The art of the interactive storyteller

Published in

UX Collective

27 min readMay 24, 2023

I would like to tell you a story:

“A couple of years ago my friends Doug, Jim and I completed a 4-kilometre hike to the Lions Head Lookout. When we reached the lookout, we stood at the edge of a sheer 500-meter cliff face which provided a spectacular view of Georgian Bay. On the horizon, we could see the start of the boreal forest growing along the edges of the Canadian Shield while below us, kayakers paddled along the wild, glacial shore of the Bruce Peninsula.

To the left…”

Let’s stop it right there. I am here sitting in my Herman Miller chair in my home office in Toronto and I just know most of you don’t have a clue as to what I was talking about.

Who knows where Lions Head is? How about the Bruce Peninsula? Georgian Bay? Canadian Shield? I am willing to bet I lost a lot of you after the first sentence.

How I lost you is not important. What is vitally important to you, as UX/UI designers and developers, is “why” I lost you. It is something a lot of UX designers and developers completely overlook in their rush to toss out the latest cool effect, a motion graphic that will get them noticed or app that will win them accolades from a worldwide audience. What they overlook is a simple fact: There is a story to be told.

For a story to be effective, the story must have relevance to you. I am in Toronto talking to you about something one of my students in Toronto would instantly understand. Many of you don’t. It has no relevance or context to your experience. If you don’t understand what I am talking about you will do what you just did, dial me out, dude. With interactive media, you don’t just dial me out. You leave, delete the app, turn off the YouTube video. Bottom line? You are gone and my effort to tell you my story is wasted.

So I am here today for one simple reason: To tell you how to tell a story.

On the surface, it may seem to you like I have just wasted a colossal amount of your time to tell you something you already know. Gosh, you all know how to tell a story. You have been doing it for your entire lives. That’s great but now your stories are being told to the world, not your friends and family. Your stories are what drive app development and the UX process though you tend to cloak them in buzzwords and phrases like “Persona” “Flow” and “User Journey”.

In fact, the entire UX process is driven by a story. The major characters in the story are your personas. The User Journey or Task Flow revolves around how a character will navigate through the app or web site. Interactivity usually involves a bit of suspense: “When a user taps on this button …” something happens.

Many of you are about to discover or have discovered a pleasant fact of this business: that people are prepared to pay you some serious money for those stories. There is also a downside to that bit of news. You will have to get the story right, the first time, and if you don’t, you will be in for a deep disappointment.

This is something I used to make abundantly clear to every student applying to the Multimedia program at my former College: “If you can’t tell a story, don’t even think of being accepted to the program.” Think about it. Where do web sites start? With a storyboard. Where do films start? With a book. Where do apps start? With a mythical character generated by research. All have their roots in a simple thing called a “story”.

I find it fascinating that we are part of an industry that doesn’t have a history, yet the foundation of what we do stretches back to prehistory.

Starting at the beginning

Before there was a written record there was an oral record. Once man discovered ways of fixing those records into place- hieroglyphics, cuneiform, papyrus, paper, stone- the oral culture disappeared. Or did it? I would suggest, instead, that it became invisible, until the 20th Century, when, like a faint TV signal, it flickered in and out of our technology.

Today, to paraphrase the line from the movie Poltergeist: “It’s back!”

Between the invention of writing and the means to communicate, using electricity, society moved steadily toward, for want of a better term, a literate society. For this discussion, printing technologies will be regarded as the demarcation point where the oral tradition, or orality, literally went underground.

The rise of literacy in the 1500s and the decline of the oral tradition, according to many social historians, resulted in the split of society into two distinct social classes- those who could read and those who couldn’t. This dichotomy put the illiterate at the lowest rung of the social order and was distinguished by the way they use language. If you are familiar with the Simpsons, look no further than Cletus.

Meet a potential persona: Cletus Spuckler

Between the mid-1800s and today, electricity allows us to transmit communications vast distances. What changed things, though, was the radio. Marshal McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy dealt with how communications technologies affect what is being communicated. According to McLuhan, radio brought orality back to communications technologies. Though this may appear to be obvious, McLuhan points to the aural images of orality vs. print’s visual imagery as being significant indicators that changes in communications modes — paper to electricity, written to oral — includes significant psychological shifts.

You can’t read the radio. You can’t watch the radio. You listen to it. As you do, you form mental images of the information being communicated to you.

