In Lisa Cron’s Book: Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence she talks about the science behind story “Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience reveal that our brain is hardwired to respond to story; the pleasure we derive from a tale well told is nature’s way of seducing us into paying attention to it.”
From our earliest moments in life it is story that connects us. At the core we all yearn for a good tale. Its primitive, visceral and it crosses every culture in the world.
Once story was only spoken then it colored the walls of the caves.
As story grew it moved from an oral tradition to a written tradition. From rocks to paper the preservation of language (and by extension human history and culture) flourished with the advent of the printing press. Bound to a page, communication gave rise to mass communication. First through books, newspapers, and magazines. Then it exploded into radio, film, TV and the internet.
As story matures even still, along with its media savvy consumer, it now springs forth story worlds across media platforms. Media is ever changing and that evolution only seems to be accelerating.
Traditional media, new media, social media these paradigms are now an amalgam of multi-platform media consumption referred to as Transmedia. Transmedia is: multi-platform storytelling where each channel tells a different aspect of the story and is optimized for that platform while building out a larger story world.
In crafting stories that move beyond our fabricated time frames of feature length, TV show, novel, short stories or ads we extend our narrative and enrich our characters and environments. We are now witnessing the birth of the next evolution of narrative with VR & AR. Our traditional models are breaking and our passive audience that stares at 16:9 rectangles is now finding itself immersed in a merger of gamification and cinema.
In a recent keynote speech Andrew Cochrane of Mirada Studios spoke about how we create and think about narrative in VR.
“Storytelling is dead in VR,” Cochrane says. It’s a word that doesn’t have any meaning in virtual reality because the medium isn’t about “telling” the audience anything, it’s about creating experiences. And so he says that words like “narrative” and “story architecture” and story worlds” are more apt. Source – Inverse
I could not agree more and I have been building the structures for these story worlds for some time. Traditionally a story bible is where the canon of your narrative lives and breathes.
I say breathes because within the active state of story creation, with multiple authors and end points as well as user generated content, an ever expanding story world or universe must be flexible. Letting your story breathe and grow while still retaining canon is quite the trick. This is why I take a very structured approach to this chaos.
I have built upon the good works of others. With an amazing mentor Jeff Gomez, I have honed my technique and have evolved a structure for world building narrative. In teaching my masters class in transmedia I had the students build from a core narrative model using the world building leviathan method of story bible creation.
It is akin to the snowflake model. The leviathan method originated as a fifty-two-week process for laying out your story world and is very comprehensive.
Well me being me it was still not enough, so over the last four years I have been expanding and evolving this construct. I have added platforms, distribution and interactive pathways in narrative, as well as developing a full suite of complementary tools I use to wrangle a universe. These tools are serving me well for this coming change and I’m here to convince you that you need to be ready for what the audience will expect from you.
I think we can agree that everything from entertainment properties to brands have stories to tell. We also know that people respond to stories on a neurological level. So how are you expanding your story? Do you tell conflicting stories on different platforms? Do you even know what story you are telling? How are you keeping track of all this? If you don’t know you are not alone. From fortune 500 companies to major studios the answers to these questions are in flux.
Techniques required to spin a good yarn in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality are not only about the hardware but also must take into account the environments and software. We are not just concerned with the Oculus on your head, we must rethink how we can leverage the IOT sensors in the future environments where we will tell stories. If that were not enough ‘new’ to deal with you also need to imagine how artificial intelligence will play a part in designing the software that expresses itself via hardware. Now don’t get lazy and think the AI will tell our stories for us. These intelligent systems will assist us and provide the underpinnings of our game mechanics, but the core narrative will come from us.
I am so excited by the possibilities of leveraging the emerging tools of technology and nurturing the new paradigms in narrative evolution
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Building on a mix of traditional story structures like The Seven Basic Plots to the expansion from The Hero’s Journey to the Collective Journey we find ourselves in new waters. As Jonathan Gottschall writes in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human “Like powerful sorcerers, all humans can see the future—not a clear and determined future, but a murky, probabilistic one.”
If your King Arthur in search of your Merlin or Jon Snow seeking your Red Woman, I can help track down the really good sorcerers.
Need help just come to the media lab over at https://www.ihaverobots.com
Republished: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-you-should-start-building-story-worlds-now-john-hartman