Let's Tell a Story

My favorite kind of book, Choose your own adventure book? The best books ever written? And I don't I don't think so I would argue you pick that you picked the wrong choice obviously, Lauren. Are you the one who always go through you know, the safe door and immediately get eaten by a wolf? And then you'd have to go backtrack to where you last left off and then take the other choice. I usually have like seven fingers in the book when ever i'm reading it, so that

I can flip between different options. I was going to say that I knew you were a placeholder. All right, Well, let's let's actually explain. Want to choose your own Adventure book is for those few people out there who may not have experienced the true joy of literature. They're they're a little older, some younger people might not actually Ryan North just published to be or not to Be. That is the adventure, which is a take on Hamlet. That is a choose your own adventure story. So you can

play as Ophelia or Polonius. If you're playing as you're playing as Hamlet, I guess you would just have, you know, lots of choices, but you never bother to choose anything. One thing that's funny we should take note of. We're already using the word play when we're talking about reading a book, and that will figure in. That's true. That's true. So choose your own adventure? What is it? Choose your

own adventure book? Choose your own adventure book is a book where you open up to the first page and it says something like, you know, you get out of bed, your uncle Ronnie comes in and says we're going out whale hunting, and you go out on a and then it offers you choices like do you want to go out on the rickety boat with the whales that want to kill you? Or do you want to stay in your bed, and if you choose stay in your bed, like a whale jumps out of your closet and bites

your arms off, right, or you get dysentery or something. Yeah, the idea being that that you actually turned to whichever page correlate choice. It's for rickety boat to turn to page seventy for stay in your bed, turn to page I didn't actually explain the mechanics yet, that's how it works, and so you keep turning to the page. It tells you to make your choice until you die in one

way or another, or you think that was possible. I think basically these were books just designed to teach children that no matter what, they're going to die, which is my hamlet is such a terrific adaptation for that is a great example of fatalist literature. I was no, no, no,

there are. There were plenty of choose your own adventures that had a positive outcome for you, but they were challenging to to arrive at, and often in my case, I would end up working backward by finding the positive ending and then just finding out what series of choices would have led you to that, Because, as you point out, Joe normally there's like, you know, chance that you are going to die depending upon your choices. Okay, so if

I'm an indexer, then then you're the you're the system analyst. Joe, what was your form of gameplay with with Choose your Own Adventure books? I would I played by the rules. I don't know what's wrong with y'all. I survived, Joe. You're the one who believes that every choice leads to death. So I have to admit most of them. Do I encompassed all the choices? I I contain multitudes? Right, You're you're the multiverse approach. Yes, so you have the parallel

universe thing going on. Okay, so this is interactive storytelling and its most basic form. Right, so you've got you've got a limited number of choices. It's not like you can introduce new elements that are completely alien to the book. Obviously you are. You are restricted to whatever has been written. Right.

You can think about the plot of the book sort of is a branching tree where you started a trunk where you know you have one branching decision and that forks into two, and each of those decisions gives you new options, and it keeps branching out until there are many possible endings, right, and occasionally those branches will reform into you know, you might be able to choose one thing in one part of the book or another thing in another part of the book, and end up on

the same page. Either way, Some of those, not all of those branches, end up being their own distinct pathways. In other words, sometimes they converge into a pathway again. And this is an interesting way to think about storytelling because most of the time we talk about storytelling, we're talking about a a single linear narrative that's controlled from the top down and told in one way, right, And

and a good story is really really captivating, right. I mean, this is a way that we communicate not just entertaining ideas, but also philosophies. Sometimes times it's how we tell history. You look at oral history, those are all told in the form of stories. And it's interesting also, I think that storytelling is one of those things that we use to try and create meaning in the experiences that we

accumulate over time. Now, in real life, we don't necessarily have actual beginning, middle, and end to any you know, series of experiences. They tend to bleed over it gets really messy. But we like our stories to have a much more contained kind of approach generally speaking, I mean they are and in yeah, yeah, I'm mostly uh talking

about my own experience. Obviously, I don't have a lot of experience with Eastern culture stories, which can be much more abstract that you guys, have ever watched a lot of Japanese film, then you will know that they do not necessarily feel a need to stick to that react structure, but it can be a little bit of of a culture shock anyway. So at any rate, when you're talking about interactive storytelling, now we're getting into this idea of the person who is being told the stories truly impacting

the story in some way. No, we're not just passively receiving it, right, You're creating input determines what you get subsequently. Right. So with the case of the choose your own Adventure book, that's quite limited obviously, but it means that you do get a slightly different tale depending upon the choices you make. But there are other examples of interactive storytelling that we have right now, right, Yeah, we don't even have to look too far into the future. How about video games?