Let me give you an example of this. In a presentation I regularly deliver on the subject of Motion Design, I position myself as a clueless Canadian who doesn’t understand the concept of a curveball in baseball. I then ask random members of the audience to describe a curveball to me. Needless to say, the descriptions vary wildly and none, to date, have been the same. Why? The people describing the curveball are drawing from their mental image of a curveball.

In fact, no two mental images will be the same because we filter them through the context of our cultural experiences. In many ways this is exactly the effect television, digital media and the Internet have upon us. They reinforce or are firmly rooted, in the oral tradition because they spring from orality. One of the oral tradition’s hallmarks is the ability to tell a story … not write one.

According to the social historian Walter Ong, oral peoples “commonly and in all likelihood consider words to have a magical potency which is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded and hence power-driven”

I come from a relatively new country, which was first discovered in the 1500s and not fully explored for another 300 years. Populating the country were our Aboriginal people and they had no written language. Instead, they had an oral tradition, which remains strong to this day.

One of our First Nations is called the Inuit. Before contact with the Europeans, their nation encompassed much of Northern Canada and Russia. One of my absolute favourite examples of oral storytelling is a short video clip from the Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) that I happened to stumble across about 15 years ago. In the clip, an Innu Elder describes how he started fires with gun powder. He describes in great detail how he would soak the cardboard in water, empty the gunpowder onto the wet cardboard and let it dry. When needed, he would bang two rocks together and the resulting sparks would ignite the cardboard and start the fire.

Starting fires with gunpowder from APTN.

Even more compelling was how he told the story. His voice rose and fell during the telling and his gestures demonstrated the process. Even more interesting was how he dragged the interviewer into the story so that by the end of the story, she was enthusiastically participating.

What I just described is what Jack Goody and Ian Watt in “The Consequences of Literacy” termed “a culture of primary orality”. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/177651) There are no written texts. There is no place for one to go to look it up.

In cultures with written texts, they claim secondary orality exists. As they point out, “in non-literate society every social situation cannot but bring the individual into contact with the group’s patterns of thought, feeling and action- the choice is between the cultural tradition and solitude. In a literate society … the mere fact that reading and writing are solitary activities means that, in so far as the dominant cultural tradition is a literate one, it is very easy to avoid.”

Essentially, you choose what you wish to know? Does this sound familiar as you mold your “personas” around the research?

There is a Canadian author whom I have had the pleasure to know for the past 30 years. He is Chinese and about 10 years ago his book, “The Jade Peony”, hit the North American bestseller lists. Wayson Choy documented the struggle his Chinese culture went through as it attempted to adapt to North American Culture.

I’ll bet very few of you have heard of Wayson, let alone read his book. Coming from a culture of secondary orality this is quite understandable. You haven’t been exposed to his story simply because you are free to make that choice.

What you have just been exposed to are two storytellers: one from a culture of primary orality and the other from a culture of secondary orality. As storytellers, they are remarkably similar in that they can engage the audience and communicate their message.

The important storyteller was from the Innu because of the intersection of his culture and “net culture”. Remember Goody and Watt and their description of primary orality? “In non-literate society, every social situation cannot but bring the individual into contact with the group’s patterns of thought, feeling, and action”

Now apply that to “net culture”. Every hit on a web page cannot but bring the user into contact with the group’s patterns of thought, feeling, and action. When you get down to thinking about that you can’t help but recognize that as being a fundamental branding strategy. The story, therefore, is the message.

In 1999, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore wrote a book called “The Experience Economy”.(https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Experience_Economy.html) It described how the idea of experience creation is not merely a new design approach but the result of a fundamental economic shift that doesn’t place wealth creation on traditional consumption but upon the creation of experiences. Sound familiar?

They offer a whole range of examples from theme restaurants to luxury travel and argue, “ companies stage an experience whenever they engage customers, connecting with them in a personal, memorable way.” What could be more engaging, personal and memorable than a fighter pilot describing his experiences: “There we were inverted, supersonic…”

As you can see some of the most compelling and involving experiences are organized around the telling of stories — whether from the experiences of you, the creator, or those who view your work. Storytelling is one of the oldest experiences and the most powerful because it organizes information in a way that allows you to draw personal meaning and create or impart knowledge.

There are as many ways to tell a story as there are storytellers. The two most important aspects of a successful story are it must be authentic and that it must be relevant to the audience. My story about my vacation lost you because my part of Canada is not relevant to your experiences.

