A story is the chronological sequence of events and actions as they occurred in time and space. A story simply tells us who did what to whom, and in what order. A story is the raw material of a narrative and it may be told in different ways.

Also known as plot or fabula.

• Events – the point at which things transition from one state to another. Events can be causally and/or chronologically related.
• Actors – characters that cause or experience events. Actors are not necessarily human.
• Time – when the events take place – past, present, future.
• Place – where the events take place – location, environment, setting.

A narrative is the telling (or recounting) of a story. It is the representation of an event or sequence of events. For instance, storytellers have told the story of Red Riding Hood in several different narrative forms, including books, comics, films and websites. 

Also known as storytelling, discourse or sjuzhet.

• Ordering – arrangement of chronological events (e.g. in media res, flashbacks, flash forwards, ellipses)
• Pace – the time of the tale vs. the time of the telling (e.g. real-time, sped up, slowed down or variable)
• Focalization – the point-of-view from which we view the narrative. Where is this point of view located in time and space and does it vary or change during the narrative?
• Narrator – is the ‘intelligent being’ who is telling the story inside or outside the narrative? Is she, he or it omniscient or limited, reliable or unreliable, explicit or implicit? What is his/her/its mood and tone?
• Text – the format or medium used to recount the narrative (e.g. printed text, painted mural, cinematic film, television episode, video game, puppet show, theatre performance, graphic novel, etc.)

Click through for further reading on Definitions of Narrative in narrative theory.

Storytelling

Storytelling has played a starring role in the development of human culture for thousands of years. Storytelling is at the core of religions, communities and civilisations; it provides tribal meaning, offers ethical guidance and explains the world around us.

Most traditional narratives are linear: they have one beginning, one ending, and one path through the story. However the computer age has given us the power to create, tell and disseminate stories with more complex structures. The dissemination part is important because, while narratives with multiple endings and paths have existed in previous ages, it’s only now that we have the interactive tools, such as video games, to let millions of people experience them first-hand.

But there’s a big question around the level of engagement offered by interactive narratives. Do people really enjoy experiencing them? If so, why and what forms? And why do people in this interactive age still like to go into a cinema, sink into the seat and lose themselves in a narrative with which they don’t interact at all? These are important questions for anyone making games or digital narratives, and to answer them we first need to look at how traditional linear stories work.

THE LINEAR NARRATIVE

Most narratives through history have a pretty simple trajectory. They run from beginning to end in a straight line with no choices or deviations along the way:

Along the way, though, most linear narratives make us take a journey of some kind. That journey might involve conflict, points of tension and resolution, tribulations and triumphs, and perhaps a moral message.

There is a ‘classic’ linear plot that appears again and again, especially in mainstream media:

The narrative starts with the setup. As the name suggests, it’s here that the story is ‘set up’ – characters, the setting and the situation are introduced. This situation usually involves conflict of some sort – or the potential for conflict – that will soon drive the narrative.

Soon there’s a turning point where a major change occurs, a point of no return. There’s no going back once this point is reached, and the action escalates from there.

Next we have a series of crises. A crisis is a significant, crucial or unstable time in the story, where the level of tension and emotion increases.

This series of crises (‘rising action’) leads inevitably to a climax. It’s the drama’s highest level of tension and interest, the decisive moment where the rising action reaches it’s peak and then starts to fall again. What happens in the climax will determine the outcome of the whole story. It’s interesting to note though that the climax doesn’t have to coincide with the highest point of action in the drama.

After the climax comes the denouement. This is the final outcome of the work, where all the loose ends are explained or tidied up. This is where the traditional ‘happy ending’ of the Hollywood movie usually plays itself out.

How characters work

Good characters are one of the most crucial building blocks of effective narratives. Characters can perform a range of functions in a story such as:

• Providing the driving force for the plot
• Representing ethical or conceptual states or views
• Providing context, emotion and conflict

Most characters have these things in common:

• They want something from their lives
• They want something within the situation of the story

Characters aren’t usually motivated by passive aims. Even if a character’s aims are negative or nasty, they’re active aims because the character will work to achieve them. In fact any kind of desire is positive for the story’s creator because it leads to action. Desire provokes action, often in the form of conflict: a state when two or more active forces meet with differing goals.

What happens then? Either one of the conflicting forces backs off or the conflict escalates – these points are often the turning points in drama. This produces engagement. We, as the audience, want to see how the character reacts under pressure and how resolution can occur.

Here are the two main types of characters you’re likely to encounter in stories:

• Protagonist – the main character, or driver of the story’s action.
• Antagonist – in literature, the principal opponent or foil of the main character in a drama or narrative, is referred to as the antagonist.

These two characters often provide the ‘conflict engine’ that will drive a story to its conclusion.

