chapter three: notes from the story

So Matt Locke's The Story happened last week. It was really good. About 400 people filled the Conway Hall to listen to people tell their stories or explain how they tell their stories. Everyone listened and laughed and applauded in the right places. In the breaks everyone filed out and drank lots of coffee. Coffee breaks looked like this, in fact: But I won't attempt to tell you about the whole day - partly because there was so much on, each talk was so different from the last (and yet the whole thing hung together so well), and partly because my notes and impressions would probably make no sense. In any case, the nature of the day I'd probably have to extrapolate at length to find a "point" where a lot of the time the only point might have been to tell a good story. So I'll concentrate on my highlights instead. Annette Mees and Tassos Stevens of You Have Found Coney told us about their immersive theatre experience, A Small Town Anywhere. "What do you call it?" I wrote in my notebook alongside their names. Alexis Kennedy of Failbetter Games showed us the inner workings of their Echo Bazaar Twitter game. "You need an organising principle" and "Go mad and hallucinate lizards" are a couple of the notes I've put against their talk. That seems to say more than I possibly could. What the Failbetter and Coney chaps have in common is that they are striking a deft balance between the player/participant driving the story and the interventions the storyteller needs to make to get you to where they want you to go. That choose-your-own-adventure, gaming aspect to their storytelling really appeals to me; at once brilliantly nostalgic and yet at the same time feeling a bit like the future of media (and other stuff). Regular readers of this blog will know of my soft spot for comics. So perhaps it's no surprise that Sydney Padua, author of the Lovelace and Babbage web comics was another highlight. Smart but self-effacing, she showed the crowd how she told stories visually as well as verbally. Her slides were great, too. I was too far away to get any real detail on my iPhone in this pic, but at least you can see that everybody's heads were pointed in the right direction. But my clear favourite was Tim, who read a story about the failure of a marrriage whilst the hero attempts to fool his business partner into thinking a project with Harrison Ford was on the cards. No one seemed able to work out whether it was invented or true, or at least what the balance really was between fact and fiction. Which is exactly how I think the very best stories should be. "Strange synchronicity" and "My moustache is a symbol of my misery" seem to sum it up perfectly, somehow. So I'll leave it there. More eloquent and interesting observations can be found on James Bridle's, Rebecca Denton's, and Vicky Matthews's blogs.

i made a superhero

Using Marvel's create-your-own tool. (If only Dark Horse and those guys had a similar toy.) Henceforth you shall know me only as Strike.

the ecosystem of comics

We've been away this weekend. Even though I didn't have a lot to drink, I was knackered when we got back. I think it's something to do with having an eight-month-old baby to look after through trips out, dinner and all of that. Babies aren't necessarily that well equipped to cope with big changes to their routines. But anyway. So this evening I spent an hour chilling out doing one of my favourite ever things. Which is to start with a comic book superhero on Wikipedia and follow the links to see where they take me. I started with Scarlet Spider (an off-shoot character who becomes the second Spider-Man) and ended up at Cable (a telepathic and telekinetic mutant, basically, as you do). And it struck me that comics have a business model and a model of comms that loads of brands could do well to follow. I know I'm just talking about a very specific strain of (superhero) comics here. But they know their market and they understand how to keep it loyal. It's no mistake that the people within it don't index as consumers, but as readers, fans and obsessives. Check that out on the social gravity chart. And here's just a few reasons why I think that's the case. 1. They are immersive. I don't just mean that a comic is a work of fiction, or immersive in the sense that you might talk about Second Life. I mean how each and many characters have a richly complex and finely detailed personal history and a web of interdependent characters and ideas around them. You gain loads by bringing even a bit of prior knowledge to them. Look one up on Wikipedia, you'll see what I mean. 2. There's a rich seam of iterative, test-and-refine stories. Hard-coded into many different characters is the sense that this is always just one version of the story. There may be parallel stories, or, after a certain time - once a narrative arc has concluded, after a creative team has wound down, or simply when sales no longer make it viable - it becomes ripe for reinterpretation. DC even creates semi-regular cataclysmic events by which its entire universe hits a reset button, allowing its characters to re-experience old events in new ways, or to explore other narrative possibilities. 3. There are so many touchpoints, and they are all same but different. There are the comics themselves (and if it's a big character, there may be several titles running concurrently), merchandising from children's toys to collectors' models, console and arcade games, free Flash games online, fan fiction, and (again if it's a big character) cartoon animation and film. Each touchpoint plays to its own media's strengths and is self-contained, but at the same time gains in richness with the fan's intimacy with other references. And I thought, it'd be great if other products could steal some of this. So, yeah. (Pic courtesy of this person).