Stories wanted. People who have a need for stories. People who like stories. People who wish they were in a story. OK, everyone is wanted!
So come on down….my company has just launch a joint venture, Startled Cat, and I can’t help doing a little self-promotional spinning around and waving my arms to get your attention.
Startled Cat is the perfect fit with the broader work we do at Remedy in brand strategy and social, mobile and immersive media. By launching Startled Cat, we’ve got ourselves a studio focused on the evolving and specific discipline of immersive story and its use to facilitate change, community and engagement.
I’ll let the stunning and fascinating press release speak for itself.
Awakening the Storyteller In Each of Us To Meet the Challenges of A New Frontier
Startled Cat Studio to Help Companies, Communities and Causes
Create Deep Customer Engagement Based on Immersive, Interactive StoriesToronto (June 1, 2010) – Real-world change made possible through immersive storytelling – that’s the goal of Startled Cat, a new production company established this week by leaders in virtual world development, broadcast and film production, education, and branding. With the launch of Startled Cat, the company is setting out to be a global leader in fostering talent and creating immersive stories that facilitate positive change.
Startled Cat, dubbed a “Studio for Immersive Storytelling,” will immediately launch with a portfolio of turn-key products, tools and programming for immersive environments. The goal is to provide brands, enterprise and cause marketers with vehicles for creating deep engagements with customers and stakeholders, and to use the power of story to facilitate lasting change.
And then hang tight. I’ll get all meta and conceptual about the virtues of story soon enough.
Hi Dusan,
I’m pleased you’ve publicly endorsed immersive storytelling as an effective vehicle for branding projects. I think you’ll agree this extends into learning and simulation as well. This has been to the successful projects I helped produce at Involve, and definitely a key element to many of the fun, engaging virtual world destinations I’ve seen in my day.
I mean, immersive storytelling is at the heart of any good virtual world – it is, in fact implicit in the setting and the participant. The virtual place provides the opportunity for the setting, and the visitor provides a character. Guests engage in personal stories, which can be written strongly by the content creator (such as MadPeas’ games, where the games are fairly linear and non-deviating, but gorgeous and fun) or could be much more open-ended. (such as with Caledon, where they focus on the setting of a steampunk area, and it’s up to the individual users to write their own, or Cube3′s cross-platform StarbaseC3 brand.) Smart immersive storytelling strikes a balance – it provides a great deal of source material, but at the same time lets the users play and invent. It’s this latter part which encourages them to share with their friends, to spread the word virally, and to evangelize in a way that 1-way viral content doesn’t get. (People talk about a viral video, but people evangelize a good virtual community.)
While I think the concept of virtual storytelling is as old as virtual worlds, I think it’s underutilized and still off the radar of mainstream marketing studios. Storytelling – sure; that’s the core to most TV commercials, for example. But the immersive part is what’s so tricky – how to include the audience and truly let themselves write themselves in, rather than simply consume pre-baked content. I do hope your promotion of it continues to broaden the understanding of the larger advertising and marketing industry on why we need to move beyond traditional mediums for reaching out to customers and consumers.
I think “Startled Cat” is a great name for a company. I like the idea of 3-D interactive story-telling and I think it has a lot of potential.
What I worry is about is whether, ironically, this seemingly more free and open-ended vehicle for engagement in fact doesn’t overwhelm and take over a “reader” of the “story” because it is all so pre-scripted by you consultants.
As you know, I’ve been a critic of Uncle D because there isn’t any room in the narrative and all the construction around it from definitive perspectives to introduce critical discourage about it, challenging the politically correct doctrines about AIDs.
In the swooning mystical setting of Uncle D, it’s all so romanticized that it is hard to stop the tape and say, hey, what about personal accountability for your actions here? And so on. It all has such a prefabricated feel. Those who are already conditioned and like-minded swoon on cues. Those who aren’t just find it all terribly annoying and teleport out. It’s too didactic, and even more annoyingly so because it’s pretending to be free and open. It’s like the entire Sesame Street construct that constantly packaged and delivered a very strict ideology that was impossible to critique within the confines of the interaction.
Everybody knows that without a storyline, users flounder in SL, and can’t figure out what “to do”. They wonder if they should get a job, or they ask where the cool places are, and they struggle. Yet as we know from the Lindens, when given prefabricated high-content themed areas to land in, they didn’t retain any better (i.e. Australian Outback, Caledonian Steampunk) and I think that too much content/story likely is as over-rich an environment killing the newbie as much as the over-complex user interface. And in the case of Uncle D, underneath the seemingly benign and engaging story is a whole worldview perspective (“communities of practice”) that inevitably signals through with propagandistic overtones.
It really is a terribly hard balance to strike. The reality is, most people can’t write their own story; yet they will if you give them a few easily handled props.
hehehe *discourse, not “discourage” — but of course, critical discourse is always seen as something “discouraging” and that’s why it is always push out and sanitized out.
Prok,
I think your comments on striking a balance are astute.
Something else to consider is context. I think one of the problems with the lack of retention of landing areas in SL is that users are coming in via one central channel. Even with choice, these are generic users who may or may not have an interest in steampunk or Australian outback or whatever. A story must be told to a particular audience, and knowledge of the audience is key. In that regard, narrowing down one’s audience helps make a successful story. In practical terms, this means routing people through websites of a particular interest, and making it clear before a person even signs up for an avatar about what sort of experience to expect – else they log on, are confused, and are more likely to drop out.
the storyteller becomes the constructive DM- dungeon master for the old D and D crowd, or “DEN MOTHER” for the new meta SL crowd. Its a complex role offering a contructed narrative “borders” and offering “instructive civic” order via crowd control.
plus due to the nature of online digital media mania, one must keep flexing the “world” into new mediums to keep the ever hungry tech minds active.
storytelling online requires not century updates like the greeks or ancients had, but yearly mediation to stay “fresh”.. the curse and challenge of techmedia online acceleration, and humans now like primitive sharks—needing to move forward constantly of drown while in online waters.
why as the woody allen joke said, we have so many dead sharks…:)
What a fabulous new journey for all of us! Congratulations! I wanted to share some of the work I have been doing expanding Digital Storytelling into immersive worlds with students.
Based on Robert Frost’s poem: The Road Less Traveled, Ramapo NY midde school students tackled the creative task of finding, sharing, and then translating very personal experiences into 3D emotional immersive storyworlds for others to experience their own parallel visual storytelling about CHOICE and their lessons learned. The Storybuilders designed emotional dynamics according to his or her artistic vision providing the Protagonist, you, the player, with complete freedom to interact and choose your own path in whichever way you like. The students had to dig deep for their thinking not where the plot should go, but instead trying to imagine every possible direction it could go and still organize the story in a dramatically coherent way. It’s like drawing a map of your entire imagination, which the player then traverses. Creativity, engagement, and deep introspection into sharing something real in their lives gave this project a special glow for everyone! You can see the Frost StoryWorld in Second Life @http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%206/28/225/21
One closing comment from the kids on what did they learn from the project: Well for an old dead guy he sure knows how hard a teenager’s life can be!
Also creating another 3D StoryWorld with Seminole County Schools FL on tolerance – Can taking actions in schools and communities today stop the history of hate and genocide from repeating itself? The storyworld will be a participatory exploration of decisions made and not made with the stories of the past Apache and present Darfur being compared and contrasted. What will the avatar character decide? This immersive build will be completed at end of 2010 summer!
WOW this work / world is fun — takes my digital storytelling to whole new worlds of experiences both for the authors and the “viewers” or guest characters aka avatars!
Visit the Ramapo Frost StoryWorld on exhibit – let us know your experience with their storyworld!