Creative Writing in New Media

 That Dragon Cancer

When game designer Ryan Green and writer Amy Green’s third son, Joel, developed an Atypical Teratoid Rhabdoid Tumor (AT/RT) shortly after his first birthday, the Green family was thrown into another world. Ryan decided to tell their story in the form of a game. Using voicemails and messages from the struggle with the disease with a distinctive blank-faced animation style, the game creates a textured representation of their family ordeal.

Why is this game important?

That Dragon, Cancer is an award-winning example of a genre called a “serious game.” A serious game, according to computer scientists from the University of Toulouse, France, is any games whose purpose is not purely entertainment. Traditionally, serious games have been used in education, training, healthcare, and other fields. That Dragon, Cancer, however, falls into the literary/memoir genres (which are not categorized as “entertainment” because… I don’t know why; the same reason “Science Fiction” and “Westerns” are not classified as “Literature & Fiction” I guess).

That Dragon, Cancer has a short play-through and its interactivity is less fully developed than in most commercial console games. The story unfolds in 14 successive chapters. The storyline is tightly controlled and several scenes end with the kinds of forced failures that can feel manipulative in a first-person shooter or adventure games, but which are part of the story and the impact the designer hopes to create. The explorable worlds presented in the scenes include three types of discoveries: the narrative elements are often presented in the character’s own words: a voice message from Amy to Ryan reports her frustration with the lack of a diagnosis or an overwhelming scene where the player points to representations of Amy, Ryan, and two doctors on a child’s See ‘N Say to literally spin out the news that Joel’s cancer has returned, there are no more treatment options, and that the hospital is “very good at end of life care.”

The interactivity is not, as a cynic or skeptic might assume, gratuitous but where used successfully — in my interpretation, anyway — brings to mind Poe’s charge to have a single effect upon the audience. Mixed in with the scenes of anxiety and sadness, there are scenes of bliss that spark hope. Some of the interactivity is pure escapist — like when the player and Joel hijack the red cart used for infant chemotherapy and careen around the hospital floor in a go-cart race. Other moments are smaller, like turning the camera case toward the hospital crib and seeing the 2-year old version of Joel (who the doctor have diagnosed as deaf) bouncing up and down to music,

Is this the best way to tell this story?

There are “single effect” moments created by the interactivity that would be much more difficult to achieve in other formats; the two most effective are two of the “forced failures.” It is the forced failures that perhaps give the user the greatest insights into what the Greens are trying to communicate about the emotional roller coaster of pediatric cancer. In the first, Baby Joel is carried away by a bouquet of helium-inflated into space. The user’s task is to avoid the thorny objects that pop the gloves. But this is a forced fail because the only way to move forward is for all the balloons to pop and for Joel to fall.

The other forced fail comes in a scene that looks straight from 1980s era arcade game where Joel heads off to slay the dragon, accompanied by Tim, a young man from the Green’s church that we have learned has already died from cancer. Here again, we know we are fighting a battle that will be lost — we know because Tim is already dead, and doctor after doctor have told us that there is no hope for Joel; and yet, even knowing they will lose, the player is compelled to fight on until their lives are lost.

The drawback of telling even a purposefully designed story in this format is the reliance on functioning technology and a savvy user. I played this on both the PC and through an iPad app. It functioned much more smoothly on the PC, and that was central to the story experience. Late in the game, you are trying to calm Joel and nothing works. At first, I appreciated the unflinching look at what it is to be with a very sick child, but after trying everything in the digital space several times, it seemed clear something was wrong. As I say, at first I thought the single effect the scene was going for was the overwhelming helplessness of not being able to offer any comfort (and I am certain that was the point), but after several more attempts to get out of the scene, I saved my place on the iPad, moved to the computer, and played to the end of the scene successfully. This is not a problem I’ve ever had with a book.

What I learned from this text

As I will doubtlessly write about in a later post, a large percentage of game narratives are based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. In part, this is because — as Campbell says — many stories are based on that pattern. However, another major reason for its popularity is that The Hero’s Journey is taught as the formula for a successful story in most film and game programs. That Dragon, Cancer represents an evolution beyond that basic recipe.

Over the last few years, it has not been uncommon for me to hear a YA author or an aspiring YA author to lament that no one is interested in publishing their work unless it is part of a trilogy. This complaint is usually made with the grave shaking of the head and an implication (unstated although much more often stated) that publishers are not interested in literature these days so much as they are interested in a franchise. The publishers are not, these authors claim, looking for the next To Kill a Mockingbird so much as the next Hunger Game or Divergent series that can be packaged and repackaged as movies, TV series, games, or toys.

