Storytelling and Computational Narratives – Reaching for the High Bar1

As our forms of media entertainment and information change, there are more and more examples of non-linear forms within our traditionally linear media. We as a culture are increasingly seeing ourselves as a collection of cultures, each with a voice, each with a story, and each deserving of being a part of every story. The storytelling process includes an author, a story and an audience. When storytellers perform, whether their medium is oral, written or cinematic, they rely on a form of feedback from their audience or some portion of their audience to help guide their story. There is an active two-way connection between the audience and the author. The computer can be an appropriate central tool for combining the interaction that oral storytelling provides and the multiple view points that these emerging forms provide. Many computer systems exist which help the author carry out their work, and there is an increasing amount of research on systems which act as a central mediating engine in the storytelling process. A tool expressly for this task is necessary to create these emerging story forms. This research introduces the term metalinear narrative as a descriptor of this new narrative form. Media entertainment technology is rapidly evolving. From radio to broadcast television to cable television, from photographs to motion picture film to digital video disks, as the media evolves, so do the stories told through the media. We already share many more stories and more types of stories from many more sources than we did a decade ago. This is due in part to the development of computer technology, the globalization of computer networks, and the emerging new medium which is an amalgam of television and the internet. The storyteller will need to invent new creative processes and work with new tools which support this new medium, this new narrative form. In my doctoral dissertation from the MIT Media Lab, I proposed a name for this new narrative form—the metalinear narrative. The metalinear narrative is a collection of small related story pieces designed to be arranged in many different ways, to tell many different linear stories from different points of view, with the aid of a story engine which sequences the story pieces. With tools and frameworks such as metalinear structure, new types of stories can be written and new methods of learning employed in ways not available today. One of the challenges of writing stories in the last years of the twentieth century has been the writer’s awareness of the ever-widening diversity of characters and viewpoints which reflect our increasingly global perspective. The effort to include these multiple perspectives makes it 1 Presented at the Workshop on Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2000. very hard to maintain story coherency. The challenge becomes more difficult as we proceed through an information age where we know more intimate details than ever before about the cities, towns, and countries of our planet through the nearly ubiquitous media. In the 1980’s, significant historical events in China and Germany appeared in North American living rooms. During the Gulf War in 1991, events in New York, Washington DC, and the allied base in Saudi Arabia were shown by CNN in Baghdad. While the bombs fell in Baghdad, the world tuned in and watched. Perhaps for the first time in history, a military commander could gain valuable political if not military strategic information simply by watching TV. The growth of the internet has accelerated our awareness of multiple cultures and made it easier for us to come into contact with one another and learn from one another. During the 1995 succession referendum vote in Quebec, Canada, anyone using a web browser could view an up-to-the minute tally of an extremely close political race upon which the future of a nation depended. Using personal computers and the internet, millions of people worldwide place themselves in countless special interest e-mail groups and share their personal narratives through tens of thousands of newsgroup bulletin boards. We can electronically label and identify ourselves as having important similarities with people who are geographically and culturally distant. We are more aware of who we are globally and, therefore, simultaneously see ourselves as parts of our local subcultures and also as parts of larger global units. We are not as easily represented by a single leader’s voice anymore, but instead recognize the multitude and magnitude of our collective voices. Though we now see and experience the world as a much more diverse place, this worldview is difficult to represent in narrative. While there is more to know and more things possible to include, writing a traditional linear story is largely an exercise in editing out. In a news article the writer can not include all the points of view. In a movie the director can not include all the angles. In a world with so many different faces, how can the writing process and writing product include more voices? And how can this new product be an environment for learning from these voices? While the computer can accommodate many voices through its massive digital storage and search capabilities, it cannot automatically make sense of those voices. This is the job of the author. Yet how does the author, trained to see uni-linear