Greek Drama – the Three Act Play

Some argue that the plays of ancient Greece provided the blueprint for the kinds of stories we enjoy today. One way that Greek drama has shaped modern stories is in its three-act structure. This structure was first examined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) in his work Poetics (1951). This structure is composed of the following:

• Act 1: Thesis – a proposition laid down or stated, especially one to be discussed or proved, or to be maintained against objections
• Act 2: Antithesis – (from Greek antitheton, “opposition”), a figure of speech in which irreconcilable opposites or strongly contrasting ideas are placed in sharp juxtaposition and sustained tension.
• Act 3: Synthesis – the dialectic combination of thesis and antithesis into a higher stage of truth.

The Hero’s Journey

The mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987) spent a lot of time exploring Greek drama as well as Asian and European folk stories. He was struck by the similarity between stories and myths from around the world, and his hypothesis, expounded in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), was that people throughout time and space tend to enjoy the same kinds of stories, whether they are desert African nomads, Peruvian Indians or New York accountants.

Campbell found that many stories from around the world involve a central hero figure who undergoes a transformation or initiation. The hero leaves or is forced to leave his or her usual environment (mostly ‘he’ though – the model has been criticized for being very male-centric) and crosses a threshold into unknown territory. There, the hero encounters obstacles and tribulations, comes face to face with various aspects of his/herself and comes to a point of dejection and near defeat. About to give up, the hero then gains unexpected support, is encouraged to keep going and eventually makes it back to where he/she started a changed person.

Here’s a simplified visual representation of Campbell’s model:

The model that Campbell developed to encapsulate the universal story shape, the ‘Hero’s Journey’, has since been used by all manner of writers and theorists. In fact, when film legend George Lucas read the book he was so taken by it that he completely rewrote his first draft of Star Wars (1977) to fit Campbell’s model.

Click here to see a clip of Christopher Vogler, script consultant and author of The Writer’s Journey (1998), talking about the Hero’s Journey as it is seen in the film The Matrix.

How do the Greek three-act play model and the Hero’s Journey model fit into our linear story shape?

Greek 3-act

Hero’s Journey:

As you can see, they fit quite neatly. We’re beginning to see how a form that has evolved over centuries is still relevant to people today. There’s a lesson here for writers of multimedia works: there’s something about this story shape that people still find engaging and satisfying, regardless of the amount of control they are given over the interface, story path or outcome.

Digital narratives

We might argue that all narratives are digital narratives. But the early 21st century term has persisted as how to describe a relatively new form of storytelling – that being, one employs some or all of the affordances (or ‘principles’ or ‘characteristics’) of the computer. A digital narrative can be in the form of an app, a videogame, a website, a podcast, a webisode, an interactive television show, or a participatory, responsive art installation.

This is how Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmerman put it in the introduction to their 2015 book Thinking Through Digital Media: 

Working in a relatively young medium, such as what we’re calling ‘digital narrative’, presents many challenges. In some ways it is easier to be innovative in an established domain of practice. Traditional media provide a reliable framework on which to experiment with to create useful and pleasing variations. They provide a well-stocked cultural inventory of conventions, language, genres and cultural references. Any established medium has diverse, elaborate formats and genres that reflect a long collective process of trial and error. These offer the designer many generic and specialized components to draw upon to create a new work.

Many of the communication techniques and conventions of older media have reappeared in digital media. The incorporation or representation of an older medium in a newer medium is known as remediation. 

Remediation describes the way new media borrow from and refashion older media. In their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, David Bolter and Richard Grusindiscuss how digital media is constantly remediating its predecessors (television, radio, print journalism and other forms of older media). They claim this process of remediation is nothing new. In fact, it has been going on since Renaissance times. So for instance, photography remediated Renaissance painting, film remediated theatre and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.

The familiar and practical conventions from legacy media formats can, however, impede the new functionalities offered by digital media. For instance, using a ‘turn the page’ convention on a website means that the user is constrained to going through the pages in a linear manner. Traditional storytelling conventions, as explored in the previous section, also need to be rethought for this new medium.

To address the challenges of creating digital narratives, it helps to be aware of the unique affordances or characteristics of the digital medium. These characteristics offer new opportunities for storytelling.

1. Numerically coded (digitally represented)

Every visual, sonic and behavioural element of a digital work is numerically coded, that is, represented as a sequence of binary digits (Manovich 2001). This means that old media forms, such as text, image, video and sound, can be liberated from their traditional forms of physical storage (for instance paper, canvas, celluloid film and magnetic tape) to exist as numbers that can be transmitted via the network of cables, wires and computers that we call the internet.