But what if it turns out that this mania for series and the ubiquitous YA trilogies is not driven by a publisher’s attention to a bottom line (well, maybe just not entirely driven by that) as by actual changes in the expectations of the audience? What if today’s younger and maturing audiences are actually demanding not only a good story or an interesting character but their expectation of literature is that it affords them a playground with space for them to interact?

In The Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins quotes a Hollywood producer who noted that, when he began, he looked for a good story; then he began looking for an interesting character that could be at the heart of a series; most recently, his holy grail is an intriguing storyworld that can not only accommodate the original storyline, but stories that go back, forward, and run parallel–places like the Star Wars universe where the studios have not only taken us back in time from the original films and forward beyond them, but into the side stories and crevasses of story that were once throw-away lines in the original.

It is easy to blame a preference for this type of world on economics–that is the most obvious and tactile motive. But what if today’s young readers are simply more likely to demand the ability to become involved in the worlds their favorite stories take part in–through fan fiction, through transmedia experiences like video games, amusement park or location experiences, and online forums where they are allowed to explore and even create more of a world that captivates them. If this is the expectation of younger (or older) readers, do creative writing programs have a responsibility to talk with aspiring writers about creating for audiences who do not want to be passive–who may demand to become involved?

The MOOC I am taking from the University of New South Wales on Transmedia Storytelling offers these questions to block out a transmedia story:

1. What is your central story idea
2. Who are the characters and what are their motivations in the story?
3. What are the rules that define the larger storyworld surrounding the immediate narrative in your story? 
4. How did you develop your story idea?

The third question is the one that stands out as being different from the typical questions I recall in my creative writing class. Of course, part of this comes from the absolute bias against anything other than contemporary, realistic fiction in many academic creative writing programs–the assumption that, of course, you would not be writing about where superheroes exist or where wizards could transform you into a ferret but could not, for some reason, transform their own unfashionable clothes. But thinking about storyworld is not just for authors writing fantasy, scifi, or historical fiction (Jane Austen’s novels arguably are the basis of one of the largest participatory cultures in existence).

This week and next week, I am reading a lot on the teaching of creative writing–something that has become standardized (some argue fossilized) since the University of Iowa launched their world-famous Writer’s Workshop in the 1930s. The workshop method has its staunch supporters but many critics who feel that the workshop might be constructed to serve the author in better ways–perhaps in addition to (or even instead of) offering a dissection of an author’s text, the brain trust of a writing workshop could serve the text better by playing in the storyworld rather than dismantling it.

In this first week of my sabbatical project exploring the intersection between creative writing and technology, I have, unsurprisingly, discovered many more questions than I have discovered answers. This intersection includes a range of interesting and innovative types of creative texts: web series, Twitter tales, interactive fiction, games, podcast fiction–and that does not even get into the literary potential of virtual/augmented reality or the internet of things. Right now, I am feeling far less organized than the outline of activities I submitted in my proposal (see the post below) suggested I would be, but things come in from the wonderful people at interlibrary loan when they come in, and nonlinearity is one of the things I am exploring.

Thus far, I have made a dent in a MOOC on Transmedia Storytelling (Online resources I will be reviewing will be found here) and read much on the history of Interactive Fiction (IF) and actually found my 20-year-old copy of Afternoon by Michael Joyce (annotated bibliography of readings here). Since it was formatted to play on Windows 95 “or later” I am not sure if I will get to revisit this “granddaddy of IF” but I put my hands on it, and that’s step 1.

Some of the questions that are arising as I start to dig into my project:

1. Is the traditional pedagogy used in creative writing classes appropriate for new media genres?
2. Do the genres used in traditional media extend to new media, or does new media require unique genres based on the role of the reader/user?
3. Current texts produced for new media often rely on adaptations of classics and or the extensions of storyworlds–is this part of the maturation process (as books that took an epistolary or false-diary form appeared often in the early days of the novels or as early films often adapted from established stories and plays) or does the reliance on the reader for interactive texts make established storylines more of a necessity?
4. Can literature created in New Media have a lasting impact without a system of curation to maintain texts through advances in technology–will Chronotrigger always be available? What about Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl or even The Lizzie Bennet Diaries?

In the coming weeks, I hope to have more to say about these questions and assume I will be adding others.

Abstract: This sabbatical will examine the evolution of new media as a distinct genre of creative writing. In addition to exploring transmedia storytelling, interactive fictions and iDocumentaries, I will review scholarship on the storytelling potential of augmented/virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and the status of new media in creative writing curricula.

On October 31, 2008, Josh Lewis, Ryan Paul, and Kris Kowal orchestrated a 21st century version of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds scare by coordinating a flood of tweets, posts, and blogs originating from around the world that all purported to describe the pandemonium and often grotesque violence wrought during their fabricated Martian invasion of Earth. #wotw2

This is transmedia storytelling.