How about them. I love them. Those those are kind of big. Yeah, that's the thing. I love the interactive story about the disembodied yellow head that eats magic pills and then goes after ghosts. I thinks Thompson wrote it. It haid that joke in the video. The thing um about video games and interactive storytelling. Nobody would question the interactive part. They're obviously interactive. Some people might question storytelling, which is ridiculous. Well, well, some some video games have

more of a story than others. Sure, some some video games are like Tetras, And while I have a rich fan fiction database of Tetris related information, I understand most people just see that as a puzzle game. But there are other games that have It's that L shaped block, isn't it? But which one? He has a twin clockwise L shape with the counterclockwise L. SHO. You have to read to find out, Joe. I'm not going to spoil

it for you. But anyway, there are other video games that actually do have a narrative involved from the beginning all the way through to the end. Uh. Now, you could argue that video games can be as restricted as a choose your own adventure book. For in some cases, and in some cases it may be more so. Right, there may be only one story you get from beginning to end, and as you play the game, you unlock the next element of that story, so, uh, you know,

you might continue through a game. I think The Last of Us is a good example of this. The Last of Us. We're not gonna spoil anything, but The Last of Us is a a survival horror game and it's ex dreamely well written. I would say the characters are very well realized. There's a huge emotional impact, but you don't actually affect the story that much depending upon your choices. You do have some choice in the game, but it doesn't I think, change how the ending is going to

play out. Wherever. There are other games where, depending upon your choices, you'll get one of a series of endings like a Silent Hill, to which I don't think either of you guys have played, But but but but again, a horror survival video game in which there there's a bad ending and then a really bad ending, and then a kind of thing and and so but but but but Which one of those you get? It depends upon a lot of kind of non traditional video game elements.

Of of what you as a character, we're thinking about by by looking at during the game, like what you paid attention to ends up becoming the result of the storyline. That's interesting, which which is one of the reasons why that's kind of called out as like, hey, that was a good one. Yeah. Yeah, there are most of the video games I'm familiar with, it's far more overt. It's one of those things where a character says, do we

do A or do we do B? And at that point you're thinking, this is going to affect everything from this point forward. I better save first. I'm going on a wiki to see what Okay, I'm I'm totally the spoiler guy. I'll be like, okay, I gotta find out if I if I choose to let this person die, is that really going to haunt me later? I'm that guy. I'm that guy. I wish I weren't that guy. Now again, I just I just saved my game. I I'm just realizing. No, this is why I have ninety eight game saves, or

as many as possible. I'm still doing. Yeah, you're doing your choose your own advantage y o A your y o A strategy on the video games whereas I can't do that with my strategy for doing it exactly. You're looking working backward right, but I'm looking at the next step. I don't look at the very end of the game. And well, I play by the rules and I just make my decision and see what happens. See, that's the thing. Obviously we all know what would happen if we all

had time travel devices at this point. Joe wouldn't use his. I would constantly be going ahead thinking no, don't want to make that choice, go back and try another one. And Lauren would just be doing the multiverse approach. I would. I would have a terrific library if everything that could possibly happen, that's horrifying. It's really interesting, though, because we're actually seeing more about our psyches here, We're learning about

each other, which is the terrific thing about storytelling. This, this, folks, is why, in a minor tangent that I'm not sure how it's going to connect to our next point, is I think that the heart of storytelling, This is why finding stuff out about ourselves and how you know, the way that we consume stories clearly has a lot to do with who we are and and and the creation of stories is the same thing. It's all about the

human experience. Sure. Sure, And so you know, Joe, you have a point here in our outline that we're looking at. I mean you you brought up the point about video games, while they are becoming a very powerful storytelling medium, they're not necessarily viewed that way by the larger public. Yeah. Well, and there might be good reasons for that. Sure, I

