The Story Engine

I love this quote from Guillermo Del Toro on the future of film and entertainment:

"In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment - film, television, video, games, and print - melding into a single-platform 'story-engine'. The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction.

Think about the way oral tradition became written word - how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines - when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology.

Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages - only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don't think so...We used to think of stories in a linear way...what the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world."

Several interesting things about this for me. For starters, the new power in incomplete ideas. As Matthew May says in the introduction to his lovely manifesto on the subject (HT to Johnnie Moore for the link): "Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things?". Matthew goes on to make a brilliant point about this, that it is the "unusually simple yet thoughtful construction of what is there" that gives the missing piece its surprising power. Rather like Itay Talgam's 'Doing By Not Doing' (if you haven't seen that talk yet, watch it. It's worth it).

And then there's the narrow view of creativity of which Del Toro speaks. A view that assumes it is a fixed trait inherent in special people, or special activities ('creative domains' like arts, design). In his excellent book, The Element (which I'm probably going to be quoting for some time it's that good) Sir Ken Robinson draws a parallel between our view of creativity and our view of intelligence, which we also define far too narrowly. We think we know the answer to the question, 'How intelligent are you?'. But it's entirely the wrong question. We should be asking 'How are you Intelligent?'. Like creativity, intelligence is inherently diverse, dynamic and distinctive.

No wonder then, that in a participative culture, it is the end users who often if not always create the real value in collaborative based technologies.

Comments

[Marcus]

The quote is interesting but it does show a rather dated and uninformed view of story telling within the confines of platform based gaming. There are rules and limitations to games and platforms and some have more limitations than others. Project Natal, is probably going to change all of that but that will be some time in coming.

Personally I am becoming a little frustrated (that’s grown up speak for pissed off) with the idea that there is some kind of engine that can create content and that this content is somehow magical. It is, in my opinion, ridiculous to suggest that Hollywood is esoteric for Hollywood has systematically dumbed down cinema for the last 30 odd years.

Yes, a digital approach does offers tangents; you call it incomplete ideas and I call it stories with holes in them but you still need people to bring them together and there is a skill in that. There is a craft. Creativity has nothing to do with being clever. Creativity is both a gift and a craft. You can be born with it and loose it. You can learn it and loose it and with discipline it’s something that you can turn on and off. But creativity has nothing to do with intelligence because sometimes the stupidest of ideas tend to be horribly creative.

[Marcus]

This is the future of story telling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYPh6qo03gA

[charlie gower]

I liked parts of the Element too. I find both intelligence and creativity fascinating. Gardeners theory stills sits the best for me.
I had some insights on intelligence I wrote here which might be of interest: http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2008/03/thinking-about.html

[neilperkin]

Thanks for the comments both.

Marcus - I don't think creativity and intelligence are interdependent, but I do think that the range of creativity (and imagination) are consistently underestimated, in the same way that the range of intelligence is underestimated. We have a tendency to define intelligence by a few relatively narrow aspects (evident in the type of questions that comprise IQ tests), so I think there's an interesting parallel there.

[neilperkin]

And that Project Natal is indeed amazing BTW

[Holycow]

Good post Neil. I like the Natal Project - its impressive and although this current presentation is nauseatingly childish - there are plenty of apps one can think of where this would be beneficial for many industries. Although I can't help thinking about 2001 and HAL - and we all know what happened there...

To your point about the value of 'incompleteness' in storytelling - I agree - the bits we leave out can be more interesting than the bits we put in (an observable effect noted by Bluma Ziegarnick - I mentioned it a while back http://tinyurl.com/4ela4c and have used it in presentations and planning sessions over the years).

But I still want things to be complete when I go and see them. Thing is, I want resolution from my stories in whatever medium I chose to consume them - I trust certain writers and producers and expect them to entertain ME - not the other way round.

And yes we are all creative - but lets be honest - some are infinitely more creative than others. Libertarian and democratic notions aside we have seen the effect of 'everyone's brilliant' in schools. I have had to sit through a few recitals and looked at the work on the walls from 'creative children' and I still bear the scars. I agree with Charlie about intelligence and creativity BUT some of us are better writers than others, some are better with moving images and some with music, some with design - the list goes on.

What I don't want is a world where everything is created by everyone - however liberating that is because the crap Vs quality equation will not be a price worth paying - which in this brave new world will inevitably be free.

[eaon]

good debate. my tuppenceworth - of course there's a big difference between intelligence and wisdom.

[Howard Weaver]

I wonder why we tend to see things in such unitary or binary forms: either everything will be *this* way, or we have to choose between this and that.

Text has advantages moving images -- no matter the platform -- can't match. I read 10 times faster than you speak. I can take in may times more information reading than listening or even listening and watching.

Different methods and platforms all have advantages, and surely are morphing and becoming more capable. But the idea that all methods will merge into a single engine is silly to the point that I tend to be dismissive of his other (perhaps better) ideas.

[Chuck Peters]

I agree with Howard that text is very powerful, but I want to be able to enter into a stream of meaning, perhaps incomplete at several points, and be able to explore other feeds into and from that stream, and be able to easily add insights or connections, whether text, audio, photo or video. What are the technical tools to make that happen?