"Sport", "Story", and "Storytelling"

[Kenneth Lu <kenlu@MIT.EDU>]

At 10:20 -0800 1/30/01, Chris Crawford wrote:
>Second, you guys keep tripping up on a common problem: the crucial
>difference between story and storytelling. You can't interact with a story.


At 23:53 +0100 1/29/01, Aa-Tchoo! Translations wrote:
>An important distinction must be made between sport and story. A 
>basketball match is an example of a sports experience and a film is 
>an example of a story. Computer games combine the two. Sports do not 
>have the same kind of structure as experiences we generally call 
>stories, and I think it is crucially useful not to throw this 
>distinction away. Story structure is more planned, generally in 
>accordance with some theory of dramaturgy, whether this be the kind 
>you can learn from a scriptwriting book or something of your own 
>invention.


But in a way, that's exactly what I WANT to blur and disturb!  I 
mean, I guess I'm mostly interested in the "message", not so much the 
"story", much the same way that a painting may or may not tell a 
story, but it usually has a message of some kind.  (How decipherable 
that message is is another story.. :P)  A sporting event doesn't have 
an authored story, (unless it's the WWF..) but it does have a 
discernable interactively created message of some kind.. Don't be 
like East German female swimmers.. be like Mike.. the thrill of 
victory... etc.  (Not to mention more complex ones that verge on 
being interesting non-fiction stories because sports are more 
dramatic than most people's day-to-day life.)

For instance, as I said earlier, I think that simulations don't tell 
much of a "story" per se.. but they do have a "message" of some kind. 
All stories (except really pointless ones) are messages, but not all 
messages are stories.


Now.. What I'm curious about is how we can integrate the "sport" or 
simulation-based messages, which are largely very dynamic and not 
very controlled.. with author-scripting.

How can we take author-written storytelling.. and USE interaction in 
the form of massively dynamic situations.. to send messages (perhaps 
stories) in ways we've never done before?


Am I making any sense?

-ToastyKen

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| Kenneth Lu - kenlu@mit.edu - http://www.mit.edu/~kenlu/ |
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| "Life is far too important to be taken seriously."      |
|                                                         |
|                                          -- Oscar Wilde |
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