want to float a few ideas in that. I agree with you that I played The Last of Us and I thought that was just a beautiful game, and it had really good writing, good dialogue, strong characters, emotional depth. I felt things about what was happening. Um. And so

that's real. I mean, I can totally acknowledge that. But at the same time, there is something I think kind of inherently different between the way we play most games, even those games that do have strong storytelling, and the way we experience a novel or a movie, where a novel or a movie has a plot that executes and you're you're following it and you're thinking about it, um, and you're engaging with it in that way. But games typically have a different kind of mechanic, like as you

progress through the story of a game. Even like the Last of Us one with good writing, you're still there are these mechanics. There's there's competitive action, there's repetitive action. It's very task oriented. You know, you have a goal you're trying to achieve. Usually they're trying to create a sense of flow by having you do these actions over

and over. And that kind of thing doesn't really, as far as I can tell, have a role in traditional storytelling, right unless you're watching something like Parts of the Caribbean where they go to the same set pieces eighteen times in a row because they hadn't finished righting the script before they started shooting the movie. But that's a rant

for another time. Um. Well not not all video games necessarily have that puzzle or repetitive task play element to them, And usually those are the ones that gamers wind up not being too fond of it. They come in with bad reviews. Um. They for example, the entire Final Fantasy series after say ten, Um, depending on who you talk to, someone's going to say like that was just an interactive movie that was completely crap. I have heard this term

interactive movie. Um, how is this different than just say, like a game with good graphics. Well okay, so so back when, back when laser discs. If we can come back to laser discs. I don't personally have much experience with with with those, but let's go ahead, go ahead. I'll chime in if I need to. I once watched a laser disc of Congo. Oh my goodness, um shun um.

When people started finding out or when the technology kind of kind of allowed people to create chapter stories within a visual digital medium, um, that's when some storytellers started thinking like, hey, this is cool. I can create a sort of choose your own adventure within this digital medium and that's terrific um and and it got I mean, there were a few games that I think people considered good ones that had um a interactive element combined with

full motion video that people didn't hate. That's yeah, They're very few in between. I think full motion video. The problem with full motion video was that once we learned how we could do it in a in a storage medium that wasn't going to take up a car's worth of space, everyone put it into everything. There was a short and the reason why I was short was so awful.

There was a short era in video games, computer games, and then in the early nineties, yeah, where full motion video was in everything from Missed to Zork to know, all sorts of games that never needed it before. And then in many cases it was used purely as a gimmick because they had the ability to do this, and it was not executed in a way that that benefited the game that was anything that a player would really welcome. It was mostly seen as a distraction and sometimes just

as really embarrassing. So it was not that it was a bad tool. I just think it was poorly applied in those early days and that kind of ended up making a um well, it kind of made it, you know, a dark mark against that style of video games from when when I said full motion video just then Jonathan developed the sudden eye twitch. That was pretty okay. Let me tell you sometime about the Tim Curry game where you play as Frankenstein's Monster and Tim Curry is Frankenstein.

At one point he refers to your face looking like and I quote pork butt, not Frankenfurter, just to be clear. But it has Tim Curry in it, so that sounds beautiful. You know what else, hast video what? Okay, I'm gold a full circle, getting back to the interactive movies thing what you mentioned with laser disc. The first thing that pops into my mind is one of the earliest laser disc based arcade games, which was Dragon's Layer, Right, Yeah, and I think that that is basically the only thing

that critics and gamers agree was not awful. The car the animation was was nice. The story was very basic, and some would argue heavily misogynist, but it was the story of you know, you're playing the character of the heroic knight who's trying to rescue the damsel in distress who has been captured by a dragon. But really that

gameplay was very limited. Essentially, it meant that when the screen flashed, you were supposed to either move the joystick in one of four directions or you pressed the sword button, and you had to learn the sequence by just playing it over and over and over again to learn which way you were supposed to do this. I mean, depending upon which version of the game you played and sum it would flash in a way that would indicate what

you were supposed to do. But more often than not, the version as I saw, was just screen with flash. You had to figure it out and it was trial and error, so it wasn't the most satisfying of game elements. So you were saying, p liked this. I thought people did not like this game people enjoyed. Well. I remember when the Okay I was alive, when this game was in arcades, all right, So I remember going to arcades

and seeing a huge line or a group around. In fact, that this was an arcade game that was so popular that many cabinets had two screens. They had a screen mounted on top of the first screen, so you could stand further back and see what was going on by looking at the top screen because everyone was crowded around the bottom one. So it was popular because the animation style was so fluid and different from everything else we

were used to in arcades. However, when it came to the gameplay elements, people were not necessarily so enthralled, but they did want to see how the story ends. Okay. But so that brings me back to the question, Sure, it's interactive, but is it really storytelling or is it I mean, beyond the most basic sense, is it good storytelling?

