XplanaZine

A couple of sites and articles have caught my attention in the past couple of days. What do they have in common? The importance of stories.

The current trend is away from separate-category products and towards integrated entertainment and learning. Games aren’t just games anymore — they’re part of a burgeoning entertainment segment that blends graphics, animation and, above all, storytelling. This trend is resulting in an industry that grosses more than the movie business and features such diversity as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Shenmu2.
On another front, after the dot.com bust, a lot of those internet businesses and entrepreneurs didn’t go away, they just moved to Hollywood where people really understand hype and story. The result is a move to innovate cable TV with gaming and to revolutionize the movie industry with new digital technologies and the Web. And at the heart of all this movement and blending is story. Entrepreneurs are crafting pitches for venture capitalists.

Game designers are writing stories to put into their newest offerings. Scriptwriters are imaging stories to offer to Web casters. And, last but not least, educators are beginning to develop stories for their traditional products so that they can compete in this changing media environment. The problem, however, is that is isn’t so easy, this story thing. If it were, we’d have a lot more good stories. It wouldn’t be so hard to find a good novel or at least one TV show worth watching on 215 channels. But it’s not easy — it’s a craft that requires artistic sensibility, knowledge of story structure and tradition, and tremendous discipline.

Make no mistake about it — we are headed into a converged entertainment universe where every product will have a story. And every story will be told and readapted for multiple formats. So, if you want some tips on how to evolve with the trends, you might try these two resources.

First, my friend and colleague Sean Crowley sent me this fun link a while back about storytelling and styles/structures. It’s a good jumping-off point for anyone interested in looking at the basics. Another good friend, Laura Gibbs, has a fantastic Web course (from which I am linking to one internal page) on Myths and Folk Tales. If you want to learn about storytelling tradition and to complete some great skill-building exercises, you might work through some of these chapters.

The key to all of this, of course, is integrating story as opposed to simply adding it on at the end or laying it over your product as an afterthought. This integration makes for stories that are multi-dimensional and that take into consideration all technological, pedagogical, and general production elements.