetuate the “content” models of the past on web and wireless. I mean, I get it and all… The institutional momentum and mindset… the metrics upon which whole industries have been based for decades… the fact you can get content-based linear programming supported by an advertiser… and myriad other institutional reasons.
But all that in the face of some pretty obvious… um… observations wrt what actually *works* in networked media like web and wireless. That is, what kind of native programming actually has a *chance*… has the “DNA”… to resonate into self-sustaining community organism?

What common thread runs through all the most successful consumer-facing web enterprises over the last, say, 14 years? There are a few… but if you think about it, you’ll find the operative word is “engine.” Not content. Not “website.” Not even “community” or “commerce,” per se.

Search engine. Game engine. File swapping engine. Social networking engine. And the list goes on. They have *components* of content, community, commerce and all the other c words you can think of… but they are *all* engines of engagement.

It’s in the Nature of Narrative

But what exactly does it mean?  What exactly is an “engine of engagement”; and how would one design one?

Look at it in “narrative space.” That is, if narrative is considered as the relationship between (a) the creator of media experience; and (b) the user/participant/consumer of media… Then our jobs as creators of programming– that is, of user experience– for networked media (like web and wireless) can be looked at more clearly, and our chances for sustainable success are much higher.

If you show someone a film, a television show, a novel, or even a magazine article and you ask them “what is the job of the creator?”… What do you suppose they’d say? Invariably, at some point they’ll arrive at “storyteller.”

But what happens when you show them a chess board (replete with playable pieces)? What response do you get to the same question– “what is the job of the creator of the game of chess?” It’s certainly not to “tell a story.” The job of the creator of chess, or most other games, is to create a “storyforming engine” they can hand to users, and through which story emerges from the usage of that engine. The form of narrative engagement is storyforming, not storytelling (and *certainly not* interactive storytelling). Interestingly, with respect to run-of-the-mill games, it’s a matter of perspective. That is, people *watching* a chess game being played are, in effect, being told a story; while the players are forming the story through their actions. So storyforming is a superset of storytelling.

Enginetworkers

So what was/(is) the job of the creators of the first incarnations of ebay (auction engine), google (search engine), World of Warcraft (game engine), facebook (social networking engine), and a thousand other sites we may or may not have heard of, but flourish (at least in usage)? It was to create a world… a *networked engine*– a place where users can *live* the story through their participation and social interactions. Once an engine is networked… we jump in to the realm of storydwelling. That is, our job as creator is to manufacture a *world*– a themed framework of function and form in which users *dwell*. YouTube’s owes less of it’s success to the fact that it traffics in videos than it does to the fact the creators manufactured a world where it was super simple to upload, share, comment, rate and a myriad of other functions that provided and attractive world within which folks could do all those things.

I’ve seen the results when this difference in “narrative structures” and the “role of the creator” is taught to students — from grad level designers at Academy of Art University to MBAs at The Wharton School. It changes their entire approach to the creative, technical and business aspects of web-based programming. It can be taught… to individuals and institutions; but that doesn’t mean everyone can or will be a great creator of storydwelling experiences. That would be like saying everyone who takes a Syd Field seminar is going to write the next great film. That fact notwithstanding, *every* writer or director knows about the foundational structures of storytelling– from 3-act structures to Campbellian archetypes. The same *should* be true of those creating programming for the web, but in a storydwelling context. Sadly, it’s not.

The Web is Not a Storytelling Medium.  It is Natively a Storydwelling Medium.

It just so happens that storydwelling (networked/social) is a superset of storytelling (linear, one-way) and storyforming (interactive, bi-directional) narrative forms. And thus those that come from other media easily perpetuate those narrative models on the web… and try and perpetuate the attendant business models.

But the biggest success stories of the last 14 years are based on the storydwelling form of narrative– in the form of “engines of engagement” that offer:

• a theme (dating, searching, gaming, file-swapping, video-sharing, whatever)…
• a set of rules and social morays (that are often broken ;-)…
• features/functions that turn users into more than consumers, and provide a suite of functionality (usually starting off as simplistic) to do so…
• … and which is then handed to the online community, and then evolved based on demonstrated usage.

Though there are process similarities, in general the creation of storydwelling-based programming is a very different creative approach to that which we’re used to for linear entertainment, or even simple interactive games.

This is all notwithstanding the issues surrounding the “monetization” of these engines of engagement… which *should* be intrinsic to the creative “enginetworking” process, btw… but that’s for another thread.

IMHO and (believe it or not) the pithy version of my thoughts wrt this subject.