“Making PIE: Closing the gap between story and experience” elaborates and expands on existing relationships between story and experience, using e-lit and game examples to demonstrate the importance of PIE environments for creative and scholarly communication.
Story is a way of rendering, essentializing, curating, crystallizing and communicating experience. Like the way that food preserves process the bounty of harvest moments into forms that extend the benefits of that harvest through longer durations and broader spaces, story is a method of processing, preserving and extending experience beyond the moment of actual or imagined events. However, given that “contemporary media is experiential,” (Arbuckle and Stewart) multimedia e-lit and digital game experiences are ways of reconstituting such story preserves into participatory interactive experiences (PIE). PIE comes from Dene Grigar’s extension of Vince Dziekan’s ideas on multimedia museum curation. Dzeikan proposes a “movement away from what might be termed as a broadcast model of distribution (entailing a one-way communication approach) by introducing degrees of openness (access, participation) and feedback (exchanges, transactions). This shift entails ideological choices that challenge the museum’s ability to respond to a changing mandate, from one founded on its presentation role to that of providing an infrastructure for aesthetic experience” (70). While Grigar migrates Dzeikan’s idea of curating participatory, interactive experiences to the practice of curating e-lit, she also asserts that e-lit is already a multimedial PIE. Story becomes lived experience in these environments and such experiences are more communicatively and rhetorically impactive than traditional written and oral forms of storytelling.