storytelling

Tabletop Role-Playing Games (ttrpgs) are games of communal storytelling. These gameworlds exist in the minds of players who collectively populate them with people, events, and histories. Traditionally played in-person, groups found themselves hard hit when social-distancing rules came into effect. While some went on hiatus, others took to the web to continue their sagas. For some, this was an uphill battle of new technology and social norms. For others, the move was trivial as ttrpgs in fact existed online even before the pandemic. 

For this panel, we take for granted that playing ttrpgs is an act of oral literary production. We talk about the ways this storytelling – once done cooperatively but semi-privately – has grown beyond the table through various internet platforms to include a much larger production base. We will also cover the ways platforms have enhanced the building aspects of ttrpgs – the building of community, worlds, and narratives. Our panelists are as follows. 

We often hide the learning process, not wanting anyone to see our vulnerability. In an attempt at normalizing learning and imperfection, Krista-Lee Malone decided to live-stream her process of learning to be a dungeon master (DM) on twitch.tv/gameranthro. Additionally, she hoped that by live-streaming this she would be able to tap into the shared knowledge and experience of her audience. Although she has been a player for over 20 years, she had never before been a DM. She began live-streaming her preparation in January with many questions. 

Casey James O’Ceallaigh was live-streaming as a DM on twitch.tv/serious_play before the pandemic. At that time the players used a campus lab to play and stream. When the pandemic shut down campus, the group was forced to negotiate not only how to continue the game, but also how to continue sharing the lab channel. Previously, all streaming was done at the lab which was set up specifically for this purpose. Suddenly, the group had to set-up across multiple computers and locations. Casey will be discussing these negotiations and the struggles of DMing virtually while streaming. 

Edword Flabberjackson is the personality behind twitch.tv/pokeyoureyesoutgames and founder of the GCGG (Good Community, Good Games) stream team. Noticing the hard time some were having with the current state of the world and guided by the truth that we are the stories we tell ourselves, Edword decided to change those stories through a ttrpg stream. By having the players play both characters and themselves, he hoped to slowly get the players to start changing the stories they tell about themselves and therefore change how they feel. He will be talking about how those stories progressed. 

Andrew C. Fudge runs a ttrpg dedicated Discord server for the LGBTQ+ community. He is also preparing a Twitch stream dedicated to diversity in D&D. He will be discussing the process of content-making and building spaces dedicated to marginalized identities and how these spaces often become places for players’ first “coming out” moments, an integral step for LGBTQ+ people.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has made me further address the value that artistic research has for our mental and psychological health and its significance in community healing. I have, for a while now, used digital technologies to create poetic spaces of shared personal stories interconnecting narratives to bring up issues of power, territory, displacement, historical memory, gender and violence. The need to live, work, socialise at a distance, through digital platforms has highlighted the importance of finding ways to share stories, connect and heal through community creative research practice. How can we engage global communities through electronic literature art practices?

This paper will explore the use of digital methods and tools to conduct and disseminate research in interdisciplinary projects alongside artists and communities and will address the motivations to researching with participants. It will draw from the findings coming up from our workshop in ‘Creative Digital Practices: Community Platform for Healing and Mapping’, (also submitted to the ELO conference).

As co-investigator of the AHRC funded project Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict my role was leading the creative team working on the artistic research project titled Invisible Voices: Women Victims of the Colombian Conflict and give voice to the women in their participation in the construction of memory. This was an enriching experience where both parties - the academics/artists and the community group – gained knowledge through the physical co-creative workshops with tailored designed research methods for this specific context, and the subsequent digital documentation and archival of the artistic experience. Taking this project and others as core studies, this paper will address questions in connection to community research; the value of creative storytelling and artistic approaches to share personal stories; and discuss pertinent issues in connection to the value, impact and societal change these projects can contribute, not only to the specific group, but to society in general.

Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Chris Crawford

Site-Specific Storytelling, Urban Markup, and Mobile Media was a presentation held by Jason Farman at the ELO 2012 conference under the category: Storytelling With Mobile Media: Locative Tehcnologies and Narrative Practices.

