Storytelling in virtual environments - Panel May 17th

Storytelling in virtual environments
May 17, 2008
10:00 AM SLT
Center for Digital Storytelling (@ “Teaching 2’ - NMC Campus)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%202/209/109/23


YHN is in receipt of the following, from Mr Gilbert Sapwood of Brythony

The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) and the Museum of the Person are celebrating the International Day for Sharing Life Stories on May 16. The following day - May 17 - the CDS is proposing a reflection on storytelling in virtual environments in the form of a panel in Second Life. The approaches to this theme will be very different as a result of the panelists’ distinct academic backgrounds.

The pervasiveness of digital cameras made it possible to extend the idea of storytelling beyond the more customary “everyone has a story to tell” to “everyone has a story to tell and the means to do it and share it”.

Virtual environments (VEs) - with their various degrees of immersion - offer yet a new digital platform to tell stories.Games are becoming more interesting than the typical ‘point and shoot’ stories that initially thrived and still do, particularly in some age/gender circuits. These may be kinetically very engaging but fall short as far as ‘plot elaboration’... More recently, the genre that has become known as ‘serious games’ is introducing civic participation and other societal aspects to gaming. At the same time, environments such as Second Life and Croquet are arguably reframing social interaction as a crucial part of the telling process - the teller inhabits the same space and time as her audience during the process - much as in ancient oral traditions. However core ‘affordances” of the medium in oral traditions arguably lose ground in VE, such as the role of tellers as they pass the story along, the need for co-presence in space and time of both teller and audience, and the real-time feedback the teller receives regarding audience engagement. As for the latter, that involvement may be limited by such diverse factors such as degree of identification with the teller, with the audiences’ own representations in the VE, or with a reduced ability to visually express that same engagement.

The level of engagement with a story may differ from the degree of immersion - as in level of sensory fidelity to the real world as far as visual, auditory, and other sensory cues are concerned. In phobia therapy, and when telling a story whose aim is to trigger the right brains; structure, realistic auditory, and haptic stimuli seem, in some cases, to be more important than realistic visuals. In environments used in medical and military training, the goal is to correctly map all sensory stimuli pertinent to the training situation, to the responses.

With games, however, the logic seems to be different. Layers other than realism seem to play an important role in engaging audiences who easily forgive low resolution, mono auditory worlds. In VEs the same tolerance to a sensory-limited world seems to be there, while aspects of ancient oral-tradition storytelling seem to be revisited:notably the ‘passing on’ of the story, the real time/ on site togetherness, and the temporal uniqueness of the telling process.

Mr Sapwood, who has told many a fine story at the Caledon Library Story Sessions and Story Hours, will be the second Speaker.  Further details may be garnered from the Artheric Presence of the New Media Consortium

gentlebeings, your servant

JJD