What are we talking about?
The 2019 book "The End of Storytelling: The Future of Narrative in the Storyplex" by Stephanie Riggs, in which the author makes a case for an expanded sense of storytelling, something more like story-possibility-experiencing.
What did I learn?
The narrative paradox of immersive experiences describes the phenomenon that the more agency audience members have during a performance, the more stifled interactions between characters and non-characters become.
Creating a sense of "presence" is one major goal of immersive technology. Presence can be broken up into three categories:
Personal presence: When the guest perceives that they physically exist within a virtual world.
Social presence: Occurs through interactions with others in a virtual world.
Environmental presence: When the virtual world responds to the guest’s presence and interactions.
When creating an immersive experience, a big aspect is choosing the right level of agency to allow audience members. Agency refers to the degree to which audience members can affect the ensuing narrative. The four styles of immersive agency are:
Local agency: When guests can navigate and interact with an environment without impacting the narrative of the piece. (Need an example)
Low agency: A la immersive theater and similar experiences that allow guests to explore scenes in a pre-scripted environment. ("Sleep No More")
Deep agency: Gives audience members the ability to interact with characters and environments with the potential to affect the outcome of the story. ("The Walking Dead")
Zero agency: World-building games in which there is no authored narrative. "Players tend to project their own goals and narratives onto the world where they control the lives and environment of virtual characters at all times." ("Minecraft")
What do I still need to know?
Stephanie Riggs did a fantastic job of emphasizing that immersive creators must first start by having a deeply specific experience in mind to deliver before doing anything. This was probably the best piece of writing advice I ever received, back when I received it.
Other than that and some specific insight into the difficulties of writing immersive digital experiences, Riggs does very little in the way of proffering a creative process or giving any kind of experiential learning (prompts, exercises, assignments, &c.).
For that reason, this book — which can only be read on the Kindle app because of certain over-the-top design decisions — does not need to be a book. Instead, I think this note will suffice for most readers of the blog.
Highlights
"Janet Murray, professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, described the quality of immersion as when “we seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality."
Twelve subjects were included in a study of exposure therapy through VR for curing a fear of heights:
"All were considered to be successfully treated for fear of heights. Similar VR exposure therapies in the mid-90s relieved the fear of flying and PTSD. Dr. Barbara Rothbaum, who led the studies at Emory University elaborated to the New York Times, “for these people to have gotten better, they have to have experienced what computer scientists call a sense of presence.” When asked how virtual experiences compared to real-world in exposure therapy treatments, she explained, “You get the same physiological changes—the racing heart, the sweat—that you would in the actual place.”
“Personal presence” is established when the guest perceives that they physically exist within a virtual world.
“Social presence” occurs through interactions with others in a virtual world.
“Environmental presence” is achieved when the virtual world responds to the guest’s presence and interactions.
Bran Ferren, the former head of R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, nailed the primary reason why immersive creators must evolve past the mentality of storytelling: the “telling” of a story delivers a controlled sequence to a passive audience. In immersive mediums, the audience may affect what they see, where they go, or how events transpire in a way that is outside of a storyteller’s control. The conflict between “telling” and “experiencing” goes back to the origins of classical and computational mediums.
In their 2006 paper, “From Linear Story Generation to Branching Story Graphs,” Mark Riedl and R. Michael Young noted that “even though a branching narrative may introduce variability into the experience a user has with a storytelling system, the variability is scripted into the system at design time and is thus limited by the system designer’s anticipation of the user’s needs or preferences.”
The ability of a guest to affect the story within an experience is called agency. When creators cling to classical storytelling methods in interactive mediums, they run into an awkward trade-off between narrative and agency; the more freedom a player has to create change, the less structure the narrative can maintain. Consequently, the dramatic story goes flat or is eliminated completely. Conversely, if the game contains a strictly linear story where a series of events must be followed through to progress a required plot, the interactions become stifled. This is known as the narrative paradox.
When guests can navigate and interact with an environment without impacting the narrative of the piece, we call this Local Agency.
Immersive theatre creators are championing Low Agency by allowing guests to explore scenes in a pre-scripted environment.
Deep Agency allows the audience to interact with responsive characters and environments with the potential to affect the outcome of the story. Complex branching narratives are examples of Deep Agency.
The opposite of zero-agency experiences are open-world games, such as The Sims or Minecraft where players effectively act as a God-like force on the environment. There is no authored narrative and no way to “win” the game. Players tend to project their own goals and narratives onto the world where they control the lives and environment of virtual characters at all times.
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