Older media are migrating to digital formats, and entertainment and information products are being linked across networked media. Formats that were once fixed and separate, like spoken and written messages, books and games, movies and file cabinets, television shows and telephones are being digitised and incorporated into the new digital medium. This phenomenon is known as media convergence (we will discuss this term and this different ways it has been used, applied and contested, later in the semester). In the meantime this simple YouTube clip with the scholar who coined the term, Henry Jenkins, offers somewhat of an introduction.

2. Modular

A new media object is modular in the sense that it is composed of independent modules that can be accessed, modified or substituted without affecting the integrity of the work. “Media elements, be it images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors, are represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but they continue to maintain their separate identity. The objects themselves can be combined into even larger objects – again, without losing their independence”. (Manovich 2001, 51). For instance, a digital narrative may consist of hundreds of images, QuickTime movies, and audio tracks which are all stored separately and combined together at run time. These modules can be recontextualised, recombined and transformed during the run of the work (Ryan 2006). Contrast this type of narrative to a traditional one, for instance, a painted mural. Oil paints are independent of one another (i.e. modular) until they are mixed together on a canvas. Once they are applied to the canvas, however, they are fused together and can no longer be independently altered without damaging or destroying the work.

3. Variable

Variability is the property of digital works that describes the way their modules can be reconfigured, reorganised, recontextualised and recombined in multiple ways (Manovich 2001; Ryan 2004a). “A new media object is not something fixed once and for all but can exist in different, potentially infinite, versions. This is another consequence of numerical coding of media and modular structure of a media object. Other terms which are often used in relation to new media and which would be appropriate instead of ‘variable’ are ‘mutable’ and ‘liquid.’…Variability would also not be possible without modularity. Stored digitally, rather than in some fixed medium, media elements maintain their separate identity and can be assembled into numerous sequences under program control.” (Manovich 2001, 56)

4. Programmable / Automated

Digital narratives are programmable (Ryan 2006) in the sense that they are able to execute procedures (Murray 1998, 2011) or automated operations (Manovich 2001). “Numerical coding of media and the modular structure of a media object allow the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation and access.” (Manovich 2001, 53). These procedures can be relatively simple algorithms (a step-by-step procedure for carrying out a task or solving a problem) such as changing the colour of a video file, scaling an image, or rotating a three dimensional (3D) model. They could also be artificial intelligence (AI) programs which simulate awareness or understanding of human interaction, for instance, a ‘bot’ in an Internet chatroom that can convincingly converse with a human being. The AI engine of a video game is another example of automation. This engine controls the behaviour of automated game characters, for example, the enemy forces in a strategy game such as Call of Duty. These AI-controlled characters can perform and respond in a limited number of ways, such as running, shooting, and picking up objects, and are only convincing because our interaction with them is highly codified and bound by a strict rule system. In other words, automated characters can sustain the illusion of intelligence and skill only because video games limit our possible interactions with them. For example, we can shoot at an AI sniper but we can’t engage in a meaningful conversation with him. Many of these examples of automation can be described as simulations, because they model some aspect of an object or system.

5. Participatory

Digital works are participatory in the sense that users can change them in a variety of ways: “The digital medium is participatory in allowing an interactor to manipulate, contribute to, and have an effect on digital content and computer processing. Participation combined with procedurality create interactivity, which means that the designer must script the behavior of the computer and the behavior of the interactor.” (Murray 2011, 432-3). Digital works can be networked and thus connect people across space and time (Ryan 2004). Digital works may also facilitate social interaction (Murray 2011), that is, participation with a community of users and/or designers. Jenkins notes that there is “a public desire to participate within, rather than simply consume, media” (Jenkins 2002, para 20).

Conclusion

These five unique characteristics of digital media (numerical coding, modularity, variability, automation, participation) are the primary characteristics that distinguish digital narratives from traditional or heritage narratives. It is useful to use these characteristics when you are creating your digital narratives and to ask yourselves how you might use these characteristics to improve or extend your storytelling practice.

References

Aristotle, translated by Butcher, S H 1951, Poetics, Dover Publications, New York.

Bolter, J. D. 2007. Remediation and the language of new media. Northern Lights, 5, 1–13.

Campbell J 1949. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Pantheon Books, Princeton University Press.

Hudson D and Patricia R. Zimmerman 2015. Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

Jenkins, H. 2002. “Interactive audiences?” The New Media Book, edited by Dan Harries, 157–170. London: British Film Institute.

Manovich, L. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Murray, J. H. 2011. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ryan, M.-L. 2004. “Multivariant Narratives” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by S. Schreibman,R. Siemens and J. Unsworth, 415–430. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ryan, M.-L. 2006. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Vogler C 1998. The Writer’s Journey, Michael Wiese Productions, California.