storytelling
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Podcasts can now win Pulitzer Prizes
Podcasts like S-Town, Serial and Believed aren't just enthralling, they're also great examples of hard-hitting, in-depth reporting. With that in mind, the Pulitzer Prize Board is adding a new journalism prize category for audio reporting.
Facebook wants Quill to be a one-stop shop for VR animators
Facebook's Quill is a tool that helps artists create virtual reality illustrations and animations, and the latest version will offer them more ways to realize their visions. Quill 2.0 has additional features allowing animators to make their creations entirely within VR, from their initial concept sketches through to a completed project.
Google Assistant's bedtime stories come to iOS and Android
Once upon a time (well, in 2017), Google Assistant learned a new trick on Google Home devices: how to tell stories to kids. Ahead of National Tell a Story Day taking place on Saturday, youngsters now have more ways to hear a bedtime tale. As of today, the feature will be available on iOS and Android phones in English in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India.
PBS interactive media series aims to make AR and VR more accessible
One issue with interactive technology like virtual reality, augmented reality and other mixed media is that the cost of the equipment alone can be restrictive. To level the playing field, PBS is launching POV Spark, a series of media projects that will be accessible to wider audiences, not just those who have access to expensive headsets and exclusive events. POV Spark will launch with three interactive productions and two initiatives meant to foster future mixed-media storytelling.
Storytelling in video games doesn't have to be scary
Benjamin Rivers believes in the dramatic, emotional appeal of the video game industry. He's the man behind Home, a surprisingly complex, pixelated horror game that found great success once it debuted in 2012. It's praised for impressive narrative arcs that branch in twisted, unique ways depending on the decisions of each player, and this is precisely the type of story-centric design that delights Rivers. He sees video games' potential to convey convoluted human experiences through strong narrative design, and he's bringing these sensibilities to Alone with You, a science-fiction adventure due to hit PlayStation 4 and PS Vita in the spring. Alone with You stars a lonely survivor on a planet due for implosion in a few weeks; players have to escape with help from the colony's AI system, which eventually takes on the personalities of dead crew members. And, it's a romance. A futuristic, interstellar romance starring just one actual human -- because that's the kind of storyteller Rivers is.
WildStar releases Voyage of the Nomad, plans story rollout
Carbine Studios has just announced new content for WildStar... well, for the WildStar website, anyway. Voyage of the Nomad, a short story that "recollects the tale of the Cassians' first steps into the vast world of deep-space exploration," will go live on the official site's story page today. And it won't be a lone entry. Carbine plans to publish 11 such tales starting today and running every other Tuesday until the plots are played out. "The stories will unfold chronologically, until they reach the events that players have already experienced in WildStar's main story," says the press release. Hey, at least the lore-fiends among the greater MMO playerbase will be happy!
Enter at Your Own Rift: How to tell a great story in an MMO
My character still hasn't (ahem) ascended to Nightmare Tide levels yet, so today's RIFT story will instead be about Storm Legion. I had been working my way through the Eastern Holdings in Brevane when I encountered a quest chain that floored me with brilliant storytelling that showed exactly how MMOs can utilize this platform to tell tales in ways that other mediums cannot. It is audacious, bold, and incredibly dark, especially for RIFT. And I cannot praise it enough, especially in light of long-held claims that RIFT is often weak on story. I have two caveats before we go through what made this quest chain so great. First, I'm going to spoil it from start to finish, so if you haven't played it and want to remain innocent, just bookmark this column to read later on. Second, there are some truly edgy themes in this recap. Got it? Let's go!