stories, shape these many narrative elements into a coherent form? Through the use of intelligent tools. There are already people using computers to author multimedia stories which incorporate multiple points of view. Projects from the MIT Media Lab's Interactive Cinema Group such as It was a Knowledge War (Houbart, 1994), as well as the Apple Computer’s Guides project (Oren, Salomon, Kreitman, & Don, 1990), are early examples of multimedia projects which, among other things, incorporated multiple narrative points of view around central issues. Other developers use what could be called a plot-based approach to authoring multimedia stories. Instead of focusing on characters and point of view, the author focuses on plot, and structures the story as an interconnected branching network of plot lines. The interactive laserdisc narratives of the 1980’s are early examples which used this method. But while these projects concentrate on the end-user experience, they do not recognize or facilitate the author’s task. In the case of the plot-based approach, how does the author overcome the seemingly intractable problem of exploding combinatorics? (Bruckman, 1990) How is the author to make sense of a multitude of narrative viewpoints? By not creating a single linear narrative, but by creating a broader narrative in which many constructions and, therefore, many experiences are possible. Such a narrative is a metalinear narrative. Traditionally, writers construct stories such that a specific audience may experience their story in a single fixed linear form. The classic example of such a linear form is the printed word. Books, for example, are a time honored medium for publishing linear stories. Even the term “to write” has a traditional connotation that the end result will be some form of printed work. Books are well suited for the linear story experiences, i.e. this happens, then that happens, then this happens. While it is possible for a reader to jump around through a book nonsequentially, still the pages of a book are numbered sequentially, with sentences and paragraphs left unfinished at the end of one page typically taken up at the beginning of the next. These physical attributes of books tend to inspire a linear progression through them. When computers are added to the writing process, the linear structure of narrative can be significantly altered, if not completely blown apart, by introducing mechanisms for creating many more kinds of narrative structures. From Vannevar Bush's proposed Memex system in the 1940's (Bush, 1945), to interactive videodisc projects of the 1970's and 1980's (Perlmutter, 1983), to digital video stories delivered over the internet utilizing tools such as Quicktime from Apple Computer, Java from Sun Microsystems and Flash from Macromedia, computational power has given us the tools to reshape the traditional linear narrative model and deliver narratives with increasing flexibility and diversity. Story and storytelling are largely about two things: culture and structure. It is impossible to have story without a least a small amount of both culture and structure, two complex and intertwined elements. As storytellers and authors Norma Livo and Sandra Rietz put it, “Story structure is not an accidental or idle invention, but the profound product of a culture’s evolved perceptions of the way the universe works.” (Livo & Rietz, 1986) Many audiences for oral storytelling just sit and listen to a story presented to them in a linear way. It appears to them that the storyteller begins the story, recounts the events, embodies the characters, and then simply ends the story in a meaningful fashion. Actually, from the storyteller's point of view, oral storytelling is a much more fluid and flexible process, suggestive of a metalinear structure. As the storyteller begins, and often even before they begin, they must tune–in to the audience's attitude and responses, what many storytellers refer to as the audience's energy. Based on this energy, the storyteller will adjust their timing, their posture, their characterizations, and sometimes even the events of the story. There is a dialog between audience and storyteller. Oral storytelling involves a shared task, different from the physically separated tasks of the writer and reader of the printed story. The audience and teller negotiate a story into being in a highly dynamic interactive process. (Livo & Rietz, 1986) As noted storyteller Rafe Martin puts it, there is a connection made with the audience through the teller’s words and the rhythms of their voice and body. (Martin, 1996) The storyteller maintains that connection throughout the telling, modulating it according to their sense of the audience’s energy. One example of this “interactive” connection between audience and storyteller exists in African folk tales. In Western Africa for example, as well as in many parts of the Caribbean, storytellers create a connection with the audience through call and response. According to African story collector and professor Jack Berry of Northwestern University: Listeners may be asked and reply directly to questions from the storyteller or, on their own initiative, interject exclamations of assent and approval by way of encouragement. So important to narrative tempo are these interpolated interjections that, if too long delayed, the narrator will frequently substitute his own exclamations of “Good” and the