The Story Lab 2016 – Blog Post Week Nine

This week we’ve been working on our major project, The Barlow Enquiry. At this stage in the project, it’s really coming down to smashing out the narrative – thinking of all the plot holes and making sure none arise, and I’ve got to say, it’s a lot harder than we originally thought. So I guess this post is just a broad update of what we’re working on at the moment.

Like all projects, we don’t know how the audience is going to respond, or how they’re going to assess the information. This is where we are coming across problems – we have to cover ever possibility that someone might think of. Just because we intend that an audience consumes something in a particular way, doesn’t mean they are going to.

Fleshing out the narrative is a task that’s taking up a lot of our time at the moment. Asking questions like, how are these characters related to one another? What drives them to perform their actions? and most importantly, how is that we’re able to solve the case today, when the police in the 1900’s failed to do so? It’s interesting, because throughout this project I’ve been relating the job of a transmedia/interactive author to that of a novel author. While that of a novel author does leave space for audiences to interpret their words differently, they still have much more control over audience reaction. They can tell their audience exactly what’s happening and to an extent, control whether people like or hate characters. Where as, us – the transmedia authors – leave gaps everywhere to ‘hook’ people, to appeal to their sense of mystery and intrigue. How a person responds can be almost unpredictable.

Another struggle we’re facing at the moment revolves around the historical aspect of our project. Obviously having dealing with the predominant part of our story set in the early 1900’s, it means that our “evidence” or “clues” to solve the case are limited in the forms that they take (it’s not like our mystery solvers are going to be able to hack into an email and check out what was floating around the web). Currently, we are deciding what information should come in what forms. Having too much of a particular tangible object could come across boring for audiences, ultimately ending with them opting out of the game all together. Bringing the game into the modern era is proving to be difficult, however we are trying to manoeuvre around with ideas, such as bringing in additional characters that may have looked into the case during the time between the murders and our investigation.

So far through the project I’ve been concentrating on a lot of the visual components on the blog and other social network sites. Continuity over the multiples media spaces is really important to me – I want to keep audiences familiar with each branch of the game.
Wordpress as a whole is proving to be a difficult partner to work with. Not my favourite blogging platform, it seems as though even the most simple of tasks are made difficult by the program. Because of this, forums and tutorials are taking up a lot of my time, however we’re persisting with it as it is a trusted site by many out there, something that they’re familiar with or at least heard of. This is important because it adds a sense of trust in the eye of the audience.