Beautifully chronicle and share your life with StoryPress
On the surface, StoryPress looks like any other photo journal app, but its unique mix of audio, visual and written storytelling is far more captivating. The oral traditions of storytelling are a lost art. These days, we tell all of our stories on social media, pictures and texts. While I'd rather converse on Twitter than anywhere else, something is always lost in translation when you can't hear someone's intonation. You miss out on some of the "heart" of the story. That's where StoryPress comes in. It blends the best of both worlds. It captures the spirit of oral storytelling and puts it in a digital package. Available for the iPad, iPhone and also on the web, the app lets you share every aspect of your life, not just what's happening right now. Reflect on your childhood or college years. Chronicle parenthood, travels or holidays. Recount milestones and funny moments. Use the app as a diary, so that you never forget those small, but important, moments. To help you tell your stories, there are templates called story guides. Each story guide prompts you with a different set of questions. Every question represents a chapter in your story. Some of these questions can get pretty personal. The "living bio" template asks you about your relationships with your immediate and extended families. How close are you? Do you like each other? Are holidays fraught with fighting? Okay, it may not ask that last question, but you get the idea. There are also questions about your spiritual beliefs and personal philosophies. This might seem like a turn off, but it's the point of the app. It wants to create a full picture of who you are and how you've lived your life. If you're using it to catalog deeply personal events, StoryPress gives you new way to get introspective and reflect on your life. You don't have to get personal. Record significant or funny moments, like marathons, weddings or simple get-togethers. To get started, select a story guide topic. Tag each chapter with "who," "where" and "when." Then, upload a photo or video. Next, click the microphone button and start telling your tale. When you are done answering one question, swipe to the left to reveal the next one. You do not have to answer every question in a story guide. It's up to you how much information you want to share. If you don't find any of the guides relevant or helpful, you have the option to create a custom story. While you don't make typical status updates, StoryPress is a social media app. You follow people just as you do on any other network. However, there is a "private" option so that you don't have to share every story with your followers. If you did want to give a Twitter or Facebook-like update, you'd have to create a new chapter and record your status. Not everyone is going to like this app. Recording yourself telling a story can be awkward for a lot of people, myself included. Despite that fact, I really love StoryPress. By verbally telling your story, you add layers of context to key events and memories. If you want a fun, beautiful and unique way to chronicle your life, you need to give StoryPress a try.
Choose My Adventure: Neverending Neverwinter story
Of all the things this trip to Neverwinter has shown me, the ability to continue a character's story beyond the quest that Cryptic provides stands as the greatest thing I think any online game can give us. Although I don't believe that Neverwinter (or any other game, for that matter) gives me everything that I ever hoped for, the Foundry does allow those who enjoy dungeon mastering in the classic Dungeons and Dragons sense a chance to test out their skills at creating a story within a realistic development environment. Most writers would love to have a blank slate, a platform to do whatever they want to do, but realistically, that never happens. Every development environment contains its own limits and challenges content creators have to overcome. Sometimes the engine doesn't allow writers to do what they would like. Sometimes budgetary limits constrain the creative process. Sometimes writers forget that they are making a game and not a novel, so "fun" adds its own limits. As a writer and a gamer, I have been given a taste of what it takes to make an enjoyable quest for a gaming community.
Chaos Theory: Nine reasons The Secret World is the industry's best storyteller
Contrary to what I sometimes see in the MMO community, I am a huge believer in games telling stories. If a game lets me create my own story, great, but even better are developers who know how to spin a good yarn and involve me in the process. That's why I've loved adventure and role-playing games throughout the decades, and it's why The Secret World has remained one of my top MMOs since it launched. I don't have a problem saying that I think The Secret World is currently the industry's best storyteller. If you want to take a cheap shot, you can insert some snide remark about rote quest text boxes in the comments, but I think that there's a lot of solid writing and storytelling across the MMO spectrum right now. It's just that TSW does it better. Why? What's going on here to make stories and characters that just stick in my head long after my brain has cycled other MMO's events to deep storage? I started writing a list and had a hard time stopping at just nine.
Tamriel Infinium: Phasing The Elder Scrolls Online
Today, I want to talk about a mechanic introduced most popularly in World of Warcraft's expansion Wrath of the Lich King. Don't look at me like that. I didn't actually play WoW... I just heard about this second hand. I will call this MMO storytelling mechanic "phasing." The Elder Scrolls Online developers call it layering. But whatever you want to call it, we know ESO will employ this mechanic to allow for story progression and player choice within the game. Let's say you and your friend are in the open world (or maybe an instanced dungeon), and he is further along in the quest than you. At the beginning of the quest, the quest giver is alive, and by the end of questline the quest giver is dead. With phasing technology, you and your friend could be standing next to each other in the virtual world. You see him, and he sees you. But he sees a dead quest giver while you see a living one. Your computer is not broken; you are witnessing phasing. So how does this affect storytelling and the overall feel of the game itself?