But I think it was such a gimmick that, you know, people were so excited about the technology that they were like, let's use this technology and not let's use this technology to create yate a story that makes sense or to incorporate game play that's not frustrating or you know that's for example, I was a huge crazy X Files fan was when I was in middle school or high school around the same time that this was going on. Sorry, Jonathan,

and um and so and so. I owned the like eight disc X Files video game that came out at some point that incorporated full motion video and UM and was basically so terrible, Like the the gameplay itself was so terrible that I stopped because I couldn't like, it was so glitchy that I just could not physically do

what the game wanted me to do. And right, So, I mean, the the challenges of creating a truly compelling interactive storytelling experience if you're going to gamify it is that you have to create a game that works, and you have to create a compelling story. It's it's two

big challenges. So you could go the last of us route, where you have a very compelling story with with good gameplay, but it also is you know, when you look at it, when you look at yeah, and the player has very little impact on how that story actually plays out, assuming that you are successful in what you do, right, I mean, you sure you get to see every time you die, you get to see a different way that you died,

But for for successfully completing the game, you get one outcome. Uh. Then there are other games, of course that depending upon what you do, you will get different outcomes. Like the Fallout series, you get very different outcomes depending upon the choices you make in the course of the game. So that that gives the player a sense that the player is actually contributing to the story, not just consuming the story.

So when we're really talking about interactive storytelling in the future of it, we're talking about maybe some sort of not necessarily a video game, but that's the one of the easiest formats we can talk about, but some form of entertainment where the person who is consuming it is also contributing to it in a meaningful way. Right. Basically, we want to look at the term and think that

it's really robust in both of the these words. It's really interactive in a strong way, and it's really good storytelling, right, And we really haven't, in my view, come across something

yet that's really strongly both at the same time. UM I would say that some some LARPers, some live action role players would argue with that, um and and say that, you know, I'm not saying this is a personal I but um but but I know many people who would argue that that they have played live action role playing games in which their characters have been able to help create the storyline and and change the storyline actually developed right.

Role playing games in general, live action role playing games in particular. These are These are forms of entertainment where, depending upon who is running the game, you may be able to impact the actual story in a really meaningful way. As in let's say a character a player a player has is playing a character, and that character makes a choice that is completely within the realms of that game. It makes sense for the character, it makes sense within

the context of the rules, etcetera. And the game master or masters, the people who are running the game, had no way of predictions that this was. They didn't think

about it, but it makes perfect sense. They if they're good and they're flexible, they can incorporate that and even make that into something that builds onto future games where the things that you know they might even scrap plans that they had for the next three or four sessions, saying, you know, what we had was really good and maybe we can still use in the future, but this is too to Let's let's continue this and see where this goes,

and in that case it does become a collaborative storytelling experience. Um from my own personal experience. Besides the role playing game, the example I gave earlier was the idea of improv games where you have improvisers on stage who are it's it goes beyond the improv games that you've seen, where it's you know, trying to go through the alphabet letter at a time, and every sentence more like it's two or three improvisers who are trying to create a scene

that has a narrative arc of some sort. And in fact, there are terms that any person who's taken improv would be able to rattle off, things like the platform, which is your basic premise, the tilt, which is where you introduce some form of conflict, the resolution, which may or may not be a happy resolution. Often it's a comically

unhappy resolution. But this is a form of collaborative storytelling where there was nothing before except maybe a suggestion from the audience, and I want to offer a slight qualification to that. While I see what you're saying, definitely, pretty much all of the improv I've seen was played for short term comedic effect. Like it, it may have been very a lot of fun to watch, but they create a funny scene, but it doesn't really have like a

strong narrative art creating. It's not like someone's going to going to record that and hold it up as as high to ature next to Sure, I don't think it, but I don't think a good story in high literature are necessarily the same thing. In fact, I would argue that a lot of high literature to me does lacks lacks what I would consider a good story, and I think that a lot of good stories don't necessarily qualify