In 2010, Ryan and Amy Green created That Dragon, Cancer, a video game based on theirexperiences as parents raising a terminally ill young child. Initially conceived as a game that asked players to immerse themselves in negotiating the uncertainties of pediatric cancer, the couple reworked the game after their son’s death so that the experiencefocused on allowing readers to live the lows, the unexpected highs, and the chaos of the family’s medical journey with a greater level of intimacy than traditional film or books would allow.

This is an interactive autobiographical game.

In 2013, Tim Travers Hawkins created an animated interactive web documentary based on phone calls he had with children locked inside immigration detention centers around the world. Users navigate their way through the work by clicking on prisons, cells and signs to hear the stories of children between the ages of 7 and 16 detained in centers in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the United States.

​This is an interactive documentary.

New media and digital technologies are pushing storytelling in countless new directions,producing textual experiences that were not possible just a decade or two ago and creating what rhetorician Doug Hesse calls “fenceless neighbors” out of disciplines that were once thought rigidly distinct. In college creative writing departments across the country, digital platforms like blogs, video channels, and interactive web pages have been embraced as publishing opportunities and even tools to enhance a reader’s experience with traditional genres of creative writing, but many are just now beginning to consider whether hypertext and other digital technologies constitute a genre of in its own right.Change of this kind comes slowly. The traditional creative writing curriculum has long included fiction, poetry, and plays—it literally took decades to incorporate the genres ofcreative nonfiction and screenwriting into the curricula. And the truth is that–although instances of creative writing have appeared in and some creative writers have embraceddigital media in the form of online journals, games, and experimental texts—new media is not universally recognized as a distinct genre in creative writing.

This sabbatical will explore whether new media compositions currently constitute a unique genre of creative writing. Genre is a flexible term in literature; broadly, it refers to a body of work that share a common literary technique or structure, but it also refers to works that have similarities in tone, topic, setting, or conventions. Much of the sabbatical will be spent reading discussions of the intersection of creative writing and new media as well as interacting with a wide variety of digital stories and texts, looking for a whether a cohesive description of a new media genre with a unique take on storytelling can be formed at this time.

This sabbatical will also involve extensive reading on those emerging technologies that are just beginning to be incorporated into digital storytelling, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things.

The completed project will include a blog that will be available online, a report to be submitted to the creative writing and curriculum committee of the English department, and support materials for useful digital creation tools that will be made available to colleagues through the English/Journalism technology committee.

In the course of this sabbatical, I will

Broadly speaking, the eight objectives for this sabbatical break out into three major themes—examining the status of digital storytelling in the curricula of other colleges, experimenting with established forms of interactive digital storytelling, and exploring the storytelling potential of emerging technologies.

To complete the research on curriculum, I have developed a partial list of colleges who currently offer new media-based creative writing courses, including Fordham, Rutgers, and MIT, as well as colleges where digital storytelling is a unique discipline like the University of Missouri; the list will expand as I have more opportunity to research the topic. In addition, I have attached a non-exhaustive list of books and new media productions that I will cover—many of which would be reviewed in the weekly blog entries that are part of the proposal.

 

The sabbatical would result in

 

Prior to sabbatical	• Supplement and refine a “working bibliography” of readings. • Compile a deeper list of independent story-rich games and interactive fiction.
Throughout     January	• Maintain a weekly blog; each entry will review either a digital storytelling production or a book on this topic. • Review literature on creative writing pedagogy with a focus on new media and digital storytelling. • Collect course information and materials from colleges offering new media-focused creative writing courses. • Research Pemberley Digital Studios history with transmedia storytelling and their productions.
February	• Read literature on transmedia and interactive fiction, with attention to discussions about experimental games, like Depression Quest, which infamously launched gamergate. • Develop skills using Inform 7, Twine, or whatever engine emerges in the next 18 months. • Complete one or more MOOCs on transmedia storytelling and interactive fiction.
March	• Read literature on interactive documentaries. • View a wide variety of interactive documentaries and research the engines that run different samples. • Gather ideas and develop prompts for others to use for writing transmedia, story-rich games/interactive fiction or interactive documentaries.
April	• Read literature on storytelling in virtual reality. • Research topics for original interactive stories. • Write and develop samples.
May     June	• Read literature on storytelling in augmented reality. • Develop QuickStart guides for software used. • Continue working on examples • Compile report based on research on new media and creative writing curricula. • Read literature on storytelling and the Internet of Things. • Recruit colleagues to “test” samples. • Proofread for grammatical errors.