Tapestry visual storytelling app adds support for iframe embeds
Tapestry from Betaworks is a visual, storytelling app that lets you tap your way through a tale. It can be used to create some very moving or entertaining narratives that you can share on the Tapestry network. Now, a new embed option expands your audience by allowing you to add your creations to any website or Tumblr blog. The embeds are available in two sizes -- small and large. The small size has a width of 500 pixels and is perfect for Tumblr, while the larger size measures in at a respectable 852 pixels that looks fantastic on websites and blogs. You can check out a sample Tapestry video that I embedded below using the iframe embed code.
Captain's Log: Story takes center stage in Star Trek Online
Now that Star Trek Online's expansion, The Legacy of Romulus has moved into open beta on the Tribble test server, I think it's high time I wrote about one of the biggest changes the game has ever seen. It's not just about what will occur in the game's story; it's how the story is being told. Players who create a Romulan faction character when Star Trek Online launches the expansion on May 21st will experience something that simply hasn't been seen before in the game. Fair warning: I'll be writing a fair amount about what happens within the first dozen levels of gameplay, so if you're holding out to be surprised, know that there are spoilers after the jump!
The Soapbox: My lore problem
"In the distant forests of El'quen, a dark evil stirs. Marrowgore the Unhunter, imprisoned for a thousand years in Cauldron Lake by the Eye of Son'drak, has broken free. Now, he and his evil BoneSlurpers stage an all-out war on the United Provinces. You, a freshly christened hero known for valorous acts both on and off the battlefield, must take charge of the Sacred Axeblade of Loqtai, harness the power it contains, and send the Unhunter back to his watery prison. "But first, can you get me nine wolf pelts?"
Storyboard: Villainy afoot
I really thought this was a topic I had revisited on a few occasions, but apparently the only time Storyboard has discussed villainy was back in the column's infancy when I was still properly finding its voice. (Not that I feel that project has ever stopped, but that's another matter.) And it's an interesting topic for many reasons because villainy as a concept really gets put through the wringer in RP to begin with, especially if you tend to let morality be muddled into a few million shades of gray like I tend to. The thing about villains in roleplaying is having a character solely meant as A Villain generally doesn't work as well, simply because no real people are as malicious as that might require. Instead, you wind up with several people serving as the villains in a particular timeframe. So we need to define what we mean by villains, what role they can play in roleplaying, and what the pitfalls are in the first place.
EVE Evolved: Five years of EVE Evolved
About five years ago, on April 27th, 2008, I joined the Massively team and wrote the very first issue of the EVE Evolved column. Five years later, the column is still going strong and delivering its weekly dose of EVE Online to thousands of readers. I used to worry about running out of ideas to write about, but regular game updates and hilarious player shenanigans mean there's always something interesting going on in New Eden. When EVE hits its 10th anniversary in May, this column will have been running for just over half of the game's lifetime. In that time, I've written over 250 in-depth articles, guides, in-game stories and opinion pieces on EVE Online and a few on DUST 514. As usual, I'll be celebrating this anniversary by rounding up this year's column highlights and giving away two 30-day Pilot's License Extensions to two lucky readers. To enter the competition, write a comment explaining which EVE Evolved articles from this year you liked best and what topics you'd like to see covered in the coming year. You will need an active EVE account to claim the prize, so be sure to include your character name in your comment if you want to be in with a chance. If you'd rather not give out your character name or don't have an EVE account but would like to give the game a go, you can sign up a new trial account and use the name of your new character. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look back at the highlights from the column's fifth year!
Breakfast Topic: What's your headcanon?