During a recent flight, I sat beside an engineer who works for a major toy company. During our conversation, she casually mentioned toys’ intended “play patterns” and how important these are to innovative design practices. “Play pattern” is a term that describes the ways that users interact with a toy, and—while there is little corporate information available to verify the specifics of such guiding paradigms, the toy industry seems to be basing this approach on the psychological theories of Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, and Mildred Parten. Andy Russell writes: “While there are hundreds of new toys and games released each year, every one of them is rooted in core play patterns derived from basic human behaviors. The not-so-great toys (Pet Rocks) are inherently limited to one or two play patterns (collecting and… well, collecting), but the best toys, like LEGOs, appeal to a variety of play patterns (modeling, collecting, storytelling, invention) over a range of ages and developmental stages. These are called “grow-with-me” toys because kids’ play with the toys adapts over time with their cognitive development…” Toys are thus designed to encourage a variety of intended patterns of play and use, similar to ways that stories are mediated and engineered to evoke diverse interpretations and reactions. Language, like LEGO, can modularly appeal to a broad range of age ranges and flexible play patterns if it is used as a creative instrument, and--as Umberto Eco recognizes in The Open Work—certain employments of language in storytelling situations can maintain such flexible interpretative potential. However, traditional print-language-based forms of storytelling permit a much more particular and limited range of interpretative patterns. While this curational approach is the key to powerful communication (similar to the ways that toys are designed to specifically enable particular patterns of engagement), it is also limited and limiting in that such prefabrications of material and meaning potential are primarily dictated by authoritative prescriptions. Addressing this shortcoming, Russell continues: “there is a gap between what the child imagines and what his or her tools (toys) currently afford. As a designer, this insight is invaluable. What can we create to help kids bridge this gap and realize their imaginations in a format that is more easily shared with friends and family? (Note: The goal here shouldn’t be to replace the child’s imagination, but to spark it with creative tools.)” Multi-media and multi-modal forms of representation can be designed to extend more limited engagement ranges, potentially defamiliarizing and destabilizing familiar habits of interpretative perception, and creating increased opportunities for playful and creative forms of interaction. If e-lit is a kind of literary toy or game, how can the idea of play patterns illuminate the ways that e-lit is designed or experienced? Theoretically, it might be useful to understand e-lit not as exclusively literature, game, or toy, but as a mode of participatory interactive experience that bridges the gaps between all three, pluralizes interpretative patterns, and provokes unconventional play patterns.

This paper examines a selection of examples of AI storytelling from film, games, and interactive fiction to imagine the future of AI authorship and to question the impetus behind this trend of replacing human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. Increasingly, we’re becoming familiarized with AI agents as they are integrated into our daily lives in the form of personified virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Recently, director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter, who named himself Benjamin. Both Sunspring (2016) and It’s No Game (2017) were created by Goodwin’s long short-term memory (LSTM) AI that was trained on media content that included science fiction scripts and dialogue delivered by actor David Hasselhoff. It’s No Game offers an especially apt metacommentary on AI storytelling as it addresses the possibility of a writers strike and imagines that entertainment corporations opt out of union negotiations and instead replace their writers with AI authors.After watching Benjamin’s films, it’s clear that these agents are not yet ready to take over the entertainment industry, but this trend is growing more common in video games. Many games now feature procedurally generated content that creates unique obstacles, worlds, and creatures. The most well-known example might be No Man’s Sky (2016), but it is not the first; Spelunky (2008), for example, made use of procedural generation many years prior. Although attempts at algorithmically generated narrative are rare, Ludeon Studio’s RimWorld (2016) boasts that its sci-fi game world is “driven by an intelligent AI storyteller.” Its AI, however, became the subject of controversy after Claudio Lo analyzed the game’s code that supports its storyteller and revealed that the program replicated problematic aspects of society, including the harassment of women and erasure of bisexual men.These examples offer insight into issues that have and will continue to arise as AI storytelling advances. This paper addresses questions concerning not only the implications for human authors in the face of this very literal take on Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” but also those related to what AI will learn from reading our texts and what it will mean to look into the uncanny mirror that AI will inevitably hold up to us when producing its own fiction. Though it may be a while before Siri will tell us bedtime stories, it is no doubt a feature that has occurred to Apple, as requesting Siri to do so results in a story about her struggles working at Apple and the reassurance she receives from conversing with ELIZA. ELIZA is one of the earliest natural language processing programs that was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s and was designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist by parroting back user input in the form of questions. Siri’s reference to this program is both an acknowledgement of the history of these agents and evokes a future where our virtual assistants grow to become more than canned responses.