In most cases, we use the term "digital storytelling" to call attention to a balance between an historically grounded, human-centered appreciation of good storytelling skills and a sophisticated grasp of the creative potential of a new set of digital tools. Practitioners of this art form include anyone concerned with producing creative work on a computer who has a high appreciation of the narrative arts

(poetry, storytelling, theater, fiction, essays, film) informing their design. Most of us realize that a good story tends to work no matter what the medium. The "digital" distinction will become less and less relevant.

Using Digital Tools to Tell Stories

As we have found in our own work with digital video, digital media give artists a richer and more flexible palette for creativity at a much lower cost than analog equivalents. As multimedia trainers and educators, we believe digital technology is an unparalleled medium for encouraging a person’s initial foray into storytelling and narrative literacy. Toward enhancing this tool set for both professionals and consumers, the digital storytelling community is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the developers of storytelling software and hardware applications. Over the years, we have participated in product development discussions with several companies including Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Iomega, Adobe Systems, Macromedia, and Radius, Inc. We have also had specific collaborations with independent software engineers.

The Digital Storyteller in Performance

Theater and the performing arts in the 20th century have integrated every available communication technology—from the use of recordings to state-of-the-art multimedia—while traditional storytellers have generally remained at the low-tech end of the innovation spectrum.

Perhaps as a result, Dana Atchley's Next Exit is a singular example of the integration of interactive media and the traditional performance storyteller. We are aware of a few other efforts—notably the work of rock musicians Todd Rundgren and Graham Nash—to create one-man shows. But no one else has extended the form while maintaining the feel of the storyteller to the degree that Dana has.

Beyond the context of traditional storytelling, there have been many artists and organizations that have explored digital applications in theater. Many artists have developed their work side-by-side with the engineers and technologists creating the newest tools of the Information Age. New York’s Laurie Anderson and San Francisco’s George Coates Performance Works have pioneered addressing the impact of the Internet, distributed computing, and virtual reality. We have also seen a steady stream of work in new media and performance emerge from NYU, MIT Media Lab, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Hypertext

Since the early sixties, the goal of one segment of the information technology research community was to create a hypertextual environment to assist in the tasks of citation and referencing—an essential part of academic activity. The World Wide Web developed many of its principal features from the design lessons developed by the hypertext community.

At the same time, a number of academics interested in the potential literary applications of hypertext began collaborating on creating content. Since the mid-eighties a number of hypertext novels, essays, and short stories were created, exploring a broad range of content. The hypertext movement also developed a series of tools and aesthetic principles to inform their work.

Our community of digital storytellers has only recently begun a more active dialogue with the hypertext community. Eastgate Systems in Boston has remained the center of both publication and dialogue about the hypertext community, and a visit to their Web site (www.eastgate.com) is a great way to learn about titles and the issues in the hypertext community.

Interactive Digital Storytelling

The advent of laserdisc and CD-ROM technologies ushered in the era of interactive storytelling through rich multiple media. CD-ROMs have been associated primarily with the computer game market. While games undoubtedly have narrative attributes, we have only met a small number of game developers that view the narrative concerns of their work as more than trivial. The success of Myst demonstrated that significant attention to story could make a huge difference in how an audience responds to the "puzzle" aspects of the game.

A large number of academic and noncommercial artistic efforts have created CD-ROMs with specific narrative concerns—and a few have found their way into the commercial arena. Abbe Don created We Make Memories, an extraordinarily rich exploration of four generations of women in her family, as an interactive laserdisc installation. Abbe shares our interest in stories from the personal archive. Pedro Meyer’s I Photograph to Remember, one of many excellent narrative works published by Voyager, Inc. between 1991 and 1996, documents Pedro’s parents’ final struggle with cancer. It remains one of the most emotionally compelling stories of this form.

We also count as colleagues Greg Roach and Jon Sanborn, who have developed a number of commercial titles that explore interactive video. Greg’s Quantum Gate titles—and most recently the development of the X-Files CD-ROM by his company, Hyperbole—and Sanborn’s Psychic Detective CD-ROM push the use of film/video on a CD-ROM to the limit. We have been particularly impressed by I Am a Singer by Megan Heyward, Mauve Desert by Adriene Jenik, and, most recently, Ceremony of Innocence (an adaptation of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine trilogy) by Alex Mayhew.

