This week we had a guest Lecturer, Ben Mckenzie, who was from “Pop Up Playground” and a creator of real-life games with a focus on emmergent narrative. He talked extensively about how to construct these types of stories, which I found fascinating.

The issues such as making sure its easily accessible and doesn’t demand too much of an audience were interesting to think about, and dealing with the uniqueness of the audiance being given large amounts of agency and nothing to stop them from doing things not originally considered part of the story and adapting to it on the fly.

The planning stage of “True Romans All” was very similar to our own Story Lab project, with the branchng paths and multiple endings. Except that there’s allowed for much more audiance freedom to break away from the pre-structured story and do their own thing, while ours is contrained to the paths we create. I think the idea of every descion being a group vote was a very clever way of giving ageency to a large participatory audiance while also being simple and easy to understand, and staying relevent to the story.

Another issue that I thought of was that differed between Pop Up Playground’s stories and our own, was that despite the apprent similarities there is a fundemental difference in that ours can be preserved. The file containing the “choose your own adventure” will be reuseable forever, and anyone can be given the physical documents to examine, wheras something like “True Romans All” or the upcoming  “$mall time Criminal$” can only exist as long as Pop Up Playground runs the event can never be experienced again.

This is an interesting concept for me, as I have always admired and appricated art/stories that have no experiation date and disliked things that will one-day become unuseable (for example Video Games with an arbitary always-online connection that will one day be turned off, rendering it useless). This philosphy partially influenced my imput into designing our Story Lab project. But the things Ben Mckenzie talked about were unique story experiences which can ONLY work as one-time things. It didnt change my opinion on peices of media that will one-day become defunct (especially if there is no reason other than publisher control), but it did make me appreciate that “one time only” story’s can be appealing and utilise the advanatages of relying on contiued involvment from the creators, and audiance, to exist.

It was a very interesting lecture, and I would love to experience one of there things for myself.