as high literature. But I will say I agree there's a lot of the improv I've seen is really let's try and make the audience laugh as loudly and frequently as possible, and it may just mean introducing bizarre characters in an unlikely setting. But there are other forms. There's long form improv, which is designed to last over the course of perhaps right an entire season of shows where where things that characters do carry over from one quote unquote episode to the next. Oh yeah, I'll I'll hook

you up. So there's a local theater here in Atlanta that does that occasionally, where they'll do a an improvised soap opera and every episode is the next episode of the soap opera. So decision that characters make in previous episodes carry over. And so you really do have a collaborative storytelling now, you know, your quality of story depends

heavily on the quality of the storytellers. Yeah, and also in those situations, um, there's probably I would guess, a limited role of interactivity for the audience, like they might contribute, you know, word or something. In the case of the soap opera one, the audience is merely an audience, So the interaction is really going on amongst a small group of storytellers, not the storytellers and the intended audience. So yeah, that's a different kind of interactive storytelling. The idea of

collaborative storytelling also interesting. Yes, yes, it's not. You know, obviously, if we were to do a truly interactive collaborative story in that mode and you were to open it up to the entire audience. It would be very difficult to manage,

very very clearly. It would be more like lapin I guess right, well sure hypothetically, I mean, you know, you you've still you've still got um similar really a small group of controllers and a large group of people who have a pretty you know, depending pretty limited input on what's going on. But yeah, but I think it's interesting that all of these examples that were coming up with of um of widely collaborative storytelling are are very very physical, um,

you know, very non technical exactly. Sure, well, you know, creating the technology is not necessarily the problem. And uh, Joe, you linked to a great article for us to read, the Gamma Sutra article by Ernest Adams, which was all about designing interactive stories and doing interactive storytelling and and Adams points out that there are a lot of considerations you have to take into account before you try and

create some sort of uh. In his case, he's telling mostly about video games, but it doesn't have to necessarily be a game, but an interactive story session. For example, if you were just to create an open world environment and then give players free reign to do whatever they want and gave them no input whatsoever as to what is important or not important. You might not see very much happen, or it might not be a story particularly. Yeah,

it may just be chaos. There might not be enough there to drive players to do anything beyond whatever basic capabilities they have because of the game. Story is more than just behavior, you know. Story implies some kind of significance or meaning that things have a cumulative meaningfulness. I guess I'm beginning to end and there's some form of persistence there that that something that happens matters for things that follow, right, Otherwise you just have things happening and

there's no connectivity. Yeah, you want you on an arc and a climax and resolution. So yeah, there's these are These are things that are the basics of storytelling. But anyone who has tried their hand at storytelling can tell you they're not necessarily easy to master. I mean these are that's whether so few really fantastic stick storytellers out there. Um, you know, there are plenty of people who like to tell a story, and you probably know a few who

are good at telling really entertaining ones. But someone who who really like transcends that and becomes the person who is known as the storyteller. That's a that's a tough skilled master. Uh. Just take a fiction writing workshop sometime to see how hard it is to create a good story. I mean, even if you are the only person working on it and there's nobody else there to get in your way and mess up what you're trying to do,

it's still really hard to write a good story. Sum when you're introducing the random variables of massive collaboration or the interactivity with even just one audience member or player at a time, You're introducing so many variables and all of the possibilities of the ways your story could not go well, just balloon, it just goes huge. Yeah. Yeah, there's there also a problem with them, with with the

with the writer's ego. I think wherein sharing something that you have created can get really really internally messy for you, like because because you know it's it's you probably have an idea of where you want that idea to go, and if the next person down the line doesn't take it in that direction, it can it can be frustrating. This is something that it becomes clear in some of the previous examples we talked about like role playing games.

So role playing games the way that Lauren was talking about them, the way I was talking about them earlier. If you have a game master who is not flexible, it doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad. They just can't handle these diversions from a plot that they have in mind, whether it's a pre bought module of an adventure or

it's something that they have written up themselves. And you can tell these kind of game masters because they will steer players back onto onto the right course, or they'll just deny the players outright from being able to do things right right. It's the kind of thing like like well I want to open that door, you can ant open that door. I open it anyway, you die right right, or or it's just like nope, doors gone, what like, yeah, this is what happens when you give me was actually

a gelatinous cue. Nice Joe, So you have played all right? So but yeah, these are these are examples of how storytelling and collaborative storytelling is such a challenging thing because it really it involves sharing control of the story. It involves listening, it involves reacting, it involves building, it involves persistence, It involves trying to create a narrative arc of some sort, especially if we're talking about the Western tradition of storytelling.

