Synopsis: Four leading figures from the worlds of alternate reality gaming and participatory storytelling reflect on how involving the audience is changing the role of the author.

In 1967, the philosopher Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author.

Thirteen years later, Barthes was himself dead, struck–with delicious irony–by a laundry van on his way back from a lunch party. But had he lived, could even Barthes have foreseen the extent to which technology would erode the barriers between the author and the audience in their quest to construct the narrative?

In the absence of a hotline to the afterlife, October’s Power to the Pixel conference did the next best thing, gathering four contemporary practitioners of participatory storytelling to discuss the state of the medium, and the impact that new forms such as alternate reality gaming are having on modern storytelling.

So what exactly is participatory storytelling? Martin Elricsson of Emmy award-winning production studio The company P proposes a continuum from traditional non-interactive media, through ‘engagement in authored culture’–as embodied by most videogames–to interactivity and, ultimately, true participatory storytelling.

“It’s about who has control of the production of stimuli,” he says. “In traditional culture, the artist has control. The audience just sits back and enjoys it. [Even in media like videogames] the audience just changes the order of a mass of stimuli. It’s like choosing a dish that someone else has cooked.”

In contrast, following the lead of Swedish theorists Interacting Arts, Elricsson proposes a new form of storytelling in which “the real artist is the audience. They produce the stimuli themselves.”

Such an approach blurs the boundaries between fictional narrative and everyday experience. The company P’s own ‘participation drama’ The Truth About Marika spilled out of the TV and onto the streets, culminating in a demonstration at the offices of Swedish national broadcaster SVT. Millions of viewers joined forces to search for the eponymous heroine, played in reality by a “24/7 interactive actor”. As Elricsson notes, “The most participatory [art] form is your own life.”

For an artist called in to ‘author’ such experiences, the script is only the start. In his own presentation, the writer/director Lance Weiler–named one of the ‘18 people who changed Hollywood’ by BusinessWeek–traced the process by which a participatory narrative is constructed.

“We start with three-act structure like a screenplay,” he says. “Then we build a show bible to define characters and rules. [This generates] an amazing depth of information: we know so much about the characters that we didn’t before.”

Weiler describes this process as “not unlike what an assistant director will do to break down a script”, planning how a narrative can be staged, and what data can be collected. The expanded story world enables him to retain “stuff that originated right from the beginning of the process: characters I cut out, dialogue I didn’t put in”.

Finally, there is an R&D phase, in which the project is released to public. By observing the behavior of the test audience, the creators can refine the pacing of the narrative and the ‘character hooks’ to prompt more meaningful interactions. The ultimate aim is to guide the audience through the content in a satisfying way. (Watch Weiler's full presentation here.)

For the artist, this means giving up traditional notions of authorial control. “I’m a writer, but I’ve discovered that sometimes writing has to take a backseat to gameplay to ensure people have the most fun,” comments David Varela, who helped create the successful alternate reality game Xi, designed to promote Sony’s PlayStation Home.

Updated weekly for three months, this “21st-century soap opera” combined elements of a real-world conspiracy thriller with more conventional gaming challenges, drawing 4.5 million people to its online Hub as the story unfolded.

This process often results in narrative more like a videogame than conventional media. Prefacing a diagram of Xi’s plot with the words “fans of the three-act structure might like to look away now”, Varela noted that “if there’s a fun enough reason you can always stretch a storyline to accommodate a great piece of gameplay.”

So does this mean that participatory stories are as ephemeral as the gameplay itself? Asked if such work could hope to last as long as Shakespeare, Varela replies that “it’ll last as long as a /play/ by Shakespeare. It’s a performance, a gig, a one-off. Recorded media is becoming less important. What matters is being there.”

In such a world, the audience does not consume the story passively: its experience of the world becomes the story.

“In my work, people spend 30% of the time playing and 70% socialising. We should be facilitating that social experience,” says Lance Weiler.

Noting that, as with conventional gaming, the audience for projects such as his recent cinema/alternate reality mashup Head Trauma, divides into groups with varying levels of commitment, Weiler called on artists to reach out to their dedicated fans in order to help draw in ‘spectators’ and ‘casual users’.

“It’s about the connections between people,” he says. “It’s about how you harness the hardcore users and engage with them.”

As well being participatory stories, the three projects featured here–The Truth About Marika, Xi and Head Trauma–have one further thing in common: they’re all essentially conspiracy thrillers. So why aren’t there more participatory rom-coms?

For David Varela, the nature of the story is something inherent in the medium itself. “If you have a conspiracy thriller, there’s lots of room for speculation,” he says. “If it’s boy meets girl, there are only two outcomes: not so much to talk about.”

For Martin Elricsson, the matter is less clear cut. “Conventions are still developing,” he says. “Right now [participatory stories] are technocentric because that’s the easy version. But any kind of story can be told as this becomes more part of our lives.”

Elricsson contends that this will lead not only to new ways of telling stories, but better ones: “I’m absolutely suggesting that collaborative media is better than authored material,” he says. “Because [as a power structure] a circle is better than a pyramid. We finally have the technology and maturity as a society to do this.

Ultimately, he believes, this transformation of the audience from passive consumers to active participants in their own experience will benefit even society itself. “It’s hard to go to war with someone you’ve played hide and seek with,” he laughs.

(Watch the Power to the Pixel Conference on Babelgum.)