Emmett Furey, writer, designer, and transmedia producer, is the author of Narrative Evolution, a series about the evolution, semantics, and the discourse of narrative. http://emmettfurey.com/. Michelle Pauls and Tony Errichetti join him in the conversation about how participatory storytelling works to involve participants in the creation of live, interactive narratives. Follow the Narrative Evolution series on Narrative Mindworks.
Emmett Furey: I bill myself as a writer and a narrative designer and I guess, participatory storyteller. When I was in Philly, where I grew up, in, in college I was studying to be a writer for traditional Hollywood. That's how I met Michelle, actually. Michelle acted in a feature that I wrote and directed a digital feature at Drexel, where I went to college before I moved to LA, still allegedly pursuing the same thing. But along the way, I sort of organically stumbled upon interactive or, as I've been calling it, participatory storytelling.
In those earliest days, it was me using a social platform like Twitter to make social media accounts for the fictional characters in the web series that we were making and me playing them live or in real time on the internet, as well as me talking to myself as the characters and me talking to the fans as the characters and sometimes encouraging the fans to make their own role play characters and tell their own stories in this way. It's sort of run in parallel, in tandem and overlapping with the story that we were telling. And from there I went into a lot of related areas, and did some worked in tabletop role playing games.2 I was a writer on a live stream tabletop RPG 3 show called Vast, which was put out by legendary Geek and Sundry,4 when they were trying to double down on the success of Critical Role, which they're sort of a big flagship RPG show. And I've also done some work in video games. I was on the creative team at ingress, at, Niantic for three years. And I was a narrative designer on a project called Silent Hill Ascension last year when I discovered this kind of storytelling. I figured out that I like it better than traditional sort of lean back media, and I that I’m better at it.
And so it was one of those sort of discoveries where I don't feel like I failed to achieve my original goal. I think I found the goal I didn't know that I should have had.
I was at an immersive conference a couple of years ago. And I was struck when we did some breakout groups doing a big group session. And there was a woman in the group who came from a more traditional narrative background and not this kind of participatory work we do. And she said she was so struck by how much each of us, in talking about what we do and crafting this kind of participatory work, are focused on the audience, how much audience-focused it was. And that was a big moment for me, honing in on my philosophy about, from my perspective, it's all about the audience and much less about the story I’m telling, which is why I call this philosophy anti-auteur 5 and audience first in the sense that we're creating a different experience for each audience member and they're sort of an active participant in that via the way our consciousness works.
There's a lot of interactive work, digital or real life, where you literally can take on the role of a character in the diegetic 6 world of the story. And that may be my favorite kind of participatory work, but I wanted it to encompass things like Sleep No More, that great immersive show that just ended finally in New York, where you're not really in the story, you're still kind of a voyeur, but the agency you have is to control some aspects of how you experience the narrative. In that case, your ability to sort of wander freely throughout the space as the performance happens around you. So you're not locked into that one seat and one theater where the only scene you're seeing is the curated series of scenes that a traditional theatrical event would, would show you.
Michelle Pauls: So your work here, I have this question. What kinds of stories lend themselves to this kind of storytelling? However you're talking about it, like live theater as well as digital and anything else in between. What are you most drawn to and why?
Emmett Furey: I think I'm the most drawn to work that, unfortunately, is often some of the most difficult for sustainability and monetization historically, but things that have the highest degree of participant agency. So not only where you get to play a character as part of the story, but like in a LARP 7 or a tabletop RPG. The story is really crafted around players, like every other sort of character that the GM 8 plays or NPC 9 that people play at the at the live-action roleplaying event, everything they do and say is to facilitate the players being the center of the story. So it's really a different angle on storytelling. Instead of writing what the heroes do, you're sort of crafting an experience where you sort of carved out spots for the participants to be the heroes. And so much of what they do is become what the heroes do.
Michelle Pauls I was just going to say, does that mean that since the participants take on these various roles, that the themes that emerge come from their hunger to see the action rather than the writer saying these are the important themes that we need to discuss? So the themes come out of the participants and the ideas, the notions.
Emmett Furey Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a bit of both. It's definitely a collaboration. But sometimes a good tabletop game master or the runners of a LARP will sort of convey the tone or genre that they're going for so people have a place to start, but that doesn't stop people from kind of going off script and doing whatever it is they're going to do. But I definitely found in some of those early online text- based role play on social media and then in a lot of other role-play environments, part of the joy of it is that people don't know what they're going to do, and you have to pivot as a storyteller. And honestly, most of the time, the thing that results because of the unexpected input from the players is a better thing than what you as storyteller imagined, or at least different, and at least something you couldn't have predicted it. You hear a lot that traditional writers sometimes say, like, the characters. I became like, sort of a cliche at this point, I was a conduit for the character, like the character was real, and I was just putting their words down. This kind of work is the closest I've ever seen to that because it's an actual conversation. Like some of the characters in the scene, I'm not deciding what they're saying. So in a way, you have to assume the character, in as much as that's possible, to take in what the other character is saying and, craft their response on the fly.