These are all very tricky things to incorporate in a way where a lot of people can participate. UH. Simultaneously, I want to talk about UM. One idea I had that I thought would be an interesting way to approach interactive storytelling, which would be to take the sort of open world gaming approach that you see in games like Grand Theft, Auto or something where if you haven't played these games, they don't have a linear storyline where you have to go certain places and do things in a

certain order. Well, at certain points they might, but generally you're free to roam. You can go all over the place, and you can you can do things in whatever order you want. You can look wherever you want to look. I wonder if there's a there's a future where people might create movies that are like this, meaning they're interactive, not so much in that the audience can change what's happening, but the audience is free to roam sort of throughout

the movie. So if the audience member UH doesn't like following a certain character as the protagonist, the audience member could select a different character and to see the same story. But I'm more interested in following this character instead of that one. So let's say it's a a heist movie. Yeah,

that's the example I used in the script. Sure, so you could follow either one of the potential criminals, or you could follow the person upon whom the heist is going to be committed, or you could follow the law enforcement that is trying to respond to and counteract this um or. You know. Obviously, this would make creating any

sort of film much more complicated. It would get more complicated as you added characters, because you have to have an entire story told from that person's point of view, at least from the point when they come into the story to the point where they leave, so that you would be able to allow people to jump from one to the other. There's nothing that says we couldn't do that.

It would require a lot more work, and I would imagine this would be something I hesitate to use the word easier, but I can imagine this being something more likely to be seen in a computer generated movie, as opposed to we're shooting live actors, which would just mean we have to shoot the same scene from like eight different points of view, although I mean, I would argue that many movies are already being from eight different points of view, and that the work, the technical work of

rendering a scene out is just as expensive, almost as as filming the actors that many times, I would imagine. So it's just it's a lot easier to work with camera placement in a three day like a computer generated environment. Yeah. Another aspect of this potential open world movie would be, so instead of following different characters, what if you could interact with different localities. So let's say I want to park the camera right here. Maybe it's a movie that's

like a disaster movie. You know, here's the day that aliens attack New York City. I thought you said it was a disaster movie. Nice. Um, So here's the day in New York. Here's the day aliens attack Jonathan Strickland's house. That would be a disaster hand you can, you can park the camera and lots of different so and one way you're looking at what's going on inside the house. Another way you're looking at what's going on in this place. You know, as the police gather outside and do not

help Jonathan. Um, you know that's fair. I'm on several lists. My original example worked better if it was a citywide you can you can focus on lots of different places. I totally I totally want an interactive movie that you can um uh switch directorial styles like like like have like this is aliens attack Johnson's house by way of Hitchcock and then continue. Would never be able to tell when things were happening, like is this before the alien

attack or after the alien attack? What's with the gimp? Yeah, here's my question, Okay, go for it. Um So all of this is interesting to talk about, but will it ever really catch on? Because I feel like interactive storytelling has not caught on in a mainstream way except unless you include gaming, and even that's not necessarily mainstream. I think it's more mainstream now than it has been. The one thing that the video game population has grown up with video games, and so it's become more of a

mainstream thing. Let's table video games and just talk about these other types of interactive storytelling. I would imagine that for the most part, if we were to talk about some sort of movie experience, for example, where you you would go to a movie theater, let's let's just do this this kind of thing. You got a movie theater and everyone has a little controller yeah where they can they can shoot, make choices throughout the film, and then

the film goes with whatever the majority rule is. That's the thing I can I can imagine that happening. Like I can also imagine after every choice you hear like half the audience go oh, come on yeah. But but anyway, it's I can imagine it happening. In fact, it has happened. There are films that have have tried this sort of thing. I think they were massively unpopular. That's the thing is that it's it's such a gimmick, right, Even if you were to do it really, really well, I can't imagine

that being um something that would be a norm. I can imagine it being once in a while, you dear, especially if if some well known filmmaker took it upon him or herself to create this kind of film that might make big news and be popular for a while. But I think that having a personal experience of that rather than a group experience, would be better. I mean, you know, if if I was sitting there with my own personal headset and going through a movie with an

ad option that would be that would be fine. I think it'd be fun if it were on online and then you could and there are video games that are like this, uh their online video games where you can make your choices, and then not only would it play out, but at the end of the movie, it would tell you how many other people made the same choice you made. So, in other words, you could find out did you make the same choice that the majority of the audience did?