In all of these interactive narratives, like their hypertext equivalents, navigational design is a critical part of their aesthetic success or failure. The more artistically successful have a consistent navigational mechanism for the users to stay in touch with the story arc—such as the ability to see the story as a linear event from beginning to end. They also tend to create a dialogue with the user that deepens or extends the user’s emotional connection to the story line—either by calling for their direct participation as characters that can shape the story’s resolution, or in inquiring about the users response to material that is presented.

Web-based Storytelling

The Web has mirrored the hypertext and CD-ROM multimedia authoring worlds with a myriad of different narrative experiments. There are purely hypertextual works, works that use text and a minimum of images, and increasingly media-rich work that approaches what has been done in the fixed media arena. Many of us point to Joseph Squier’s "Life With Father" as an early, but inspiring example of a moving and effective Web story.

A couple of phenomena have dominated the storytelling uses of the Web. The first is the Web serial, essentially a soap-opera format Web site, with daily or weekly updates. Yahoo! lists about 120 Web serials. The first major serial of this genre was "The Spot," a look behind the lives of some youthful Southern Californians, aimed at the "Baywatch" or "Melrose Place" fan. There are ways for the audience to interact with the story line, or in the case of "The Spot," with the characters. Jon Sanborn recently launched his "Paul Is Dead" Web serial, a complex mystery that invites the users to uncover the truth behind the death of a rock star. The interactive television market will be developing more of these serials as ways to extend the brand of existing television or film projects.

The other storytelling phenomenon that has drawn our attention is the Web diary. Justin Hall’s Links is one of the better known examples. For more than four years, we have been able to follow Justin’s daily life and interact with him. He has traveled the country as an evangelist and trainer for self-publishing on the Web. Hundreds, if not thousands, of diaries exist. Many of the sites blur the boundaries between thoughtful literature and exhibitionism, fiction and nonfiction.

Part of the Internet’s allure is the fluid sense of private and public it creates. The posting of intimate aspects of life stories invites intense, and often dramatic, interchanges between authors and their audience. Sites like Derek Powazek’s Fray approach this with artful intentions, curating personal essays on many sensitive topics that directly invite readers to respond with personal stories of their own. This type of storytelling interaction encourages community, connecting diverse people through shared experience.

Multiplayer Role-playing Games
— From MUDs to Virtual Reality

Many people have explored the narrative potential of online role playing. Role-playing environments encompass everything from the text-based multiuser dungeon (MUD) and the object-oriented MUD (MOO) to online virtual worlds using character avatars like The Palace, to more sophisticated explorations of virtual reality where three-dimensional controls are linked directly to the player’s physical movements through VR helmets and gloves.

All of these forms invite a level of conversational exchange, which can include sharing stories in-character. Playing the games inherently requires a strong sense of narrative intelligence: how to portray and sustain a character, how to develop a situation to a crisis and resolution, and so forth. The dramatic success of a given experience—or a long-term relationship to the game—relies on the improvisational skill of the players, the situations in which they find themselves, and the robustness of the virtual environment’s interactivity. At the current state of technology and user sophistication, many of these environments remain at a level of awkward social interaction—chat with pictures—that does not encourage prolonged or serious participation.

The designers of these environments are increasingly aware of how story structure enables them to heighten dramatic tension. All of the more successful environments involve a metastory—a larger goal or activity in which the participants are simultaneously involved, from community building to defeating an opposing force.

Janet Murray of MIT has suggested in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, that the authoring of these virtual worlds leads us precisely to the territory of the new aesthetic development of cyberdrama. While no specific environment that meets all of her requirements for cyberdramatics currently exists, she outlines the elements necessary to successfully implement an authored world. These include conventions for interaction and rituals of participation; a complex and media-rich world that sustains a constant injection of plot material; and sophisticated computer-generated characterizations that make the players’ interactions continuously unpredictable and spontaneous.