Congratulations to our Artistic Director, Joe Strickland, who handed in their PhD thesis in March 2022 and graduated on December 14th!
The title of their thesis was "What Opportunities For Storytelling Might Near-future Technologies Offer Creatives, And How Might Personal Data Affect This?" and, if you're so inclined, it can be downloaded and read by clicking here.
Here is the abstract to get a flavour of the topic approached in the thesis, as well as a final chapter that was removed from the original document before its final publication. This final chapter was deemed unnecessary for the examined thesis but draws some helpful conclusions for artists, researchers, theatre-makers, and storytellers looking to make digital work that feels meaningfully interactive or, indeed, has the presence of an in-person theatrical performance. Enjoy!
Abstract
A common feature of storytelling, at least when it comes to a western and classical perspective, is that of linearity. Stories often have a single path through them that the content of the story, the Fabula, is arranged along, with this arrangement of the content of the story, the Syuzhet, often being dictated by a single authorial voice. However, a rise in technology and an audience’s willingness to experience new storytelling methods has helped give rise to more experimentation, leading to the popularisation of audience-controlled linearity and interactive storytelling. There can be tension within this way of telling stories as it is commonly believed that in order to increase the interactive quality of a story you have to reduce the quality of the narrative, with some storytellers and researchers approaching narrative and interactivity as opposing forces.
I believe that, by doing this, researchers and artists are accidentally limiting the scope of the combinations of Narrative and Interactivity they consider when researching these qualities of storytelling experiences. Narrative and Interactivity are neutral and complex features that can be mediated in different ways throughout a storytelling experience to create enjoyment in an audience, one of the main aims of most stories. Perhaps the multi-faceted nature of enjoyment has made reliably researching it seem difficult, futile, or even perhaps unscientific in the past, but using Roth’s (2015) battery of experimentally valid enjoyment questionnaires allows me to examine the enjoyment elicited in responses to an interactive narrative experience in an experimentally valid and appropriately detailed way. This means that I should be able to derive which quantities and qualities of interactivity and narrative create or hinder the creation of not just enjoyment in an audience, but specific facets and flavours of audience enjoyment.
In order to test this hypothesis I had to build an interactive storytelling experience that could vary its amount of Narrative or Interactivity, and it became apparent while doing this that the system that runs this, a branching narrative that presented different video clips depending on audience responses, could also be used to run the research itself, not just deliver the narrative content of the research experience. Using this system, and taking inspiration from my experience with making interactive digital theatre and using magician’s crowd control techniques, such as the Equivoque Force or Barnum Statements, an automated researcher was created to help brief the participants, calibrate the audience behaviour data tracking system, and deliver quantitative and qualitative data collection procedures to the audience. This researcher felt lifelike without the use of complicated AI or machine learning by using a clever mix of simple narrative path systems and a careful anticipation of likely participant responses. The effectiveness of this sort of automated researcher was also investigated as part of this thesis.
I found:
Various new methodologies that have wide uses for different researchers, including the automated research assistant and a way of analysing and comparing digital theatre experiences, called a Dramatography, as well as continued evidence for the use of a Performance Led Research and Rapid Iterative Prototyping a valuable methodology for examining these sorts of creative research questions.
In spite of the theory concerning the balance of Interactivity and Narrative, I found that a narratively rich and meaningfully interactive experience is achievable via a creative, low-resource methodology, that a minimal use of easy-to-measure audience behaviour data is required to create the feeling of meaningful interactivity and liveness, and that the type of audience behaviour data used to create that feeling didn’t have a significant effect on audience enjoyment.
That a majority of participants had positive things to say about the automated research assistant and found the experience of undergoing the research user-friendly in spite of the lack of a human researcher, meaning that a scalable and on-demand research methodology for both complex quantitative and qualitative data collection, with a recognisably human face, is possible.
Conclusion
To conclude this thesis, let’s reflect on what I set out to do and whether I reached those aims. I hypothesised that I would uncover the following:
In spite of the prevailing theory concerning the balance of Interactivity and Narrative, that a narratively rich and meaningfully interactive experience is achievable via a creative, low-resource methodology.
