A view from the outside: my experience at the 2013 Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Research Symposium

Being at the intersection of gaming, stories, computation, and cognition (as my blog’s headline suggests), I often have a research identity crisis, which I suspect (although this has yet to be confirmed) is a shared feeling with other researchers in my field.  This inner confusion does have its advantages; like a chameleon, I can float around different kinds of people and find some language in which to converse.  Such was the case at the 2013 Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Research Symposium, where I was scheduled to talk about my research “Computational Models of Narrative and their Relation to Human Action,” as part of a panel on Gaming.  My “language” was cognition, and (I think) it was the most appealing aspect of my research to the community .  Regardless, there were several takeaways from the symposium that I wanted to share:

• Everyone is working on something related to everyone else

Something I perceived, which was most likely affected by my inexperience in CRDM, was the fact that everyone seemed to be working on topics that were relevant to everyone else.  What was remarkable is that seemingly disparate topics shared a common thread (which was often Dr. Carolyn Miller’s landmark paper: Genre as Social Action).  The concept of genre (I learned) is definitely a cross-cutting thing, and has useful taxonomic properties, as well as historical fingerprint qualities.  The fact that this common thread was woven, I think, was probably due in part to the excellent focus of the workshop.

• Support is overwhelming

Despite feeling I was overly technical, and that my presentation had too much jargon, the response was overwhelmingly positive.  I had several people throughout the presentation nod in agreement, had others tell me afterward that the presentation was well done, and even had one professor approach my advisor to congratulate me by proxy.  I’m sure I’m not the first one to say this, but having experienced it first hand, I think the following is worth repeating: communities certainly welcome outside perspectives.  I think it’s worth reaching out.

• Be precise!

Like Dr. Nicholas Taylor said before delivering his talk at the Gaming Panel, “all games researchers apologize before beginning their talks,” as a way of acknowledging that, because we’re all from such diverse fields, there’s bound to collision on some aspect of research.  I did, in fact, apologize for “possibly offending someone with my research.”  While, at the time, I sincerely doubted that my scientific advances would constitute an offense to anybody, it did help a bit.  Someone called out distinction of the virtual v. the real, alluding to the philosophical arguments relating to phenomenology.  All I meant to highlight was the distinction of video games and non-video games.  Specifically, I was talking about the challenge of borrowing non-interactive narrative concepts to analyze an interactive medium.  I should have been more precise.

• Keynote by Dr. David Herman

Dr. David Herman, Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, was the evening keynote speaker.  His talk was probably the most valuable aspect of the whole symposium, because his research has been highly influential on my own and because we both see narratology as a cognitive science.  In essence, narratives are such a core part of our lives, that we use them for more than just entertainment; we use them for sense-making, for structuring our reality, and for guiding our future action.  These ideas merit their own set of posts, but my ideas aren’t completely formed yet.

All in all, a very fruitful symposium.  I hope I get to invade other types of academic gatherings to gain unique insights going forward!

An account of the Storytelling Workshop at the Albuquerque Comic Expo

My wife and I recently visited the Albuquerque Comic Expo and we both had the pleasure to go to a Q&A session featuring Michael Golden, an American comic book artist, and co-creator of the X-men character Rogue.  He has recently stopped doing illustration work and has focused more on other projects, notably a Role-Playing Game, which he did not reveal.  His session was focused on storytelling, a topic that I am passionate about.  Granted, his focus was storytelling in comic books, but I felt most of his commentary could be applied to other mediums as well  (*sigh* I know, I know, the medium has much to do with how the audience perceives the story, but just let me get on with the blog post.  I can talk about why some storytelling principles are not domain-specific later).  Like most “words of wisdom” sessions, he started out with three golden rules of storytelling:

1.  Cover the basic six points of storytelling:  “Who?”, “What?”, “When?”, “Where?”, “Why?” and “How?”
Michael mentioned that he often became upset when people would talk about a (what he felt was a false) dichotomy between “old-school” storytelling and “new-school” storytelling.  To paraphrase,

There is no “old-school” and “new-school”.  There is only one way to tell a story – if you don’t cover those six basic points, then it’s not storytelling.  It may be (at best) story elaboration, but you’re only telling a story if you cover those points.   You don’t have to reveal all the information, but you at least have to set it up.

2.  Audience perception is crucial:  spoon feed them the facts, or risk them not “getting it”

Essentially, it means that you can’t count on the audience to be smart.  (This is one of the times where it became comic book centric: ) highly abstract symbolism is not welcome when the time to deliver the story is constrained to twenty-two pages.

3.  Know the basic story structure:  Have a beginning, a climax, and an end

Michael went over this point briefly, and emphasized to (for goodness’ sake) “end the damn thing.  Don’t tell the never ending story!”  He also revisited point (2) saying that the climax must be led into – everything must be purposeful and plausibly lead into the next event.  He also mentioned that above all, the ending must answer “why?” questions that are left unanswered.

The session then went into a formal Q&A.  I asked the second question, which (for those who know me and my research work) had a thinly veiled purpose.  I will paraphrase his answer from my notes and memory:

Me:  One of the really cool things you can do with storytelling is play with the expectations of the audience.  In your experience, what are some effective and non-effective ways that you can play with expectations?

Michael:  There really is no “slap-your-hand” answer.  Anything goes.  Because the audience can’t be expected to keep up with everything you are throwing at them, it becomes really easy to spoon feed them false information.  That can also be a burden: if you want them to expect that something will happen 3 pages down, you really can’t afford to be subtle.  It’s almost like “journalistic storytelling”: you have to stick to telling the story in a concise way that doesn’t lose the audience.  I will say though, genre has plenty to do with how you play with expectations.  There are certain tropes and devices that are genre-specific and will often distinguish what will happen next.

The fourth question, asked by another audience member, asked him to comment on how storyboard design differed from the comic-book domain to the video game domain (great question!).  He noted that it was like a “tree” of storyboards, but that all branches should coalesce into one ending. I asked a follow up:

Me:  Often, video game story designers will often playfully complain about the player and how he or she is “messing with the story”.  What are your thoughts on players disrupting a story?  Essentially, players can do whatever they want in the context of the game.

Michael:  You know, I often hear that complaint.  My rebuttal to that is always:  “Isn’t the point of RPG’s to mess with the story?”  Allow the player to tell his or her own story, but be sure to have a great resolution to tie it together, or have the player not make it.  Just as a note, I’m not a fan of multiple endings, because they force the player to go back and replay to figure out what happens, and I don’t have the time to do that.  I try to have a solid resolution to which all players lead up to, and let the player mess with the middle.

The remaining questions were more about the editorial process (which he thinks is crucial) and other production issues, which I wasn’t nearly as excited about.  Still, the workshop was very informative and I was happy that he was very straightforward about the process.  The idea of spoon feeding the audience so they can reason about what will happen next resonated with work in cognitive psychology on inferencing during reading (essentially, readers make inferences only when they are necessitated and enabled – go read the paper to figure the details out).  Also, the simplistic account of storytelling is nice, and I wonder how we might approach it from a computational perspective.  However, while the 5W’s and 1H might be the backbone of storytelling, the devil is in the details.  You can easily reduce most stories to The Hero’s Journey, but what distinguishes Mass Effect from Halo?  The Legend of Zelda from Skyrim?

In conclusion, I felt the workshop was a success.  Like most 1 hour talks, I left with more questions than answers.  Although, I suppose that is the hallmark of a good story.