Did you did you take the path less traveled? Uh? Did you eat the marshmallow? Yeah? Did you take the red pill or the blue pill? Did you deny the existence of the matrix sequels or did you embrace them like the person who is wrong? But yeah, I think that part of the problem with part of the problem with all of this right now is that the technology is still kind of clumsy, and that as as the technology improves, maybe it'll get more popular. But I don't know.

I mean, at the same time, you know, if you if you take the the current functional working examples of things like improv and LARPing, not that many people larp. Other nerds look down on laper's. I don't like talking about my limited lamp experience in public because people go, oh, oh, never mind, it's gonna make a joke. But I'm not going to. I'm just gonna back away. Wait, you're actually one of those people. Uh So here's the thing. I yes,

I agree that it's it's a niche thing. I think that even if like the technology, I'm not so concerned about. I think the technology could be we could, We could do it right now. The problem is writing a good story to have it work. The technological problem is not a hardware problem. It's a design problem. Right, And and that's and you know, and also just you know, what, what are people looking to get out of a story? Are? Do most people want to do the work that it

takes to participate in an interactive story? Right? That's also a good question. I mean, I think for some people it would be a curiosity that they would be willing to try out once. But you know, would that ever translate into something that's truly successful if you were to compare it to say, other traditional films, I don't know. Maybe it would mean if you wrote a really good one and you had lots of different choices and they were different enough so that the film was a satisfying

experience no matter which series of choices were made. Maybe you'd have like the next big enormous blockbuster in your hands as everyone goes again and again in order to see what the other outcome would be. All Right, everybody already seen what happens if you hit ay, everybody hit B and then you find out, you know, when you punch the guy, the movie gets twice as awesome. So I mean, you'd have to have someone really good at

creating a story to develop that. And even then, like we said, it's just going back to that video game model where the interaction is still limited. You're you're given a couple of choices, and it does impact the way the story unfolds, but ultimately you're not creating the story. Yeah, and with like the open world movie idea I was talking about before, it um it would It's not that

we lack the technology to make that either. But what we said I think I think you said it Lauren correctly, is that you know you would have to take like two hundred hours of footage or something or Moore, Well, I mean, it's just like, let's just think of it

as just like a simulation of real life. You know, you could go and sit down and on a park bench, and on one day you might see the most amusing series of characters walk by and overhear conversations and think it's fantastic, and maybe you even see something that is well outside the norm, maybe there's like a police chase or something that goes by. You get something really exciting. And then the other day, on the next day, on the same park bench, you sit down and it's just,

you know, just a quiet, normal day. The same sort of thing could happen in one of these you know, these environments, unless you were to engineer things to happen so that everyone remains Uh, I'm going to use the word you love Joe engaged consistently over time. You know, this is I love this conversation. That's a great one. I love this idea of interactive storytelling. And there's so much more we could talk about, but we really need

to wrap this up. Guys, for those of you out there who are storytellers or who just love a really good story, way in on this, come over to FW thinking dot com. Let us know what you think. Tell us if you've got an experience in a collaborative story.

Maybe we didn't even talk about. You know, some of the traditional approaches like round round robin story telling, where a person starts writing a piece of fiction and passes it on to someone else who then takes it up with the same trying to use the same voice and continue the story using their own imagination, and then passing it on to someone else. I've seen stories like that that turned out to be great most of the time.

After about three passes, it just takes a wild turn and you're thinking you already had a narrative in your mind, you were determined to apply it to a pre existing story, and or it turns into something like Christopher Tolkien taking over for his father's work or something like that. We'll talk more about then our next episode. Uh spoiler alert for you guys. All right, so we're wrapping this up. Go to fw thinking dot com joining on the conversation. We want to hear from you, and we will talk

to you again, really sion. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places