With my work as a stage magician, I was aware that what is required for audience members to believe a complex interaction is occurring maybe actually require significantly less complex underlying mechanisms. I hypothesised that, by using a minimal amount of easy to measure Audience Behaviour data, I could create the feeling of meaningful Interactivity, and that this data can drive a simple interaction system without the need for complicated machine learning or AI, allowing for a low barrier to entry for storytellers regardless of their technological literacy.
These two methods of interactive storytelling can be combined to create a convincing AR/MR/XR experience that feels enjoyable to a wide range of audiences and can convincingly replicate the feeling of Liveness crucial for creating the illusion that this technology strives for.
I also said I would address my identified research gap in the following ways:
Presenting a set of guidelines to allow creative users to understand key qualities of Interactivity and Narrative and how these can be used to achieve particular artistic aims.
Presenting an understanding of how Audience Behaviour data can be used to drive such interactive experiences and how that affects audience Enjoyment.
Demonstrating a low-technology, low-resource method of interactive experience design which allows artists to create a believable digital facsimile of Presence without requiring highly technical development.
In addition to using the proposed design for performances, I use a version of it as an `automated researcher` to perform interviews and qualitative data capture during my study.
To address these in order, my results show that many combinations of Narrative and Interactivity make stories enjoyable, with variations in the quantity or quality of these story features creating a variety of significant changes in the Enjoyment scores across a variety of different Enjoyment subcategories. Likewise, a variety of different uses of Audience Behaviour data can influence these same Enjoyment scores in a variety of different ways. This result reveals the complex nature of the relationships between Narrative and Interactivity, as well as the complexity of how audience data could feed into and augment this relationship. It is not down to the presence of these storytelling features, but how they are used together and how they interact in a variety of ways to influence and impact the multifaceted enjoyability of an experience, with significant features referenced within, and differences between, the Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics of the research experience. This general enjoyability result also supports my final questions and matches my hypothesis, that an augmented reality experience can feel enjoyable to audiences while being made using a simple structured system, and few expensive resources, and can achieve the often elusive feeling of Liveness in an audience or user for both narrative and creative, as well as administrative and practical, purposes.
As a result of the discussions resulting from the studies in this thesis, several guidelines have been drafted that should be of use to any creative, be they researcher, artist, or storyteller, that might want to begin crafting interactive narrative experiences in an efficient and audience enjoyability-focused way. Firstly, Narrative and Interactivity are two neutral features of a story, that in no way have to be in opposition of one another during the creation of an interactive narrative experience. They instead form two key components of a complex mesh of different relationships that affect different forms of Enjoyment in a variety of different ways. There is not a simple solution to which quality or quantity of these features to utilise when in an interactive narrative experience, other than to diversify their use throughout whenever relevant to the story. However, my work in this thesis suggests the following guidelines: Allow the form and the content of the story, the syuzhet and the fabula, to complement each other by use of appropriate Narrative and Interactivity choices. Always consider the user experience with every decision and how that extra dimension could further enhance or hinder the reason for each section of the story. Finally, relinquish the uphill battle of authorial control. As the relationships reveal themselves the temptation for some creatives might be to further investigate them, to nail down the exact details of these relationships, but given their multidimensional nature and the unknowable value that is the audience and the agency they have over the story, it might be a more fulfilling creative decision to stop trying to control the way the audience or user interacts with your work and allow them to play and create their own experience. Give them a structured narrative, but allow them to peel away from it. Give them interaction, but allow them to ignore it. If you allow your experience to become a tool that the audience can do with what they feel then all the aims you have for your story, be they entertainment, enlightenment, or sociality, can still be achieved in a large proportion of your audience, with a whole world of experiences being generated for any audience outside of this group too.
