MEGO

As I discussed in my first book (and maybe my second?) I think that the best way to develop a story, any story, is to tell it over and over, to different people, without notes. This gets you a bunch of things:

a. You can tell how it holds together. If you can't remember what comes next, then the story logic needs mending

b. You can immediately tell if your listener is bored. People who read your writing have time to prepare a lie, but if their eyes glaze over, they're bored

c. You may come up with something better as you tell your story on the fly. Writing a story down freezes it, but until then, it's a fluid, living, growing thing.

So here's Yannick Trapman-O'Brian, immersive experience-maker, on Reality Escape Pod S8E7:

"I wish upon everyone an intoxicated audience. The clarity it requires of you, someone just looking you full in the face as you do your beautiful dance piece and they go, 'Okay, this is boring, I'd rather go pee.' That is such good feedback."

See? 

Odysseus is a comic hero:

 

Odysseus is a comic hero:

• It's Odysseus's fault he doesn't go straight home, because he just HAS to tell Polyphemus his name
• After he ends the war by hiding in a fake horse
• After he tries to duck the draft by pretending to be insane
• Circe turns his men into pigs
• He's captured by a nymph, Calypso, who keeps him as her boy toy. For, like, 7 years.
• When he gets to Ithaca, he lies his head off to the first person he meets, a shepherd boy, telling him a cockamamie story about having been kidnapped by pirates...
• ...the boy turns out to be Athena in drag.
• When he gets home, he doesn't tell anyone who he is, not even his wife, Penelope, who he tells that he "saw" Odysseus, in Egypt or something
• Even after he kills all the suitors, Penelope still tries to trick him by asking him to move their bed, to his great irritation, because it's impossible
• His final task is to appease Poseidon by carrying an oar inland so far that people have no idea what an oar is. 

No Proscenium

 Another interesting thing about immersive, experiental theatre:  it is local. So much of the world is now global. There is no proper city in the West without a sushi restaurant. You look at a new museum (probably by Frank Gehry) and you have no idea where it is without looking at the caption. 

But immersive theatre? If you want to experience Phantom Peak, you have to go to London. 

Ladders? Los Angeles. 

Meow Wolf's Radio Tave? Houston. 

Factory Obscura's Time Slip? Oklahoma City. 

Moment Factory's Foresta Lumina? Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook, about two hours East of Montreal.

(I was commissioned to pitch a Moment Factory show for Jean Drapeau Park on Ile Ste-Hélène in the St. Lawrence River. That was super fun even just thinking about it.)

Wasteland Weekend? Neotropolis? Burning Man? The freakin' Mojave Desert. 

(I'm not counting the projection shows where you pay $30 to look at Van Gogh screen savers projected on walls.) 

Like, I'm seriously thinking, wouldn't it be nice to fly to London and go to Phantom Peak? I'm sure there's other things I could find to do over there. 

And notice that it's not all cultural hotspots. There's a lot of theater you can only see in London or New York. But Oklahoma City? 

(Check out Everything Immersive and No Proscenium if you want proof.)

I keep thinking: this is the exact opposite of video games. Each copy of a video game is identical. You can have different experiences, but you can't have an experience that isn't programmed into the game. You can have emergent gameplay -- the interaction of different mechanics producing unforeseen effects -- but true emergent storytelling is ... well, I've never seen it, and I've played a bunch of games that are supposed to have it. 

You can buy any videogame almost anywhere. You can download anything on Steam in Hokkaido or Honolulu and (if you're clever) Hanoi. 

Videogames scale. If one person can play it, a million people can play it (if you throw on enough servers and work out lag issues). Every immersive theatre show is artisanal. 

As with theatre, each performance is unique. There's a script, usually, but you'll never see the same performance again exactly.

It's interesting to contemplate the other end of the spectrum from the art business I'm in.

Elan Lee

 
I'm listening to Reality Escape Pod, a podcast about escape rooms. They interview Elan Lee, who co-invented Exploding Kittens, the card game and the animated Netflix series. 

His rule for making games is, "Don't make games that are entertaining. Make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining."

Maybe doesn't apply entirely to video games (which had better be entertaining!), but it is an interesting filter to put on the user experience.

He also puts the game instructions through 100+ drafts, literally, and then starts them with, "Don't read these instructions. Watch our video about how to play."

Aaaaand he has a really interesting approach to testing his games. He asks his testers only one question:  "Do you want to play again?" He doesn't trust anything they might say about what's fun or not fun. People tend to want to be helpful, so they come up with things to say that may be true or not. 

What he does, instead, is records the player playing. It takes longer, but you can see what they're doing when they're frowning, or when they take out their phone to check messages. 

This relates indirectly to my idea that the best way to refine your story is to tell it over and over again, without notes. When you tell your story to a live human being, you can tell when they're bored. Their eyes glaze over. You can tell when they're confused. If you hand someone a story on paper, they may tell you they're confused about Y, but the recording reveals that they were actually confused a minute beforehand. 

For example, they find a scene confusing. But that's not the scene's fault. It's because they didn't understand who the character was when you introduced them. And maybe the introduction itself was okay, but you said something right before that introduction that bounced them out of the story, so they were still processing it when you did that introduction, so they didn't absorb the introduction.

I was a computer science major at university. When I wrote a program, I'd get a flock of bugs. I could eliminate 50% of them right away by checking the very beginning of the program and fixing the mistakes I made setting up variables. 

