Digital Bards: Interactive Media and the Evolution of Storytelling

This was a talk given as a Distinguished Speaker at the University of Alabama Huntsville in October of 2016.

Digital Bards: Interactive Media and the Evolution of Storytelling

Print media was itself a revolution of earlier oral storytelling practices, and today we see digital media and videogames in particular challenging traditional notions of what storytelling even is. New paradigms have been developed over the last few decades of game development many of which have not filtered back into academia, and new interactive structures are causing debate within games themselves as well. In this talk we will discuss how games have approached storytelling in a variety of frameworks ranging from linear narratives to telling massively multiplayer stories for tens of thousands of interactive participants simultaneously, and we’ll look to the future that is rapidly taking form on a tablet or phone near you. Writing will never be the same — again.