MIT's Center for Future Storytelling

Looks like MIT is creating a Center for Future Storytelling as a part of their much-venerated Media Lab. The intiative claims to be promoting interactive storytelling, which tingles my ARG sense a little... but if you read the press release carefully, it appears that they plan to focus on technological innovations in making a static end product. A little disappointing if that's the case.

Still, this sounds like a really interesting project, and I'm already itching to work out how to get myself invited on a tour of the place when it opens. My calendar for 2010 is wide open!

Thanks to Robert Rice at Neogence for pointing me to this via VirtualWorldsNews.com.

Comments

[Robert]

You know, after reading this a second time, I realize that this is much like starting a cancer research center and focusing on improving bed comfort in hospitals.

If you go by the principal investigator backgrounds (interactive TV, Robots, Display technology) and the rest of the article on virtual worlds news, it seems like they are going to be trying to advance interactive/immersive technology, and little, if anything, about storytelling and narrative.

[John Evans]

I'm not sure I'd agree with the "static end product" bit:

"By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process..."

This brings up an interesting question; How do we research future storytelling? Do we get smart people to write strange new kinds of stories with existing technology, or do we try to create new technology for telling new kinds of stories, or do we make it easier for anyone to tell stories so we can tap into previously untapped creativity that ordinary people have?

Reading the press release, it sounds mostly like they're focusing on the latter two. Then again, the first option doesn't sound quite so spiffy and buzzwordy; all you do is get smart people together and let them do their thing...

[Andrea A. Phillips]

Well, obviously at this point it's all speculation, isn't it?

But it seems to me they're using a lot of buzzwords -- "interactive," "active participants" -- and then when you scroll down and read about their specific research initiatives, much of it is about making better motion capture and robotics to build better animated characters.

This gives me some real cognitive dissonance. As everybody who ever watched Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith will tell you, special effects and storytelling are entirely different things.

Still, I guess I shouldn't judge until we see what comes out of this. My eyebrow is raised, but I'm not going to write off the whole project based on a single press release.

[Drew]

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to see the PI list on this, too. It does seem like their primary set of capabilities is much more about how to present or produce linear stories than about the more ARG-like, game-like, social approaches that I think would be fun. Somehow I can't see this group getting a conversation about IF or hypertext storytelling going.

Still, there's quite a bit of buzz among students (I'm currently a grad student at the lab) about some of the other potential directions this Center could take. There's also some evidence that Kirkpatrick might be excited about moving beyond linear storytelling and into something else. Wait and see, I guess.