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Writing Drama for Digital Media

The creative possibilities of writing interactive drama.

Report on an NMK event presented at the TAPS London Writer's Festival in September 2001.

Speakers: Stephen Jeffery-Poulter, Sadie Kaye, Mark Eyles, Richard Fell, Tim Wright

The evening began with an overview by Stephen in which he described the plethora of emerging digital platforms, their defining features and the potential that they have for interactivity. Stephen expected to see important shifts in lifestyle habits and used Interactive TV as an example of how a viewer would choose a more personalised experience, replacing fixed notions of mass broadcasting and scheduling. In response to these changes, we can expect to be targeted by programme makers, advertisers and commissioners in more direct and intelligent ways.

Stephen finished by talking more generally about interactivity and how it has existed long before the advent of digital platforms, pointing out that traditional broadcast has enabled the audience to interact in ways that range from emotional to voluntary interaction on the viewer’s part. The new digital channels simply increase the possibilities for expanding and enriching this interactivity.

Actress Sadie Kaye followed Stephen and provided an example of the kinds of exciting and innovative work currently being done in this area. With a group of actors they have developed www.dinnerparty.tv, an interactive drama based around regular dinner parties. The interactive elements of the drama have undergone experiment and moderation since its launch, with viewers currently able to vote for their favourite guests and make certain changes to future episodes.

Currently Senior Designer at games studio Rebellion, Mark Eyles has twenty years experience in the UK games industry, and regards the development of storytelling as one of the major developments in games design. For Mark, games offered much richer opportunities for interaction than recent experiments in film production. Whereas interactive movies enable players to choose how the story ends or develops at certain stages, in games players can actually shape the world they inhabit.

However, Mark made it clear that although players may enjoy the sensation of interactivity, the narrative structure of many games is more rigid than it may seem. Publishers do not want to spend money on expensive game content that the player may never get to experience, and so levels and tasks are used, which the player must complete in order to progress through the game. In this way, whichever choices players make in the course of the game, they will often find themselves in the same position further on, having traversed through as much as the game content as possible.

There are a number of different roles for writers in the games industry, although they tended to work on either a freelance basis or else continuously on a number of different projects, rather than throughout the entire production process. Important writing roles include: originating the initial game concept and putting together the proposal; writing the story of the game, or the ‘game bible’ for the designers to work to; writing the dramatised shorts that often occur between game levels; writing character dialogue; interactive scripting and interactive plotting.

Richard Fell from the BBC began by emphasising the interactive nature of all storytelling, which he regarded as one of the most fundamental human activities. He then proceeded to outline four types of interactive opportunity in digital drama that were currently being pursued:

1. Branching plots, in which users make choices to proceed through the story. For Richard, this was not an especially compelling development, as human relations and tensions are too complex for these kinds of simple choices, and dramas of this nature can often become stories without narrative, with two-dimensional characters and a lack of emotional realism.

2. Multi-view dramas. Like the interactive features of certain televised sports, the user can operate a player-cam, and watch the drama unfold from the perspective of different characters.

3. Viewer-created drama. For Richard, these types of truly-interactive narrative are still a long way off. Audiences go to storytellers for their storytelling skills, and there are limited inputs that they can realistically give and still sustain a compelling, dramatically complex narrative arc.

4. Multi-platform genre. In the short-term at least, Richard regarded this as the most promising option. As already pioneered in shows such as Big Brother, a range of digital platforms, such as TV, the web and SMS, are used to enhance the drama in different ways, allowing audiences to explore the backstory to the narrative, and make some contribution to how the drama unfolds.

Richard thought there was exciting and innovative work currently being done in all of these fields, but that there were some abiding principles of digital drama that all writers should be aware of. These included:

• Immersion: writers can create worlds with their own logic, peculiarities and sensibilities, into which the audience can browse, explore and make their own discoveries within the general flow of the narrative.
• Participation and ownership: even if the interaction is limited or illusionary, the viewer should have strong feelings of ownership over the drama, and be involved in a much closer manner than traditional narrative allows.
• Community: digital dramas should create technologically-enabled networks of interest, in which members of the audience can meet and interact with other viewers.

Tim Wright began his talk by describing how he came from a print-based writing background, and realised five years ago that digital technologies could be used to tell new types of story. Since then, he has worked on numerous projects and platforms, and experienced frustration and excitement at both a commercial and creative level. Trying to be optimistic, he outlined eight problems with interactive storytelling and then nine opportunities:

Problems

1. Complexity: the work is difficult and requires considerable collaboration, at technical, creative and business levels. Making a story work all the time on all platforms, with a number of revenue partners, is an enormous production challenge.

2. Ignorance: broadcasters and audiences are ignorant of interactivity and don’t see the need for exploring new types of drama.

3. Bad tools: interactive dramas are produced in a multi-platform world, in which hardware, software, middleware and operating systems can all have compatibility problems.

4. Bad business models: how do you make money from interactive content? There are numerous ideas, from micro-billing to sponsorship, but no established model.

5. Big media prejudice: the large media companies are happy to exploit tried and tested genres and products, and convincing them to experiment and innovate is difficult.

6. Audience apathy: large parts of the audience are not interested in interaction, and are content with the standard, passive entertainment forms.

7. Good alternatives: there is a great deal of competition for both the audience and talented writers, from books, film and other traditional forms of storytelling.

8. Timescale: how long can we wait for a mass market internet and broadband uptake? Many necessary developments are simply taking too long for interactive drama to get going.

Opportunities

1. Personalisation: through interaction and data capture, dramatists can create much more personal experiences for individual audience members.

2. Unlike traditional drama, there doesn’t need to be a Big Ending. There are opportunities for creating a mixture of platforms, characters and locations to develop rich, continuous experiences.

3. With interactive dramas, fact and fiction can be blurred in new ways to provoke interesting responses and questions - what’s real and not? When does the drama end?

4. Interactive dramas are less constrained by usual dramatic conventions. Writers can create fluid narratives with their own logic, rules and eccentricities.

5. The user’s journey through the narrative allows for architecture to become narrative, with space used to help tell the story, rather than just time.

6. Interactive stories allow for creative role playing and the fabrication, switching and merging of identities on the behalf of the audience and creators.

7. Unlike passive forms of entertainment, online dramas can create social spaces and connect people together in creative and interesting ways.

8. Interactive dramas can be experienced directly by the end-user, in ways that are unmediated by broadcasters, brands and publishers.

9. There is an opportunity to develop stories with genuine emotional involvement and impact. The Internet can be so much more than pornography and gambling, but it will need writers to get excited about these opportunities and help create meaningful and challenging new forms of drama.