In 1998, a homeowner documented on the now-defunct Boar.com, how his house on a cliff face in California fell into the ocean. It starts with the following words: “Feb 23, 1998. today my house fell into the ocean. The Pacific Ocean…”

“Today, my house fell into the ocean…” (Boar.com)

Using taped together images of the wrecked house on the beach he weaves an interesting story, but the most compelling piece of the story is the audio track of a friend calling his telephone answering machine and jokingly telling him: “ Yo, Mark, I just saw your house on the news … I don’t think you are living there anymore…”

What makes this story work is the fact is that it has a perspective. It is told from the perspective of the first person- my. It tells a story of what happened to the storyteller. The Innu story is so effective because it is told from the perspective of the third person- he, she, it- which is one of the most common techniques used.

Non-linear stories

Stories have a beginning, middle and an end which suggests they are linear. This goes completely against the grain when it comes to interactive media and app development. Our stories are non-linear. Hit a web site, for example, and the odds are fairly good that you will be dropped into the middle of the story. Look at an app’s flow diagram and you can see this almost immediately. As interactive media developers, it is our responsibility to ensure that the visitor dropped into the middle of the conversation instantly knows what we are talking about. Thus the importance of the brand.

User Flow’in by Bill Kennedy for User Labs. (https://dribbble.com/shots/1768721-User-Flow-in)

Go to the Cocoa Cola site and you will see Coke Red. Hit Disney and you know you are there because the Disney brand is simply so universal.

Don’t for a minute think the great dot com meltdown resulted from billions of dollars funding thousands of bad ideas. I got into this discussion with an older gentleman who asked me during a question period after a speech why I was training my students for unemployment. “Sir”, I said, “the stock market is not the economy.” The reason these companies went down the tubes was due to a fundamental inability to tell their story. What do gerbils being shot out of cannons and trained chimps in garages tell us about a company and its products? Interactive media companies disappeared not because they weren’t great. It was because, in many cases, they couldn’t articulate their client’s story and the client simply found someone else who could.

Stories diffuse to other media

We are also starting to see stories developed on the web diffuse to other media. Here’s an example:

The company that developed the Turbonium site over 20 years ago looked at a single feature of the Volkswagen, turbo power, and decided to build a story around it. The story is the discovery of a new element- Turbonium. A month or so later I saw a Turbonium ad on TV and heard a Turbonium ad on the radio. This suggests that nothing can stop the power of an excellent story.

Dave Jones is Australian and an example of his work underlines my next point when it comes to telling a great story: It is called teetering and you can see it here.

Teetering . Dave Jones. ( http://www.transience.com.au/wp/animation/teetering/)

The beauty of this piece is drawn from the story. It is a great story of love and romance, with a twist. It was also done in Flash, whose main strength, was the ability to tell a linear story. What makes this story work so well is not the underlying technology. It is the characterizations. It is the creative tension- Will she get the flowers? Will they fall off of the mountain? These are the hallmarks of a great story and they are no different from those of the Innu or Wayson Choy.

Sometimes you are simply handed the story and asked to make something from the literate tradition have just as much appeal in the oral tradition. If you have ever been to a poetry reading you will discover that the poet can make the poem more vivid and compelling than were you to simply sit in solitude and read the poem from the printed page.

Moving media from one tradition to the other is extremely difficult if not impossible. It can be done and done well if you approach the story from the oral tradition and look for areas where the strengths of the technology add power to the written word.

It’s the story. Not you.

For a story to work, the audience must focus on the story. Not the storyteller. Let me tell you a story about that one.

A few years ago, when Flash was new, somebody figured out how to create a rotating globe using Flash. The source code was posted to a Flash list and the next thing you knew, spinning globes were showing up everywhere. A Flash developer in Dayton, Ohio, asked for a review of a site he had just completed for one of his clients. Guess what was on the right side of the web page? I had had my fill of these and told the developer how much it “sucked.”

He read my review and, in the Flash list, proceeded to let loose with a primal scream that started with “Just who the hell was I to criticize his masterpiece?” and finished with his calling my parentage into question. Well, he called me a “Bastard.”

Rather than get into it with him I asked a series of very simple questions:

I live in Toronto; can I buy a set of tires from his client? No.
What about someone that lives in Kuwait? No.
How about someone in a neighbouring state? No
Then why the spinning globe? It tells me the company is global in scope and you are telling me it isn’t.