And that is why you must take all feedback with a grain of salt. If someone says something is confusing, it is confusing, you can't tell them it's not. But they may not realize why they find it confusing. Figuring out where the glitch is, is part of the skill of writing.

Boldly to Go

 I am coming around to the notion that immersive experiences are the Wild West frontier of narrative. Video games have been telling stories since, what, the 1980s? While it seems like immersive theatre dates to the early 2000s, with Punchdrunk's Sleep No More.

I say "seems," because of course there have long been immersive theater experiences. Also in the 1980s I saw a production of The Remembrance of Things Past -- mostly the naughty bits -- in a house on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven that was due to be torn down. It was promenade theater, meaning you could wander around following one or another actor in one or another plotline. Arguably promenade theatre goes back to the Middle Ages, with Stations of the Cross installations. Arguably Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge Village and other living history centers are a form of promenade theater. 

(I live in Old Montreal, where there are regular ghost tours where actors play ghosts in various alleys; it is also not at all uncommon to see British redcoats marching down the street with musket and bayonet.)

But definitely the current wave came into its own with Sleep No More. And now, escape rooms. 

I've been listening to the No Proscenium podcast a lot lately. There are over 450 episodes -- I hadn't known there were that many immersive events to podcast about! There's a fascinating episode about Neotropolis, which is a descendant of Burning Man, but cyberpunk, and with a plot.

Various folk have been trying to sell us LLM's (large language models, a form of AI) by saying, "What if you could talk to NPC's, you know, really talk, about anything." Never mind that no one has made an LLM worth listening to; everything is just a prototype and the real deal is right around the corner.

But in many immersive situations, you really can talk to the NPCs, or the other player characters. They're human beings and they have a character and a backstory, and they can react to you accordingly. 

That, I think, is a great development. Open-ended dialogue is not something video games are good at. AIs are a very long way from being about to tell a coherent story, let alone a good one. But check out No Proscenium -- there may be immersive events in your neck of the woods.

Clams

 Here is a fine list of clams, that is, turns of phrase that were once clever and now, not so much. (Not sure if "not so much" counts as a clam. Apparently Paul Reiser popularized it on Mad About You. I'm not ready to give it up, though.) 

Of course, there is also Know Your Meme and TV Tropes. I am not responsible for your lost hours of work if you open up TV Tropes, though. 

Another reason LLMs are not the future of dialog

Executives have been trying to get rid of writers ever since moving pictures were a thing. Samuel Goldwyn allegedly threw a writer out of his office, and told his assistant, "I never want to see him again! Until we need him."

Many years ago, a Canadian network, probably the CBC, decided it could save a lot of money if it made a series about a bunch of commuters taking the train home. The actors would improvise their dialogue based on the day's headlines and whatever else came into their heads.

The show was a ratings disaster, but it was cheap to produce, so it stayed on the air longer than it should have.

The latest idea for getting rid of writers is large language models, aka generative AI. So far, the demos have not been promising. AI-scripted characters turn out to be boring and creepy. 

Well, think about it. If a roomful of live actors can't keep your attention, how can autocomplete software do it, when it has no concept of what it's saying?

Think about improv. The audience for live improv is tiny. If The Groundlings weren't a farm team for Saturday Night Live, who knows if it would exist as a business? Why? Most improv is a stunt. It is like the dog who walks on his hind legs:  it does not walk very well, but it is fascinating to watch it succeed at all. 

It is hilarious to watch the actors interpolate truth based on "yes, and." But you can only watch so much of it. No one is binge-watching improv. 

I don't doubt that there are sublime moments in improv here and there, but you don't see much live improv on TV. Saturday Night Live runs on cue cards. Paul Feig lets his actors improv, but he does dozens of takes and edits a performance together in post.

So if people are not, by and large, watching live human beings making stuff up on the spot, why would we watch autocomplete software do it? 

It remains to be seen how long it takes Hasbro to realize that no one wants D&D scenarios based on autocomplete, either, but I figure we've got another year of this before LLMs implode like NFTs and Beanie Babies.

Delivering the Goods

I'm watching GODZILLA MINUS ONE. You might think it is a movie about a giant undersea monster with nuclear abilities.

But it is actually a movie about survivor guilt in post-WW2 Japan. The hero is a kamikaze pilot who abandoned his suicide mission. He considers himself a coward. Other characters are struggling with having survived when so many of their family died. 

If you deliver the goods in a movie or game, you can do whatever the hell else you want. THE L WORD had sexy lesbians. Lesbians, and lesbian-curious folk, were watching to see sexy lesbians. The writers got away with making their characters really flawed people, because they delivered on the sexy lesbians. Without the lesbian sexiness, network executives would probably have said, "These characters aren't likable, make them nicer." But no one was watching to see nice lesbians, they were watching to see sexy lesbians. So the execs left the writers alone. 

Similarly, in GODZILLA MINUS ONE, there is all the nuclear monster spectacle you could ask for. Which means the filmmakers were able to tell a story about survivor guilt. I mean, maybe they started with Godzilla and thought "How can we make Godzilla fresh." But I suspect someone wanted to make a piece about survivor guilt, and then realized they could bring a bigger audience to it by doing it in a monster movie. 

Survivor guilt, by itself, is pretty heavy. Who wants to see that? Some people, but maybe not many. But if there's a nuclear monster, then sure! Bring it. The best horror stories are really proxies for stories about theme that are too bitter to take on directly. 

We're working on a war story right now. But we're turning it into a ghost story, because who wants to play a game about how war is horrible? 

 Deliver the goods, and you are free to do what you want!