Scriveners' Trappings

"Together with a whole network of media researchers, creators and students we will:
- learn storytelling basics such as antagonist/protagonist relationships, narrative/narrated time, ...
- have a look at exciting current media projects
- analyze how they are designed and executed based on aforementioned basics
- and discuss how (and if) new online tools and formats change the way stories are told and perceived.

The 8-chapter course starts on October 25th, 2013 and ends on December 20th, 2013.

It will offer weekly video material, lessons, interviews and tasks on the following topics (not necessarily in this order):
- storytelling basics
- serial formats (on the TV, web and beyond)
- storytelling in role-playing games
- interactive storytelling in video games
- transmedia storytelling
- alternate-reality gaming
- augmented reality and location-based storytelling
- the role of tools, interfaces and information architectures in current storytelling.

Our first Storytelling-MOOC will focus on fictional formats.

"Our goal is to inspire and help understand. To broaden our horizon of what is and might be possible and what has already been attempted, and what has succeeded or even failed - and why.
In several little tasks you'll analyze and practice storytelling on your own and in teams."

by Justin Marquis

"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that "runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers." Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings."
(Your Brain on Fiction, 17 March, 2012)

"The immediate thought prompted by this talk of "vivid simulation of reality," and being able to "give readers an experience unavailable off the page," was that video games do this too. In fact, they could provide a more richly interactive experience than reading because they have the capability to adapt for individual users and to provide branching scenarios based on different inputs. So the question is, can video games accomplish the same objectives that the authors are attributing to reading fiction?"