Turns out they mainly supplied auto dealers and garages in Dayton, Ohio with tires. The globe was there because the developer learned how to do it and thought he would tell his peers, “Aren’t I clever?” What he didn’t expect was one of them to tell him he wasn’t all that clever because the globe had nothing to do with his client’s story.

A fascinating twist on the telling of a story is allowing the user to choose how the story is told. A classic example of this point is CSS Zen Garden which does this quite well by allowing the user to make that choice.

In this case, it is simply the same story but the user, to use a print analogy, can choose to create one of the multiple editions of the same book.

Stories are the key.

Stories are the key to our ability to communicate. We are hard-wired into the process- whether we are the ones telling the stories or those listening to them. In many respects, there are very few differences between the Age of Exploration when Europeans discovered there was more to the world than their small slice of it and today’s exploration of cyberspace. In both instances, the voyagers returned with stories of what they had seen. Is there any difference between the notation on an old map where the edge of the known world is shown with the legend on the other side of that line “There be dragons” and “You gotta check out this cool site … “?

What makes stories so interesting is not the story. It is the interaction that takes place when we share them. Your choices in this interaction are rather interesting: You either relate to the story and respond or you don’t. At the beginning of this piece, I told a story and you decided how you would interact with me. What we did was to form or alter the relationship between us. If you are good at it — telling stories — you will have the opportunity to impact someone either positively or negatively.

A story’s strength lies not only in its content and context but also in its presentation. This means you must master the medium and you can only do this by totally understanding the medium.

For the Innu story, the medium was oral. It used the Innu language. The storyteller used inflexion and emphasis to tell his story. In the North American Aboriginal culture, the most powerful people are the storytellers. They have the most stories to tell to the most people. This tradition is now a part of your tradition. You, as a storyteller have the opportunity of not only reaching the most ears (or eyeballs) but also telling the most stories. Don’t get arrogant with that last one. It is the quality of the story, not the quantity that is most important here. If your stories have no relation to the listener and there is no reaction, all of your power is lost.

Whether it be film, television, radio, newspaper, a book, music, digital imaging, an app or the internet a story is only as effective as one’s mastery of the medium. Josh Ulm in a presentation at FlashForward 2001 explained it beautifully when he said, “ Each medium tells its story differently and can tell a compelling and engaging story if you let the medium use what it does best. “

The most effective piece of Television I have ever seen was the night of the start of the Gulf War in the early 1990s. Bernard Shaw was in a hotel room in Baghdad and he simply stuck the camera out the window of his hotel room and let the camera roll. I was simply spellbound listening to the air raid sirens and watching the tracer shells of the antiaircraft guns fly across the Baghdad skyline. What made it even more compelling was the fact the correspondent simply said nothing. He let what the camera “saw” tell the story.

Each medium tells its story differently. I will be gentle and suggest that many developers and UX Designers clearly don’t understand this important point. TV is not the web. The Web is not TV. A newspaper is not radio. Video is not a newspaper. The internet’s storytelling capability is still evolving along with our understanding of the Internet. It is simply too new. As Josh pointed out, “We are still trying to figure out what the Web does best by looking at other media.” I would suggest this may just be the wrong approach. Let me explain.

Remediation

In 1999, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin wrote a book entitled, “Remediation: Understanding New Media.” The point of the book is that all media from print to the Web refashion prior forms of media. For example, photography essentially refashioned painting and digital photography is refashioning photography. Along with immediacy and hypermediacy, remediation is one of the three traits of the heredity of today’s media environment.

Immediacy is the attempt to get the user to forget the presence of the medium and believe that he or she is in the presence of the actual objects. Go any 3D movie and you will see this in action. The film attempts, unsuccessfully I might add, to make you think you weren’t watching a 3-D animation but an actual human being.

Hypermediacy goes in the opposite direction. It reminds the viewer of the medium. Multiple windows on a computer or web site or fly-out menus are good examples of this.

Due to its sheer newness, it is almost impossible for any individual to claim mastery of the Internet as a medium. Jacob Neilson and his advocacy of an engineering approach to web design in his book “Designing Web Usability” comes close when the first sentence of the book is, “I am a usability expert, so my choice of medium is governed by what is most usable for a given communications goal and not what is in fashion at any given time.” Though usability is rightfully a huge issue among the UX design and development community, it is not the design of sites and apps that are driving the debate, but the fact technology is overwhelming the story.

As Bolter and Grusin so succinctly put it, “ The web today is eclectic and inclusive and continues to borrow from and remediate almost any visual and verbal medium we can name.” Film became video which became digital video and, on the web, it became streaming video. Just like TV only better.

The telephone became radio, which became broadcast audio, which became digital audio and, on the web, it became streaming audio and podcasts. Just like radio, only better.

The cell phone became an entertainment centre. Only better.

The web rivals everything from a letter written on paper from your lover to television by promising greater immediacy and by putting any media it touches into a new context which encompasses that thing called cyberspace.

If the rules are constantly changing, then the most powerful stories you can tell on the web may be nonlinear. They are those that change themselves to suit the situation. What the web offers is something no storytelling medium has ever offered in the past: interactivity, intelligent systems, and real-time globalization.

Several years ago Josh Ulm created a piece, called “Dreams”. In it, you could choose from several ethereal clips to create your dream. It was a great example of the remediation of film to the computer and the concept of immediacy.

What is most important with this piece is the non-linearity of the story. 16 clips can be combined to form a huge number of individual stories. The user is being asked to tell the story with a difference.

Another example is fashion retailers let you “try on” their garments and choose the colours or pattern before you add the item to the shopping cart. It is a lot like hiking a path in the woods but the first step involves choosing one of 16 paths that each have four branches with another sixteen paths. Look at an App Flow or User Journey diagram and you can see what I am talking about.

Being confronted with that number of choices can be daunting but it is a story that reaches a greater number of eyeballs and ears because it changes across multiple dimensions. The viewpoint can change. The content can change and best of all, you can keep changing it until the story relates to you.

Interactive Storytelling

If there is one aspect of what we do that has the most potential to ultimately define the art of the Interactive Story Teller it is the word “interactivity”.

Whether it be the way you interact with a machine or the way you listen to an Innu elder the key is the ability of the user or listener being able to relate to the story. Now, what if you were able to play with the story or to customize it in such a way that it has a context that relates to you and not the person sitting next to you? This is interactivity. It is an experience that is both personal and participatory.

Unfortunately much of the web and app development today is designed around an old media …the magazine. You can flip through the pages, look at the pictures, maybe read something. The only real interactivity is the ubiquitous button click or element tap to navigate.

This is not interactivity. In his FlashForward talk in 2000, Josh Ulm outlined five criteria by which you can determine interactivity. The more of these qualities an experience has, the richer the interactive experience.

Subject and Participant

This one is quite obvious. If I tell you a story you react. If I just stand on a street corner telling the story to myself there will be a different reaction.

Intention

Does the potential for an interaction between the storyteller and the listener exist? At the beginning of this piece as soon as I moved out of your context or didn’t meet your expectations for this piece, you became distracted and started concentrating on your environment and friends. Think of the best story you have ever told. You and the audience made eye contact and maintained it throughout the telling of the story. Eye contact signals the intention to communicate. If done effectively people stay put.

There was a site in Toronto that was an online rave. It is called Safehouse and people would stay on that site, on average, for 30 minutes per visit exploring the various rooms in the “House”.

When Bryan Rieger, one of the site’s developers told this story to potential investors they greeted it with scepticism until they saw the numbers.

The site worked because the people visiting the site are there for an experience and are hooked by the potential for interactivity which, in this case, is the opportunity to customize the story. Look no further than Instagram to understand this.

Investment

When people visit a site or use an app they are investing their time, thought and emotion in the exchange. They are moved to interact with the story.

Another example of this is something that just drives me crazy. Most evenings, just as I am sitting down to dinner with my family, the phone will ring and the caller will want to engage me in the story of their product’s features. Now I am standing there watching my dinner get cold and the caller is attempting to tell me a great story about their phone service, new windows for my house or cleaning my ducts. I have no intention of making any sort of investment with them and I will either be rude or polite but I am not making any sort of eye contact with them. I am thinking about how to get rid of them and not concentrating on their story. In interactive media, the Back button on the browser, the sudden appearance of a modal or a “Quit” command is the digital equivalent only it is more impersonal and doesn’t involve any sort of human-to-human interaction. It is rather brutal if you think about it.

Participation

I once stood in front of an Andy Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe in a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art. As I stood there a couple of people start talking about the painting and their reactions to it. On the surface, you could say, the couple was interacting with Andy and the painting. Alternatively, were they simply standing in the Museum of Modern Art talking about an Andy Warhol painting? I would suggest the latter and it was not an interactive experience.

For interactivity to work, the user must participate in the story and have a role in its telling or development and that role must be important.

Change

What many developers don’t seem to understand is how difficult it is to change. Yes, there is a high level of participation but the majority of sites and apps out there offer little more than the opportunity to select which page or section to view, which element to click or which form to fill out. The interactive experience is always the same. Even the Dreams piece, with its multiple choices, never offered more potential to me than it did to each of you. When things change, though, they offer more personalization to each of us. The experience is mine., It is not yours.

Amazon.com is a tremendous example of this one. When you visit the site each subsequent visit will result in a series of suggested books or items that meet your initial interests. Up until this past April I ordered a lot of software and design books and each time I visited the line up of these books changed. In April, I started thinking about what we do and decided to order a couple of academic books that explored digital media. Now, when I enter the site, they have a different series of offerings that I might be interested in purchasing. Thus my Amazon page is different from everyone else’s Amazon page. It is mine alone and when I participate I change the content and it is specific to my interests, not yours.

This works through the use of an intelligent system but the rise of dynamic content which can be customized to the user over the past few years and its ability to mould its story to my unique needs holds immense promise for the storyteller. Imagine listening to the Innu storyteller and the story you hear from him is different from the one the person next to you is hearing.

Awareness of Effects

There has to be a payoff. It is not enough to invoke change if we do not recognize that our experience is unique. When we take responsibility for change, the value and importance of the experience will grow geometrically. If there is a purpose for our involvement in the story the reward becomes even more significant.

SafeHouse worked because the visitor was taking responsibility for the evolution of the story. Dreams worked for the same reason.

Josh called this “the reward” because there is a physical sensation that comes along with your realization of purpose. It is, as Josh said, “ encouraging, inspiring, and often exciting.”

Accumulation of Effects (History)

This may just be where interactive storytelling will find its strength in interactive media. Imagine what would happen if a piece accumulates the effects of each person who touches it and changes it. This is history and evolution and is an interactive environment that changes over time. Instead of machine-human interaction, it will be a storyteller- storyteller interaction where the users become the storytellers.

I am a Boy Scout leader. I work with a group of 8 to 10-year-old Cub Scouts and we spend a lot of time outdoors. When we go camping the highlight of the weekend is inevitably the campfire. For five years now we have been telling a story that is much like the Dream piece I just demonstrated. It started with me and since then the story has changed across those multiple dimensions as over 500 boys and adults have involved themselves in the story

What does a story told around a campfire in Canada have to do with an interactive storytelling article? It is the non-linearity of what we do that is the common thread. The classic Aristotelian story is linear. The story in the realm of interactive media is the opposite.

This where the concept of the persona becomes rather interesting. The team develops the stories about each mythical user based on their understanding of the underlying research. The thing is, these stories change as they move through the team. As these stories are described, both the storyteller and the audience become engaged in the story. All of the principals I had just presented were there and each one had a compelling interactive storytelling experience.

Where might we go from here?

I am going to conclude with a bit of theory regarding the future of Interactive Storytelling.

In 1999 MIT Press published a book of essays called “The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media”. One of the contributors and the editor is Peter Lunenfeld, an academic and founder of MediaWorks: The Southern California New Media Working Group. His essay, “Unfinished Business”, should be required reading for anyone getting into this business.

The point of the essay, as he points out in his first sentence is, “The business of the computer is always unfinished.” The rise of hypermediacy and, in many respects, the use of hypertext, means our stories will never reach the point where we add- “The end”.

That story told around a campfire is a good example of this. It, theoretically, will never end because the participants always change. It is no different when developing the stories critical to the UX process. There will always be someone to whom the persona story is passed and the story will constantly change as it is filtered through the experiences and cultural contexts of the listeners and the storytellers.

According to Lunenfeld, we should not react with fear to the concept of “unfinish” but to embrace it. “The unfinished work or person”, he wrote, “ allows us to read our own desires into a not yet fully formed object- opening up more space for pleasure and identification than any “complete” work or person can ever offer.”

The use of interactivity in digital media has a profound effect on our stories. A web page, with hyperlinks or app menus and buttons, is a good starting point for how unfinish will affect us.

All of those words in an app or web page are simply that, words. The communications tradition they come from, therefore, is one of textuality which uses Aristotelian linearity- start, middle, end- as its model. