A panel discussion from the Narrascope Conference, Boston, June 15+16 2019 - Celebrating Narrative Games “Dissecting the Bandernatch With a Vorpal Blade: What Netflix’s Choose Your Own Adventure Got Right and Got Wrong” was Narrascope’s panel discussion. Heather Albano, Mary Duffy, Jason Stevan Hill, Emily Short, and Ian Thomas discuss Netflix’s first venture into the world of interactive television with Bandersnatch, the Black Mirror episode that let viewers influence the story in a choose-your-path adventure kind of way. What was good, where did it fall flat, how would experienced game designers have tackled this kind of project? But beware, there will be spoilers!
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DISCUSSION SUMMARY
 
DIFFERENT AUDIENCE REACTIONS
Reactions different wildly from those familiar with the format, and the many audience members who had never previously been introduced to it.
 
FAMILIAR DESIGNS
Familiarity was again seen to be an important design tool.
 
CONTROVERSIAL CHOICE DESIGN
Not all choices made sense, or appeared to have purpose
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF ENDINGS
Viewing experiences were very different according to the endings reached
 
UNIVERSE SWITCHING
Too often the reality of a context was undermined, when a more interesting solution could have been found.
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTENTIONALITY
The writers could have done more to explore intentional participation through choices
 
GIVE PLAYERS TIME TO CONSIDER CHOICES
The decision to freeze action and give players time to make choices was generally received well.
 
FLASHBACKS
The option to step back in time was innovative, handled well
 
FAILING FORWARD
Whilst branching narratives are complicated, production load can be minimised by techniques to group potential responses thematically
 
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

1. Explain apparent continuity errors:
2. Intensify choices and limit replay:
3. Think about tone and context:
4. Focus
5. The power of authentic social messages
6. Respect consent
7. Complicate control

 
 
UNCOMFORTABLE SOCIAL MESSAGES
A number of panel members questioned social assumptions within the game
 

 
DETAILED DISCUSSION TRANSCRIPT
 
As a gamer, what did you learn? And what did you hate?
(spoiler alert)
 
 
DIFFERENT AUDIENCE REACTIONS
 
By the time `I watched it there were already a whole lot of game designers who had seen it and panned it. Where's the innovation they asked? … and yet at the same time there was a whole bunch of consumers saying, Wow, this is exciting. We've never seen anything like this before… is a really interesting disjunction, I think.  And so my first real reaction to it was that it introduced a lot of new people to interactivity, and that's a pretty major plus. 
 
FAMILIAR DESIGNS
 
They clearly built this to feel familiar for television viewers, the way it handles recaps, the way it handles changing audio and those kinds of elements. There was a lot of television craft that went into it. And that's part of what makes it accessible to those kinds of people. As a result I found myself a little bit more sort of forgiving of some of those elements.
 
CONTROVERSIAL CHOICE DESIGN
 
But also, I got very frustrated really early on with the first few choices that just didn't seem to do anything very much, with no immediate consequences that just railroaded you straight back in to the narrative.
 
I felt sympathetic to the possible design reasons for those choices because it felt like …We've got a TV audience, we need to get them used to the idea, they might even need to pick something. And if they miss and they fail to make a choice early on, we don't want their first experience with this style to be …oh, I missed out on doing something interesting because I didn't really understand the controls.
 
It’s interesting to think about it in terms of a product that has to teach its players how to play. It reminds me of something I encountered when I did customer support for Choice of Games. When I first started working for them, I would get emails from people basically saying “Please put a back button to your games, I picked the wrong choice, and I have to do the whole thing over again”. And I would diligently respond that there was no wrong options. But there are arguably many points during Bandersnatch where viewers can make the wrong choice. In fact audiences proceed directly into what seems to be the most important choice right off the bat in Bandersnatch, namely… Should I work in the Office of Tucker soft games? Or should I work on this at home? And everything about the way the scene is constructed, says, work at the office, you're going to have all this support that you don't have as an independent game designer, and that's the wrong choice. So I'm so frustrated by that particular moment.  It seems to be teaching audiences that their choices don't matter. Because what seems obvious to you is wrong. And so, you know, in a game that's trying to do all this layered metaphorical stuff about control…That's the first real choice. And it's tricking the audience. And that was such a turn off to me.
 
I agree 100% .  When I hit that first choice, and went into the office and died, it's like…really?  So I recognize the cultural impact that it has.  Introducing lay people to interactivity is cool, but in many ways they’re replicating what I consider to be bad habits that I want to move away from as a design culture. So, as a designer and as a player, I myself did not care for it.
 
Okay, that's fair, but I actually had a different reaction to that first choice and the shortness of the path. I thought it was an interesting design choice because if you have players who have never seen anything like this before it teaches them right up front that this genre involves replaying the same scenes and making different choices. In that context I thought the confronting delivery of the need to reply choices was forgivable.
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF ENDINGS
 
I also found that personally, I had a different reaction to the experience as a whole depending on what ending I got. And I feel like that's something that might be interesting to delve into.
 
Me too.  I enjoyed the piece more than a number of my friends because the ending that I got was the one in which he winds up being reunited with his mother and sharing in her death on the train. And that, to me was much more thematically resonant than many of the other options because I was much less interested in sort of gotcha endings where, you know, he fails to make a good game for some silly reason, or, you know, the whole thing devolves into this weird murder plot. I felt like the business about what has happened to him in the past and how he can revisit that trauma was a story that was less obvious to tell based on the form.
 
So what I mean by that is, I felt like a number of the paths through Bandersnatch were basically things where Rooker was asking questions about freewill or about you know, what does it mean if you have somebody, a player controlling the protagonist, which basically have been asked and re-asked by one interactive narrative designer after another.  It’s almost the first thing that people do when they realize that this form exists.  So, what I found most interesting was the case where the story it actually kind of gone beyond that set of probes into something different.
 
I agree. I got the same ending and I think it was an extremely poignant ending… choosing to go and die with your mom on the train. That was like a good Black Mirror episode to me. But when I was looking at the different endings that ending did not appear to be common.
 
UNIVERSE SWITCHING
 
Each ending almost catapults you into a different universe.  In some endings you are definitely controlled by a person. You’re making a movie. Actually, you step out of it, and you're the actor or the Stefan that you are controlling is an actor on set, which is a totally different universe from the other universes where you die, or you're the mother. So there's Something really strange about different roles stepping out beyond the original fictional frame and ending the story outside of itself. Great for the cognition of the player, because the player has built an idea of the world that they're in, and then suddenly you shift that from under them.
 
That kind of universe switching approach can be something where you're kind of asking the player, what kind of story do they even want out of this? What are they interested in? But the trick I feel in the case of Bandersnatch, is that it's, it's hard to actually articulate that agency As a player, although I had ideas about what I wanted to explore, there are only a few points where I really felt like I had the agency to articulate that to the system.
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTENTIONALITY
 
Not me, one of the things with choice games that we really tried to focus on is the idea of intentionality, that you have some idea of the possible consequences of your decisions. And you're in there with the therapist and you get into the fight and then it's like, jump on your dad or jump out the window. But if it turns out that you're just an actor that's forgotten the fact that you're an actor… that complete lack of intentionality was frustrating for me.
 
Also, if you have X number of options, and the player is failing a number of hidden tests, so that only one option appears instead of all 10, there's something wrong. And I question what that's supposed to do for you as a player in Bandersnatch.
 
Yeah, there were a couple of choices that seemed to duplicate each other. I mean, throw the jewels at the computer or destroy the computer. I don't want to do either of those.
 
And there are some that are explicitly the wrong choice where if you decide to throw the towel on the computer, it immediately brings you to try this again or go back or something like that, which I hated. I thought that was a cop out if you're going to give the player choice, it should be a choice that goes somewhere.
 
GIVE PLAYERS TIME TO CONSIDER CHOICES
 
That said, there are some interesting things in those choices just from an execution point of view.  We've all seen all the FMV games where you hit a choice and everything stops while you make a decision.  So it was quite nice that they had the kind of live feed happening in the background and that during that the character you were responding to would generally prompt you and put a bit more pressure on which is interesting. But there's also a flaw in that which is, it's like the choices out of walking dead where you have three choices actually left to right or fail to act.  Bandersnatch had that as well but didn't really seem to do anything with the fail to act option, other than auto-choose on your behalf, which was just a bit strange because it meant that you could just sit through it and sit back and watch the whole thing and it kind of loses the point a little to me because then you're not in control of anything.
 
I think there is a different emotional effect since you have as much time as you want to sit there and think about what you want. And so it's, you know, fail to act means something different than if you've been able to think about being inactive, and that's my choice, right? Whereas if, you know, you're sort of sitting there and and you're troubled by the question, and you're having a hard time making up your mind, or you somehow don't really want to commit and your time is running out that feels different. Yeah. So I'm a little bit more patient with it in a timed context, and I think it's more expressive actually.  So it wasn't so much that I wanted a third option to press. Yeah, it was more. I want there to be a consequence of failure, like an unexpected ending, or something….
 
FLASHBACKS
 
And I guess we should talk about flashbacks as well, because they were effective. Going back through the loop, and shortcutting all the sequences and seeing the results of some of your choices worked really well, brought it into a TV form really well.  But, but there was never any attempt to explain in the fiction how that happened. I mean, you can look at something I like that the strange reversal of going back through choices is very explicitly laid out in the world. How are we repeating this however?  Do the things I did last time apply to this loop? That's cool, but it lost me as a player. What is the friction? What's the infectious reason for this strangeness?
 
I'm struck by how differently I reacted to this emotionally depending on which of the endings I happened to strike. I didn't get death first, although it's my favourite because I agree with the emotionally resonant. I got, history repeats itself, where pearl ends up finishing the game, which I actually thought also worked as a black mirror episode in a very different way that it was very intellectually clever rather than emotionally resonant. I'm good with either ending, the one that annoyed me to death was the Netflix one that just struck me as the kind of thing you write at three o'clock in the morning when you're a bit blocked and it seems funny at the time.
 
I was listening to Charlie Brooker the other night talking about that, and that wasn't supposed to be a main choice, it was supposed to be a bit of an Easter egg. And they went through testing and decided to put it in.
 
And then I found the government control paths, which Stefan mentioned and the whole thing If that path felt to me, like they'd hacked it in that weekend, and that was when I started to wonder how deliberately the creators were commenting on different types of interactive fiction. I suspect that they haven't read that too deeply enough into the various types of interactive fiction to be that explicit about it. I think a lot of the impression I got was they wrote a huge tree in twine and then chopped lots of bits off when they realized it wouldn't fit into production.
 
When I was replaying it this week, I wanted to follow through all the leaves have an individual branch, if you will, and I was frustrated to that degree where it would take me farther back than I wanted to go and not let me explore all of those leaves. That said, I thought that the recap in particular was the best part. Like that was a really an innovation. It's not something that I'd seen before that I think will probably become a gold standard for this type of format in the future.
 
 
THINK ABOUT WHAT CHOICES MEAN
 
One choice context that I found particularly effective was the kind of locked, safe situation where the story presents you with the protagonist’s father's safe. And there are different storylines that could lead you to think that different things might be inside. You might think that it's about this government control program.  You might think that it contains something that's quite personal. And you're offered options about what combination to use to unlock the safe. And it presents the task as though it's a puzzle and as though you're supposed to solve it by knowing what the combination ought to be based on what's happened previously. But actually, all of the combinations are words that connect somehow to what's been going on in the story. So the choice that you're really making is what do I think is important enough to be the thing that might be in the safe at this moment? And so, although it disguises itself as a puzzle, it's actually asking what do you as a player care about, and that I thought was quite cool.
 
It actually works better than it would have done if there was a parser type answer, because it's making it really clear there are potentially multiple right answers. And if you revisit that choice point, having come through different avenues in the store, you're actually offered different combinations solutions, which lead then on to different discoveries in the safe.
I think that's what the fight sequence is about as well…what type of game are we playing?
 
Yeah. I managed to miss enter that code through clumsiness and get it wrong in playtesting. Just not enough people were getting the number. I also had to be much more explicit about it and retire that as the main puzzle from what I gathered from the script,
 
Okay. But the question I got about the whole thing, actually, in the podcast.  They interviewed Charlie Brooker about Black Mirror in general. And the impression I get from that was that Netflix said, Would you like to do this interactive fiction? They went, No, we don't want to. That's really nice. But we want to leave that. And then came up with an idea about a Black Mirror episode involving control and agency, and then did it the other way around, and went, Oh, no, this has to be interactive. Which at first involved trying to build this massive, massive branching tree narrative, and then production reality hit that massive tree. And so, what we've got left is really a very sparse impression of what the original structure was supposed to be. Because, as we all know, having again been through this loop over 30 years or whatever, the combinatorial explosion just doesn't work for filmed content really well.
 
FAILING FORWARD
 
And it made me wonder, like, why didn't they structurally do more with what we call failing forward (trial and error)? For example, you might have a choice with three options. Each option is testing a certain stat or maybe a certain Boolean for the past thing that you've already chosen, and it tests it, and then you have six different possible outcomes that involve either success, or failure. Why not just make two films for six different outcomes? Sure, it's expensive as hell to shoot a bunch of different outcomes. But if you can write something that either fails forward, or succeeds forward, and just elaborate on little moments here and there, then you could you could have something that feels a little more meaningful,
 
The production team were also saying that they tried to record a scene, and then a bunch of different lines to plug into that scene, and found that they just completely lost the emotion of the scene because they didn't know where it was going. So they actually had to record the scene six times, with six different line deliveries.  An experienced game actor, will know how to do that and to be able to authenticate themselves, but they're not using game actors for filming.
 
 
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

1. Explain apparent continuity errors: The first thing that I would do is continuity testing. On my last playthrough, I played Bandersnatch through intentionally leaving Collin alive, and then it forced me to kill Collin. And then he came back to life. And I was like, well, is that a continuity error? Or was that just jumping through multiplicities? If you don't know what the intention is it reads as a continuity error.  It was actually the intention of the author. So, if you're going to have a moment like that, you need to make sure to explain it so that it doesn't read as a continuity error.

 

1. Intensify choices and limit replay: For me, it would be about going off in all these different endings and potential universes, which are a great playground. It means that your content is wildly different on the different branches. If you're producing a whole lot of content, having one reality helps to limit that. I think you can put a lot more variance into the choices, as well as the continuity errors.  I’d also change the replay context.  The first time you play a game, it can seem to be really respecting your choices. And it's not until you play a game the second time that you notice that choosing that option, does the same thing whatever choice you make. So to a certain extent they shot themselves in the foot by having quite a sparse tree and forcing players to replay it at least once. It shattered the illusions a bit.

 

1. Think about tone and context: If they had made sure that the disparate paths that are re-joining contain something that cast a different emotional light or a different narrative context on what follows that would still feel meaningful so you can get away with it.

 

1. Focus: The main thing I would do differently is to drill down on the buffet of themes in this draft, to identify which ones people actually care about. Focus on that. Make sure that more of these choices are either structured in a way that lets the player feel some thematic agency, or else gain a better understanding what the stakes of the choice probably are. And I think if they narrowed the multiplicity down a bit so that it was easier to build kind of a mental model of what the possibility space is, where we're going here, then you'd get a lot more sense of intentionality at more of the choice points.

 

1. Deliver more authentic social messages: When choices seemed to be all about mental illness I was like, what? Like, for instance, you have an option at one point to take your meds or flush them. And then on a successive replay, you come back around to it, and you can flush them or you can throw them away. And I'm sitting there, trying to puzzle that out. And I'm thinking, Okay, well, if I throw them away, my dad might find them in the trash, and he'll know that I haven't taken my meds so then that will make something else happen. And then if I flush them, then the evidence is gone. You know, and you are smarter than the game. And then on top of that, they're doing something with mental illness that I didn't particularly appreciate. So, if you're going to give me binary choices, make sure that they clearly do something. But also, please don't give me choices that are like take your antidepressants or don't take your antidepressants.

 

1. Respect consent: But going back to those choices again, I think there were a whole bunch of occasions where you wanted a different possibility. The one I particularly hated was you can say yes or no, when Colin offers you the harder drugs. And if you say no, he spikes your drink. And I have, I think, never been quite so angry about a fake choice. That's bad writing and appalling social commentary, it just fails in every possible way.  It's a fictional violation of consent that goes with the mechanic. I didn't know that would happen because I've never turned down drugs.

 
I think they were banking on the fact that 90% of the players are not going to turn it down for a variety of reasons. It's the most interesting choice in the scene. Let's do it and see what happens right again, that's the problem with their intentionality. And their design strategy is to make one much more attractive than the other. And then they either reward you or punish you for picking the most attractive one and I'm not interested in being punished and I'm not even really that interested in being rewarded.
 
The first time I got the take your meds or don't take your meds I got to it from the path where Colin has ranted about people controlling you by putting stuff in your food in the context of the government control path, which is not well executed and is not believable. But in that context, deciding to throw your pills away makes a lot of sense. It's a story
 
The second time I got to it. I did not have the context of the common explanation. It was just I'd come from my psychiatrist office. And so I took the meds and then I failed to finish the game and the game that Stefan created was not well received. And so explicitly connecting antidepressants to creativity is incredibly irresponsible. So yeah, I was pretty disappointed by that.
 

1. Complicate control: I think it's quite interesting that we're talking about Stefan being us, actually, rather than that whole separation of control thing that they're trying to go for. So the separation of the control doesn't seem to be quite working. Because a lot of the intentionality in the choices and the reactions in that section where you're poking stuff out to do things and he is getting fed up with the voices in his head and he's starting to try and do something else. Which is an interesting idea, but wasn't very well executed, I think.

 
 
What are the social messages of this piece?
 
I found the mental illness aspects troubling. I also think there was a missed opportunity to go as far as they could have done with the friendship with Collin because it felt like he was a really interesting character and the possibility of comradeship in a difficult emotional space and different creative space is really important. And it is a possible resolution for a lot of the things that are afflicting the character. And the fact that they take you partway down that road and then they say, Oh, he drugs you, or you accept his drugs and then things go haywire. And there's this weird force jumping off a balcony scene. I felt like that was there was something false about that.  It felt like we got to this point because they thought it would be shocking or because they felt like they had to show you having a bad result for taking drugs. It feels like it's an opening to emotional intimacy and connection and you want to say yes to that, and it really bothered me that the story was like a hard no, and not for a good reason.
 
I was genuinely emotionally affected by the death ending. There's a bit at the very beginning where, where you're talking about your mother's death, and the psychiatrist says he didn't know. And so being back there and picking …No, I'm not getting on the train, knowing what's going to happen is also a very interesting emotional moment. I would have liked to have seen them do more of that.
 
Heather Albano, Mary Duffy, Jason Stevan Hill, Emily Short, and Ian Thomas. 2019. Narrascope 2019 - Panel Discussion - Dissecting the Bandernatch With a Vorpal Blade. In Narrascope 2019: YouTube.

Whilst cinematic games are increasingly popular, interactive movies remain niche and often struggle to combine narrative and interactivity.  Some theorists argue that this is because interaction obstructs the movie watching experience. 

"The problem is that too much interactivity will weaken the narrative and too little will weaken the gameplay" (p. 22 citing Crogan, 2002).

For this reason, even though internet TV platforms have the capacity to include interactivity, most don't, or if they do, they offer only very limited interactivity.  The few examples of successful integration of more extensive interaction such as Her Story (2015) and Roundabout (2015) are either regarded as niche, or classified as games.  Indeed, due to the historically poor reputation of "basic narrative with minimal branching and predictable endings... (Edmond, 2015; Edwards, 2003)" in interactive movies, the gaming classification has been a notable preference.  The researchers quote a print advertisement for the interactive movie Psychic Detective, which self-describes as a full motion video game, adding 'Yeah, we know full-motion video games in the past sucked' (Interactive Movie, n.d.).

The researcher defines interactive movies as those which include interactions that navigate the narrative and create alternate stories, albeit within the overall structure of the script, so that the audience is also in some sense the co-creator of the interactive movie (Kromhout & Forceville, 2013).

Using a combination of surveys, interviews and observations of 150 university students who were asked to play the interactive movie, The Outbreak, a branching tree narrative movie.  Branching tree narratives allow for pauses so the user can choose a path, and based on their choice the narrative continues with multiple possible endings. 

"Looking at our chosen interactive movie for this study, the interactivity only serves to branch the narrative and actually pauses the play until the user chooses a path. For that matter, most interactive movies seem to only use interactivity as an add on and not at all embedded as part of the narrative" (p. 27).

"While some of the participants enjoyed the novelty of trying a new concept, most found the interactivity distracting and even frustrating, with the most common key words used being – boring, distracting, frustrating, unique.." (p. 26).  

The researcher concludes that gamers are interested in complex interactivity and do not find interactive movies challenging enough, while non-gamers find the interactivity distracting. Thus, interactive movies as they are seem to be lost between two distinct genres, but the in between approach satisfies neither audience.

The researcher recommends non-obstructive interactive mechanisms that are complex enough to create an immersive gaming experience, while fully integrated in the narrative.

"For interactivity to be fully embedded, the gamer needs to let go of the role of story author and be a willing participant in the narrative, immersed in the story by the act of interacting with the narrative in a semiotic manner" (p. 23).

e.g.
A notable example of early interactive cinema in 1967, the interactive movie Kinoautomat (Weiberg, 2002) and its use of pre-determinism and making fun of democracy. In this movie the audience voted on each choice but that always lead to the same conclusion. The interactivity is very simple with a branching narrative structure that leads to the next section; the interactivity preserves the narrative and the narrative structure, but at the same time, the interactivity itself is actually part of the narrative in that it tells the story of democracy, no matter what you vote.

Work is under way to explore whether focusing upon character interaction, rather than narrative interaction might also enable more interactive movie engagement, but early efforts like the Façade Interactive Drama produced in 2005 (Mateas & Stern, 2005; Rettberg, 2015) are still experimental.

The market is not yet developed, and the researcher concludes that it will require considerable investment in talented writers and interactive designers to produce a few hit interactive movies before audiences are willing to consume such movies regularly. e.g. Netflix recently added interactivity to Black Mirror Bandersnatch interactive episode (discussed in another research summary) which was met with fanfare and positive audience engagement (Chua, 2019).  As yet these efforts are still experimental.

Dahdal, S., 2020. The Illusive Ludonarrativity and the Problem with Emergent Interactive Storytelling Models in Interactive Movies. Journal of Digital Media & Interaction, 3(6), pp.17-33

Interactive stories are a technologically daunting challenge.  They require several support technologies that are still underdeveloped - e.g. a lot less money has gone into interactive story technologies than AI voice tech, and even that is still developing.  

As a result "interactive story as a narrative form can be said to be in an infant stage of development akin to the first cinematic films of the early 20th century" (p. 2)

"Putting aside superficial features such as high fidelity graphics and animation, the most successful games offer players true agency - the ability for players to have persisitent, meaningful effects on the events of the experience.  Today's games have only achieved agency in the domain of action - or puzzle oriented game-play" (p.2)

EMBRACING THE COMBINATORIAL EXPLOSION:
The quintessential requirements of an interactive story - and a research agenda.
1. Agency is primary - implicit in this is the promise to directly affect the plot of the story.
2. Generation - in order to achieve this requires vast amounts of content, so to overcome branching fatigue and costs we need systems that can content generate on the fly.  Pioneer projects include Talespin, Universe and Minstrel.
3. Interface - Once players are directing the plots of stories about people, expressive natural language and gesture interfaces will be required.
4. Connection - If generation is akin to speaking, and interface is akin to listening, then the two phases need to be connected with the ability to manage the drama and reason about the player's input.
5. Terminology problem - If players have true agency the interaction is not being told, but generated.  "Interactive storymaking" is more accurate, if awkward.  For now, the researchers drop the verb and refer instead to "interactive stories", noting the need for a new term.

Future recommendations including building new systems to enable new types of interactive stories and making them available for public feedback

Stern, A., 2008, November. Embracing the combinatorial explosion: A brief prescription for interactive story R&D. In Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 1-5). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Lance Weiler, founding member and director of the Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab shares findings from the labs re-imagining of the work of Arthur Conan Doyle titled Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things, a prototype that had 1,200 collaborators from 60+ countries working across 70 events to create a massive connected crime scene.
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Main Takeaways:
Identifies 4 Immersive Participation Design Theme Principles
1) Trace: Provide a way for people to leave their mark/personalise the experience
2) Grant Agency: Shifting between individual and group tasks helps to promote, as well as reinforce a sense of individual agency.
3) Thematic Frame: Everything is so much easier when you're working with a known starting point e.g. a popular source IP
4) Serendipity Management: Let things evolve/Aim to show, not tell and leave gaps for the audience's own interpretations.

In addition he recommends dividing participants into groups of 5 - 6 people
​
The Digital Storytelling lab kicked off a prototype about a year ago called Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things and it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate right? This idea of mixing Holmes and the IoT (the juxtaposition is consciously unexpected).
 
Because what was fascinating about Arthur Conan Doyle's work is that he was writing about emergent technologies that nobody knew about outside of certain small circles: non contaminated crime scenes, ballistics and different types of blood tests.  Law enforcement was reading that and saying, wow, these are really good ideas, we should adopt these. 
 
And so in a lot of ways, Arthur Conan Doyle was starting to influence fact. ... and I love this quote by Arthur C. Clarke.
 
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
 
And I think the Internet of Things is very much like that for most people. ..all these common objects within our lives connected to networks seems like magic. 

We also wanted to experiment with this idea of copyleft, so we made the whole experience open to whoever wants to be a part of it, all over the world. It's released under creative commons, share alike license, so people can commercialize whatever they create within it as long as they give back the code base and share their learnings.
 
Taking this original source material from Arthur Conan Doyle, and using it as this fertile playground to start to experiment with what we could do was a large, massive global storytelling experiment.

THE GLOBAL STORYTELLING EXPERIENCE
 
The experience starts when people go to the source material.  We ask them to find an object from one of Arthur Conan Doyle stories and adapt it using physical computing sensors to create this enchanted object that's intended to be something that they can use as a way to tell a story.
 
We didn't plan to use IOT at the start. Instead, we started for about six months through a series of meetups, and did everything in physical form, paper testing.
 
SHORT
Our analog prototype consisted of four key areas. It would take about 90 minutes to run it.

TEAMS OF 5 or 6
5 - 6 is optimum.
When` we had less than five, certain personalities would dominate and people would have a miserable time. And then when it was too large, it started becoming almost like a consensus vortex where nothing ever really happened.
 
TASKS
1. Create a crime scene.
We hand each team a roll of masking tape, and say okay, now go out and create a crime scene with your fellow teammates.

2. Create clues
When they came back we would lay down Brown. paper and tell them to empty their pockets in their bags and define three things that they thought were really interesting to tell a story with.
 
And then they would just trace those things. So if they had, you know, sunglasses or their phone, or whatever it was, they would trace the outline of it. And they’d do that individually.
 
3. Mix it up
Then we ask them to step back, pick three things that aren't yours, rip them out, cut them out, and now you have them. Go back to any of the bodies except the one that your team just created and place these objects with purpose in another crime scene, and be creative with them.

4. Set the scene
a) 1st individually

That famous phrase by Ernest Hemingway: "For sale. baby shoes never worn" a very evocative statement, that's this idea of generative, flash fiction.
 
We gave each team a packet of post it notes and some pens. You can go around, you can pick up that phone on the ground to hear the last voicemail message from a crying ex girlfriend. If you see glasses, you can leave teeth marks on broken lenses.  But you do it as an individual. The only rule is you can't make any changes to your own crime scene, your own body, your team's body.

b) Next collaboratively
 
And then they come back and we'd say, Okay, now you're a team again. Go back to the dead body crime scene that you originally created, but you're going to realize that there are all kinds of clues there now.

5. "Solve" the crime
Now we'd challenge them to be a collaborative Sherlock Holmes, by making up a story about what happened here. They could pick and chose what they wanted to respond to. But then they crafted these narratives about the scene that were incredibly dynamic and they did it very quickly.  
 

SCALING THIS EXPERIENCE
So we workshopped what to do through a series of meetups and then with a global community, which probably came close to 2000 collaborators from 60 different countries. Last year, there were 70, self organized events all over the world. There's been a ton already this year.

 
FOUR DESIGN PRINCIPLES emerged from this prototype. And remember we tested this thing all over the world.
 
1. TRACE
People really responded well, whenever they could see some element of themselves within the story, you know. And what's interesting is when we first started this, the very first prototypes, we thought we'll write the stories will populate the crime scenes.  We'll lay out the bodies and then people can come in and be Sherlock Holmes and Watson and they'll love it.

But what was actually more engaging was when they were creating everything themselves, and we were just letting it happen. So that one step of the trace was really important where they could see a contribution of themselves within the story.

2. GRANT AGENCY
Breaking the event up from a group task to an individual task and back and forth led to these really these potent moments that allowed people to feel like they actually had an impact over what was going on.

They didn't feel like they were just following somebody else who might be a dominant personality within a team. And that was that was interesting.
 
3. USE AN EVOCATIVE/ACCESSIBLE THEMATIC FRAME

Most people probably know Sherlock Holmes, even if they don't they know what a detective mystery is. And if they see a body on the ground, they probably know there was a crime. So there's a common language there that that really helped quite a bit. It made the experience accessible and quickly gain context, mutual understanding, engagement and back story.
 
4. SERENDIPITY MANAGEMENT
 
A classic screenwriting principle is that you're supposed to show, not simply tell, but interactive designers often get very concerned that people won't know how to interact with something in the proper way, so end up telling too much. 

But we left a lot of gaps in this experience and because we left those gaps, the imaginations of the participants filled them, leading to these really wonderful kind of moments where they would collide into each other in unexpected ways. And these collaborative, creative sparks would pop up out of it, which was really exciting.
 
When we were trying to work out how to manage the creative process of thousands of people. We ended up running an open MOOC usually known as a massive open online course, but we called it a massive online offline collaboration, open to whoever wanted to participate.
 
PARTIPATORY URBANISM
So it was interesting how something so simple was so effective in terms of people being able to organize themselves. 

We had this road rotary phone that had a Raspberry Pi with a text to speech engine.   So you could write to it from a distance and it would ring, it was also beacon aware so whenever  the phone got near something, it would recognize that it was there and ring, right. So then all of a sudden, somebody would start interacting with a character, you know, a killer and a cat mouse game or whatever.

We made that code open source because we want these IoT objects to be something that stimulates creativity within a group of people.
 
Ubiquitous computing is like calm technology, it's all about being in the peripheral, it's not necessarily about being buried in your device. And in fact, when we did have a device and we used it, it broke the flow, because everybody became very interested in the screen. So what we're trying to do with this is say, can we use objects that are enchanted in some way or smart objects that people can use as a way to tell a story. So it becomes about the human interaction and not necessarily solely about a screen interaction.
 
And the other thing that's interesting about the project is there's no win scenario. We remove that, you know, there's not one right way that a crime is solved or crime is created. So it becomes very much a collaborative form of story and play.
 
At TheDigital Storytelling Lab we’re now exploring participatory urbanism and the collaborative design of neighbourhoods through storytelling. For example we partnered the City of Los Angeles and did a storytelling innovation lab with them. The project was called My Sky Is Falling and it was shaped with foster youth in collaboration with the students.

70% of whom tend to end up addicted to substances, pregnant or homeless. It was heartbreaking. But together with the students they made an immersive science fiction story. We also teamed up with MIT and they gave us a bracelet that participants could wear to track their emotions as they went through the experience. And instead of relying on pre survey and post survey, and audio video transcription we came up with 26 different feedback loops within the experience itself. There's a really cool white paper on it if you're interested you can find it at myskyisfalling.com
 
When it pointed to and, just like Sherlock was this idea that stories can spark a really interesting innovation because that prototype was made for a couple hundred dollars. And then the UN invited us to run it there - and now it's being adapted in three different states as a framework to train, potential foster care parents and social workers to understand the emotional journey of a foster youth because when you go through the experience. .So this idea of inspiring greater understanding is really interesting and making use of technology to do so is something that we are very interested in doing
 
STORIES ARE NOW EVENTS
This is an amazing time to be a storyteller.  A story maybe isn't just by one person anymore, it’s a collaborative community event.  And increasingly now we’re seeing the rise of creative technologists who are using stories to create a common understanding.
 
EVENTS CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE
​I did a project with David Cronenberg called body mind change. And it was kind of about this idea of a personal recommendation engine that you just put into the back of your neck through synaptic entanglement. That's a word we made up it didn't exist. The engine would know everything you wanted needed and desire before you did. And so that story was all about the quantified self and about artificial intelligence and about this idea of emotional intelligence. But what is interesting about this the moment is that we have the opportunity to change the way that these stories are told.
 
For example, if an object is connected to a network it can send you media. You could build subscription models off of that. That object could change over time, it could change state, it could recognize other things around it and it could change the way it interacts. It could do simple things like change colours, it could change the lights when you walked into a room, whatever you want.

This idea of allowing those formerly known as the audience to be collaborators in the creative process allows them to create something or co create something that they care about, that can evolve over time. And new business models can come from it.
But this apparoch also breaks from permission based culture, so you don't have to spend years trying to convince somebody that you want to make something, you can just make it.

Weiler, Lance. 2018. Story Driven Innovation. U.S.: fitc events.

This paper outlines audience research of early prototypes for mobile AR narrative games where users were invited to co-create a location based narrative using AR.

Noting that real world objects can stimulate user's imagination, the designer's created a system to encourage user's to create their own stories in relation to real sites.  Design guidelines included
1) menu minimisation, enabling users to jump directly into stories
2) carefully constrained user freedom
3) choice of interaction metaphors to support cross-space flow
4) encouraging joy by emphasising playful discovery

DISCOVERY
- In this mobile AR game design users could explore and uncover hidden parts of the story at random through their phone, which is utilized like a window to the physical world, enabling the discovery of narrativised AR objects.
- Only portions of the AR world can be viewed at any one time, forcing the user to construct the overall puzzle pieces in their head.
- Users werealso given the option to create their own stories by writing tags for these location linked AR objects.
- These tags could be shared and modified by other users in turn.

Following these principles the designers created 3 protoptypes
1) In the 1st prototype users could discover AR objects through a scrubbing and dusting action to mimic cleaning that also involved physical mobile vibrations whenever the phone is shaken to 'clean' the AR dirt.
2) The 2nd prototype involved users catching AR fish in prototype augmented ponds. Different ponds and fish were linked to different corresponding words and sentences, which users strung together through the act of fishing.  The image on the mobile viewfinder is simultaneously projected on a nearby large display. 
3) Users play with augmented comic strip graphics on the wall, adding their own captions and tags.

Results:
- Users regarded the 3rd prototype as the most interactive in terms of narrative creation
- The narrative interactivity of the 2nd prototype was less understood.
- Prototype 1 was regarded as the most playful  Even middle-aged users enjoying scrubbing themselves, despite weak flow between physical and virtual realms because participants only focused on dirt-scrubbing activity once the virtual body appeared on the mobile screen.

Nam, Y., 2015. Designing interactive narratives for mobile augmented reality. Cluster Computing, 18(1), pp.309-320.



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“If interactive narrative is ever going to approach the emotional power of movies and drama, it will be as a three-dimensional world that opens itself to the body of the spectator but remains the top-down design of a largely fixed narrative script”

• Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story

After a review of narrative theory in AR environments - considering the difference between a story (sequence of events) and narrative (the way those events are presented), as well as the likely blurring of fiction (the story) and reality (the mobile environment) in AR, and the broad treatment of the term text in this article to include all forms of communications including hardware and buildings, versus their definition of a medium, which extends beyond the hardware to include "a set of conventions, practices and design approaches that authors make use of to create a familiar and meaningful experience for the user" - the authors survey features of early AR fiction experiences, distinguishing between
1) Situated (local, quick) augmented experiences,
2) Location based narratives (using a few, sparsely located portals in a wider area)
3) World-level AR experiences sited across an entire neighbourhood, or city, or globally that tend to run for longer periods.

1) Situated augmented experiences
- AR/Fac¸ade: A portable version of a previous, breakthrough, interpersonal audio-visual dialogue interaction with a warring couple, AR/Fac¸ade  allowed users to inhabit the same physical/virtual space as the drama’s main characters, Tripp and Grace, while wearing an AR headset and a portable computer.  In order to maintain the illusion the virtual characters could not respond with commands like 'invalid input'.
- Three Angry Men (TAM): An interactive experience that allows users to explore the scene from different physical points of view (which trigger character behaviour changes, rather than plot variations).
- "inbox": An AR installation that allowed users to enter a shipping container and trigger short stories about the shipping industry by engaging AR markers in the space.
2) Location based narratives
- M-Views: Users were encouraged to walk around the MIT campus and encounter a distributed and modular, variable order cinematic narrative, embedded about the campus.
- Murder on Beacon Hill: A murder mystery tour of downtown Boston
- GEIST: A similar approach is used to tell the history of 17th century Heidelburg
- Hopstory: Added the option for users to act in their own timeline and move to different locations throughout the building, adding a layer of time and evolution
- The Westwood Experience: The creators used real live actors and physical setups to increase the immersion, alongside computer vi- sion methods for landmark locations.  At certain points the actors broke out of character to explain technical aspects of this Nokia research project.
- The Oakland Experience: A mostly linear audio only tour of a cemetary, with branching mini-stories around single graves.
- [8]: Combined a positional tracking system with a directional microphone to create an unfolding narrative in the changing landscape surrounds of a motor car drive-through (whilst there were some branches, mostly the drive had to be linear, without room for variation)
3) World level augmented narratives
- Alternate Reality Games e.g. 'Conspiracy for Good': Involved both online and offline presence with live actors.  The master narrative was fixed, but players had the option to change the advent, or order of the next story 'beat' which supported the impression that they were changing the story.

These examples often emphasised exploration of real world spaces in order to support both a sense of interactivity and narrative progression.

In order to help guide users through this exploration AR markers were used, as well as non-marker signposts e.g buildings and objects that might be more compatible with the fictive immersion.




Shilkrot, R., Montfort, N. and Maes, P., 2014, September. nARratives of augmented worlds. In 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality-Media, Art, Social Science, Humanities and Design (ISMAR-MASH'D) (pp. 35-42). IEEE.