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© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
While many of the tools used in this workshop are technical this is not a technical workshop. The essence of this workshop is the most human of all, storytelling. Story is what makes us tick, story reaches inside of us and reveals the world through myth, metaphor, and archetype. If I start to say, "Once upon a time it was late at night and a small child trembled in the corner of a dark room as the door slowly creaked open ..." you already know something bad is about to happen. You are into the story. You are at the beginning and you want to know more about the small child. What did the child do to be in such a predicament. What happens next. How will the story be resolved. What does the story mean. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, suggested that the cave wall paintings of Altamira and Lascaux were visual story tools the elders used to initiate the young into adulthood and the meaning of life. Story like game and play is probably as old as humankind. Digital storytelling is just the most recent upgrade so to speak.
Digital Stories are stories in a digital medium. There will be various characters with flaws, there will be obstacles which must be overcome, there will be a beginning, middle, and end. As with all good art nothing will be in the story which doesn't serve the purpose of moving the story along to reveal the mystery and meaning of the story. Unlike traditional storytelling digital stories will be told with graphics, animation, sound and text. Digital stories start with a sketch in either text or images or maybe both, the story board.
Computer games are very similar to digital stories but computer games diverge away from pure storytelling because computer games are interactive, non-linear. Good computer games have multiple possible endings.
If you sit in the front row of your neighborhood multiplex and watch Jurassic Park you cringe when the Raptors appear. You are afraid because of the combination of story, image and sound -- the representation. When you play the computer games Doom or Quake you worry as you turn every virtual corner. Will someone or something be waiting there to kill you? Granted it isn't real death but you do attempt to dodge the bullet if possible. This is part of the interaction the playability of the game. This is very difficult to write and design. This is what is new. In the early days of film it was difficult to talk about the medium because the word cinematic did not exist. We needed that word. Today nteraction is what is difficult to understand with computer games but interaction probably isn't the right word. We are at the birth of a medium, similar to D. W. Griffith in the early days of cinema and similar to station KTLA in Los Angeles in the early days of television after World War II. We are still figuring out how to use and talk about the medium of games.
"... we continue to see, without humor, the prospect of a decade of research analysis of usability possibly failing to provide the leverage it could on designing systems people really want to use by ignoring what could be a very potent determinant of subjective judgment of usability -- fun." [2]
Carroll pointed out two reasons why fun is not researched. First not many researchers want to be known as 'fun' researchers and researching fun runs into the problem of killing the observed, fun. One obvious form of information research which gets around the death of fun is the actual design of interactive, fun computer games: design as research which is what we are doing today.
Digital storytelling and computer game design has roots in many fields: computer science, education, information studies, human factors, ergonomics, computer graphics, industrial engineering, graphic design, music, architecture, writing, cognitive and emotional psychology, and storytelling. The perspective of this workshop is that digital storytelling and computer game design is the cutting edge which combines all these fields. Again, while many of the tools are technical the most important, creative aspect of digital storytelling and computer game design is not technical, it is artistic.
"Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control to artists -- or more precisely, to the communication craftsmen." [3]
2. Carroll, John. "FUN" in SIGCHI Bulletin, January 1988, Volume 19, Number 3, 21-23.
3. Heckel, Paul. The Elements of Friendly Software Design, The New Edition, 4.
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