Tony Errichetti. So if you're running this story multiple times, you're just going to have different outcomes, I guess, depending upon what the participants bring to it.
Emmett Furey Yeah, that is pretty great. When I run stories at LARP or tabletop, I tend to have them be bespoke in that they happen exactly once. But there's a reason tabletop role-playing games sell, what in LARPing and RPGs call modules rather than a script because it sort of creates a framework for what the experience would be. But 100% if you run a published module or a module that you wrote yourself multiple times just with different people, or really even with the same people playing different characters, it can go in totally different places for sure.
There's a guy at academics, John Cage, and he said a thing, which is an interesting topic for discussion. He said something to the effect that since the conscious human brain of the participant is so much of the experience that they have is crafted by them, how does it tie into their own past experiences and how do they feel about what's happening based on those things? Because consciousness or conscious experience is subjective, so is our narrative experience. And no two people have the same narrative experience of the same thing.
He went so far as to say that because so much of it is based on the audience and what they bring to it for the creation of their narrative experience, he said the less we do as storytellers, and the more we make the work unstructured, like things that could happen in life, the more impactful and engaging it could be. And I do feel like at a certain point the less structured it becomes, the less it becomes art. Then it's just everyday life and then you're just saying, like everyone living a life is like interaction with a person is a scene because we're performing for the people in it, which, I mean, that's a conversation you can have. But I do think there's a fine line. I definitely think of LARP and role playing as a collaborative art, but of its own variety. And, you know, interesting thing is, it's no less work to create that art. It's just shifting your focus in what you're doing instead of building these sorts of hooks and end points for the participants. So in a way, the less structured it is, the more work you have to do because there's so many things you need to account for.
Michelle Pauls Kind of reminds me of structured improv because I have done that too. And you have to have guideposts along the way and you don't know really where you're going to go, but you know you need something to get there, especially if you're doing issue driven improv, for a client, say. They want to talk about their values and their company, and you can't just be willy-nilly and go anywhere. But they want it to be live and of the moment and there's that interactive, part with the audience. So it reminds me almost like that, but a different focus. So the players are suspending their disbelief.
So can you tell us about the audience? Are the players the audience or is it a separate audience?
Emmett Furey That's an interesting question. In more recent years, tabletop role playing as a spectator sport has become a thing, in part because of shows like Critical Role. It's a sort of live streamed RPG show where they played historically Dungeons and Dragons. And this really talented voice actor name Matt Mercer and his really talented voice actor friends, will play Dungeons and Dragons, and part of the reason that that's so compelling when it's really meant to be a thing you participate in and not sit there and watch is because they give you this level of performance and accents and acting that, you don't usually get at your tabletop games at home and isn't usually the point. Part of the point, historically, is that it can be anybody and no one needs to be intimidated or worried that they're not a good actor because no one expects you to be. So there has been a bit more, you know, it is a spectator sport, but generally speaking, it's more like the audience is the participants. Or there isn't an audience, depending on how you want to frame that. And some of the other work that I talked about is that it sort of hearkens back to the practice of ritual, which was all inherently participatory and also transformative by design.
Tony Errichetti So I guess this refers to your idea of the anti-auteur approach where what really counts is the participants, their point of view, and not necessarily the story that the creator is trying to impart to a passive audience.
Emmett Furey You know, oftentimes you have to be able to, as if you're a good kind of a participatory storyteller, pivot and not be so hung up on how you expected or intended the things to go.
Michelle Pauls What is the difference between those two models? The one where you sort of have an end in mind, and the one where you don't have any end in mind? What is the satisfaction, for the participants, in each of those? Because I can imagine these participants come and they have something that they need. They want to get satisfied by this work. We go to see theater and we maybe know the play, and we want to have a catharsis and, you know, breathe together. All right. What is the need? What and how is it satisfied in each of these two models?
Emmett Furey It can be escapism, like any kind of entertainment. However, you know, the term role playing I know emerged from psychotherapy originally. And I LARP with some therapists who say rightfully that this kind of role play is not a sufficient replacement for proper therapy. Nonetheless, sometimes it can be an avenue towards learning more about yourself by playing someone else, or learning more about other people or experimenting with things that in your real life are scary to you in a fictional space. Or maybe, you know, you can grow some.
Tony Errichetti It's like what writers have said that, you never know where the character is going or open on the page anyway so the character that you've created, taking you anywhere, you're not necessarily trying to control the action. You want to be open to what's coming up in you.
Emmett Furey I think the there's a concept in LARP that's sometimes referred to as “playing to lose” 10 or “playing to lift.” 11 And certain audiences of games, especially Americans, tend to play games to win, as if there is a thing to win. But role playing is a different animal. A lot of times I prefer it to as a player or as a storyteller when sometimes you engage in what's called “steering” where I'll make a decision because it's the most dramatically interesting, not because it will have a good result for my character sometimes. Like, oh, this will make a good story. And that's a different mindset. Playing to lose. That doesn't always have to mean your character can never have triumphs, it just means we're all telling a collaborative story together. So I think it's important for participants in that to recognize that sometimes what's fun for you isn't fun for the other people in a scene. And being aware of that and, and in LARP and role playing, there's all sorts of safety mechanics you can engage in and build things to indicate like, hey, this is this is an area I'd rather not go to in the role playing out. So, there's a lot of being aware of the other people and realizing that we're telling this story together and it's meant to be fun for all of us. And then there's other elements, too, or some people saying “well I was just doing or saying what my character would do” to be an excuse for bad behavior or an excuse for them to take out some of their frustrations in their life outside of the game. Hit the game and exert power over people in ways that they don't have and it's a little toxic. And that's something that also needs to be sort of managed.
Michelle Pauls So is there time for reflection? Is that built in after a section or after a game period? It is a reflection for where people who want to talk about, well, this is how it occurred to me and this is how I felt when I did it. And this is how I feel now, is. Do you do that?
Emmett Furey I think some LARPs definitely build that in where there's some structured period of reflection afterwards. It happens whether you designed it in or not, but I think it's a good design practice. We don't have it super built into one of the LARPs that I'm a part of. The LARP runs from Friday night to Sunday morning, eight weekends a year at this place. And so people are camping. I say it's sort of like nerding man because it's the same impetus to go out and camp and do a thing over a weekend and like, don't get a lot of sleep and a lot of people that are doing something collaboratively, it's just rather than listen to bands or whatever, it's you know, it's putting on elf ears and telling a story. But Sunday morning tends to be everyone's breaking down and then they're in character spaces and packing everything up, and the and you're driving your cars back onto site because they're explicitly not allowed in there, you know, for like, immersion breaking purposes over the course of the weekend. And so there is plenty of, of, you know, discussing then out of character, some of the things, you know, telling people stories about things they weren't there for or, or commiserating over things that you did together as characters. It's also a pretty active community. And then right then sometimes people have what they call “afters,” which is like big groups go to different restaurants, to eat lunch and then we have, what we call “decompress” or “decompression.” Like this Friday we had a game this past weekend. So this Friday we're going to go to a local bar, but not all, but like a bunch of us, you know, and just and continue, so like the community exists outside of it. So yeah, there's a constant sort of negotiation. You know, like, in a way, until the event is over, it's hard for you to narrativize it to figure out what your character story was. But then you then you do what we do in real life, which you remember the stuff that's most important and most relevant to you, and you weave it together into a story.
DEFINITIONS
1. Participatory storytelling – A method of working with people and their stories. It’s an idea that involves people contributing to the construction of a story.
2. Tabletop role-playing - A classification for a role-playing game (RPG) in which the participants describe their characters' actions through speech, and sometimes movements. Participants determine the actions of their characters and the actions succeed or fail according to a set formal system of rules and guidelines. Within the rules, players have the freedom to improvise their choices shape the direction and outcome of the game.
3. RPG - May refer to role-playing game, which is a video game genre where players take on the role of a character in a fictional world and interact with it through narrative or decision-making. RPGs are often set in fantasy or science fiction environments and may involve character development through statistics recording. Some examples of early and popular RPGs include Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), BattleTech, and Star Wars Galaxie
4. Geek and Sundry – Geek & Sundry is a commercial YouTube and Twitch channel and multimedia production company.
5. Anti-auteur – The anti-auteur movement is a reaction to the auteur theory, which suggests that a director’s vision present in every frame of the film. Auteur theory also suggests that directors can influence the artistic direction of their films.
6. Diegetic – Diegetic means relating to the world of a narrative or film, and anything within that world is considered diegetic. In film theory, diegetic refers to the world depicted on screen, and anything within that world is diegetic. This includes dialogue, road signs, and other elements that establish a location. Anything outside of the diegetic world is extradiegetic, such as voiceovers or captions.
7. LARP – An acronym for Live Action Role-Play
8. GM – Game master
9. NPC - An acronym for "non-player character." In video games, NPCs are characters that are controlled by the computer, rather than the player, and have predetermined behaviors that may affect gameplay. NPCs are not usually meant to act like real people. For example, in Halo, Cortana is an AI that accompanies Master Chief, the player character, throughout the game, but is not controllable by the player. NPCs can be neutral, followers, or adversaries, and may change behavior depending on the allegiance of the player character.
10. Playing to lose - A technique used in collaborative play to create drama by intentionally letting your character lose.
11. Playing to lift - Means that the responsibility for one’s drama and their character also rests on all one’s co-players, where all have to lift each other.