Headcanon is a concept you may not be familiar with if you're not an RPer or fanfic writer. Simply stated, it's a fan's personal interpretation of events or characters in whatever setting they're a fan of. Sometimes a person may use their headcanon as a way of coping with a story choice they dislike, and sometimes it may just be to fill gaps in the story line. For example, in WoW fandom, you might hear someone say, "In my headcanon, Jaina and Kalec are just good friends, because I hate them as a couple!" or, "I have this headcanon that Cairne and Magatha were actually fairly close at one point, and had a falling-out, and that's one of the reasons she hated him so much and he didn't throw her out of Thunder Bluff." The first is an example of a coping (or "corrective") headcanon, the second is an example of filling in unknown gaps. One of the most fun things I do with my WoW friends is chat about our personal headcanons of the story and characters. What kind of relationships do these people have outside of what we see directly in official lore? Were they childhood friends, were they comrades in arms, were they lovers? Do these folks resent being forced into obligations they never wanted thanks to world events, or are they hungry to wield a power they wouldn't have otherwise achieved? How much does group X actually enjoy being allies (or enemies) with group Y? The "if only" game is endlessly fun! Do you have any WoW headcanons? Did you, by any chance, already tell us about them back in October? Have they changed? For the most part, I only discuss my own headcanons with a handful of people, because I'm way too shy to do it in public! If you're not, though, please tell us in the comments!
The '101 Gameplay Ideas' behind the Assassin's Creed franchise
During a panel at GDC today, Ubisoft writer Corey May and lead mission designer Philippe Bergeron discussed their "balancing act" in crafting the stories of Assassin's Creed. May is focused on building up the story, making the characters and their relationships important to the player, while Bergeron and his colleagues aim to deliver fun mission gameplay, and stay within the various technical and developmental limitations shared by the entire team.May and Bergeron both focus on research at the outset of the process. For each Assassin's Creed game, the team has picked an era first, and then looked for potential locations, specific events to portray, major characters, "potential Templar targets," and possible protagonists. While May picks characters, Bergeron's team brainstorms various mission ideas for the game.May said Ubisoft has an internal document containing "101 gameplay ideas." It has been pillaged and refilled since the first Assassin's Creed game, as designers sample previously unused ideas or add more when concepts don't make the cut during development of the latest game.Finally, May said, once all the mission plans are completed and his early script scenes are done, he takes the mission design documents and pastes them directly into a file that eventually becomes his finished script for the game. May said this process was "the ultimate expression of our collaboration," and that mission designs created by Bergeron's team are then used as "the skeleton and the backbone that I work off of."Once the script and designs are all completed, the real work of coding and testing the game begins. May and Bergeron's teams cycle down (or, most likely, move on to the next game in the process).The talk was a simple look at an undoubtedly complex process, but it did offer some good insight into the marriage of story and mission design in the Assassin's Creed franchise.
EVE Evolved: Is EVE becoming a spectator sport?
This week saw another landmark event in EVE Online grab the gaming community's attention as over 3,000 players from dozens of alliances battled it out in the lowsec system of Asakai on the Caldari border. The battle reached 2,800 concurrent players at peak, falling just short of 2011's record-breaking siege of LXQ2-T which hit 3,110 simultaneous combatants at its peak. There were livestreams, tons of after-action reports, and the story of this immense battle started by one man clicking the wrong button really captured our imaginations. EVE is one of those rare cases in which a lot of people find the media that surrounds the game more fun than the game itself. News of big in-game events like scams, heists, and huge battles spreads across the internet like wildfire, even among people who hate the game or have never tried it. When news of the Asakai battle emerged, someone on Reddit suggested that people should play EVE for only a few months to get some background and then quit and just read the stories. I've seen a lot of similar comments over the years saying that EVE is more fun to watch and read about than play, and it makes me wonder if the game is becoming a bit of a spectator sport. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at why stories like the Battle of Asakai are so pervasive and explain why I think EVE should embrace its role as a spectator sport.
Storyboard: Plotting concepts
There's an uncomfortable paradox in roleplaying as regards plotting in advance. If you plan out your character developments in advance, you're not really roleplaying so much as laying out a pre-determined plot that other people are forced to fit within. On the other hand, if you don't plan out anything, you don't have any conflicts driving your characters, meaning that you're trying to force yourself into other character plots in the hopes that you might develop some relevance. Stated more simply -- plotting out your character in detail or not plotting your character out in enough detail are both equally detrimental to your roleplaying. Ever since I've been writing this column, I've been trying to develop a good way to actually handle this issue, and a fairly recent post from Websnark actually kicked me down a new path. For ease of reference, I'm calling it plotting by concept. I can't say that it works perfectly forever and ever, but it's been producing good results for a while, so I'm just going to outline how it works in the hopes that other people can find it useful too.