The use of Audience Behaviour data as a way of meaningfully propagating the audiences along one of several multi-linear narrative paths in these experiences has a relationship similar in complexity to that of Narrative and Interactivity, although in a way that might be less significant in some cases when compared to the two former interactive storytelling features. The key with Audience Behaviour in this experience was that my novel interaction method was used for a specific user experience purpose, to make a control system that was organic and natural to use without tutorial or instructions, without making the audience feel like they couldn’t interact with or access the narrative content of the experience without performing alongside it at a particular level. The style of audience data used didn’t seem to significantly influence audience Enjoyment. So long as the data collected fits the form and content of your particular interactive medium, a data-driven interactive narrative can be utilised effectively. If anything, a lack of significance in this result can show that it did not negatively impact the Enjoyment of the experience in a significant way, it merely existed as a neutral quality that facilitated the experience faithfully and appropriately without stealing the limelight for better or for worse. This isn’t to say that the star of your experience can’t be the way of interacting with it, an excellent example of this being the 2021 game Before Your Eyes, where the content of the life of the character flashes before their eyes in a series of surreal vignettes that vanish whenever the player blinks. However, their data-driven control methodology is built as a foundation into the content of the experience and the user experience has been crafted to be difficult and to reflect the fragility of the memories and the preciousness of life. If a player blinks at the wrong time they haven’t failed the game, but have allowed a memory to slip away and that feeling of failure or discomfort is an intended and important part of the themes of mortality and reflection that the experience wishes to evoke. This is all to say that the interaction method, the data collection part of the data-driven experience, shouldn’t be used for the sake of novelty, but can instead used as a subtle, almost invisible, cog in the machine of the experience or the main feature if thoughtfully and artfully integrated into the bedrock of the artwork.
When it comes to creating an effective AR experience, that is to say one that feels pertinent and equivalently present or embodied in the reality of the audience, a key suggestion is to use simpler technology to let you focus on creativity. For example, when aiming for a realistic feeling of human presence in the audience, a realistic simulation of human presence or human intelligence in the experience is not necessary. Presence is a feature of the mind of the audience, the user, the spectator, and this feeling is one that is, from a neurological perspective, easy to manipulate. Whether by creating something that associates enough with reality to be considered equivalent, or something that feels intelligent enough to be conversed with as if real, that feeling of Liveness is within reach regardless of resources and technological literacy. The unusual pilling of bedsheets can feel like a hidden person, a shadow near a curtain can look like the hand of an intruder, and in this same way, the physical presence of a person can be evoked with relative ease in an interactive experience. The intellectual presence might be somewhat harder to achieve, but by the careful crafting and limiting of a conversation that still feels relevant to the narrative of an experience the intelligence of an automated conversation partner can be achieved in a surprisingly easy way; without machine learning, natural language processing, or other artificial intelligences. By utilising Barnum Statements, cold reading, and the particular dominant characteristic of a conversational character, audiences can have an experience that is instinctually reacted to in an equivalent way to that of a real-life conversation, especially with pre-recorded video performances removing any concerns of an uncanny valley effect tarnishing the Liveness being evoked by the experience.
This course of research also created a number of unique contributions to multiple academic and artistic fields alongside the above conclusions and guidelines. The automated researcher, created using the same system as the interactive narrative experience, was an enjoyable and practical experience that could be used to conduct qualitative research on a massive automated scale, operate studies across different time zones, or to reduce the carbon footprint of larger studies by allowing for their remote and on-demand operation. Another contribution is that of the non-linear story mapping and grammar, a surprising contribution given my assumption that a system to formalise the writing of the scripts for interactive narratives would exist when no single widespread system exists that is as easy to construct a story for the author as it is to then read and understand those scripts as an audience, or indeed a performer. My two document system, one that detailed the content of the story and another that exhibits a clear network of its potential navigations that can allow for quick and easy propagation through the different pathways takes this previously complicated way of writing these experiences and simplifies so that even those new to the system can feel comfortable with it with relative speed. Lastly, the adapted Solomon Four Group Design allowed me to conduct my research in a way that didn’t disrupt the artistic execution of the experience and its repetitions. This is a methodology, as well as a philosophy, that I hope is taken up and repeated by other researchers; that a performance-led research project or study should allow for the constant feeding back between art and academia and that, if the artwork is that being studied, then the research methodology should bend to fit around it so as to study the actual use of the experience “in the wild” for the most accurate results, even if this means adapting methodologies previously held as rigid for reasons irrelevant to your proposed use case. Adding these contributions to the results of these studies should help to move even further towards making the telling of interactive stories, and researching these stories, easier, less resource intensive, and with a renewed focus on audience Enjoyment rather than mechanical complexity.
People were always going to tell stories with near-future interactive technology, as they have always done with any technological or cultural advancement throughout human history (Miller, 2014). Those stories would always allow for entertainment, enlightenment, and sociality amongst their audiences. Some would utilise non-linearity and multi-linearity in their narratives, and some would utilise interactivity. Some might even attempt or promise to utilise both. But then some authors might worry about their authorial control and, while trying to make something interactive, make that interactivity meaningless to restrict user decisions to those decisions they think serve their vision for the story best, a criticism of a lot of “interactivity” in the AAA gaming industry. Some others might introduce interactivity as a novelty to attract users without any narrative depth to an experience, or long-term, legacy plan for keeping them as audiences to the medium, as I have seen in the beginnings of the modern resurgence of virtual and augmented reality. Either way, these approaches could cause a surge of initial interest, followed by a drought as the first experiences of these new technologies for many audiences lacked the one thing audiences can get from almost every other existing form of media, Enjoyment. The best tactic to address this, given the variety of ways in which audiences enjoy stories, is to create experiences that can be enjoyed in a variety of ways, as is the case with meaningfully interactive non-linear narratives. However, best practice for these sorts of experiences was limited by developer and research bias concerning the ease of combination of the qualities of Interactivity and Narrative, and the lack of focus on a broad and multifaceted definition of audience Enjoyment from the offset for them to aim for achieving. Another limiting factor was the lack of belief amongst live artists that the feeling of Liveness that is so important to their practice can’t be replicated digitally or remotely in an equivalent way. Finally, in spite of an increase in the ability to do so, a lack of audience data-driven artworks in the data-driven art world complicated these matters further due to the necessity of data collection and processing in making a communicative or interactive system.
It was clear that a niche existed for someone to unite these three ideas; for the counterintuitive relationship between Interactivity and Narrative to be clarified, for digital Liveness to be measured, and for different facets of Audience Behaviour to be used to drive an interactive narrative experience. Now, this niche is filled and not only do I have new guidelines and best practices established for Interactive Storytelling moving forward, but I also have uncovered a beautifully complex and multidimensional relationship space between these qualities. Now knowing how much more there is to know about these key features of interactive narrative experiences, and that discovering this can only be possible through further performance-led research and collaboration between artists and researchers, this thesis has offered an invitation to the rest of the immersive and interactive artists and researchers out there: However simple we’d like the relationships between these qualities to be, however linear, however binary, they are in reality chaotic and complex. However, they are also rich with understanding and importance to the state of the art of interactive storytelling, with many more useful findings ready to be discovered just below the surface. This thesis has been an exploratory exercise in showing the limits of rigid and inflexible research and development, as well as artistic practice, when it comes to conducting research with the aim of helping to foster a fledgeling entertainment medium, one which has struggled to take off for the past few decades, in part due to the gulf between those creating the systems that run the experiences and those creating the content that would populate them. When researchers and artists join forces to develop an entertainment technology or medium, expertise is required in both the technology that drives the storytelling system and the structuring of content to populate that system in order to understand the full scope of the hybrid results. This is a joint expertise that can only be acquired within individuals if they feel able and willing to understand both sides of the coin, both the technology and the artistic practice. This thesis offers up creative guidelines, practical considerations, research methodologies, and an understanding that there is so much potential in the future of this research, which can have an immediate benefit to the inevitable direction that storytelling will continue to develop in.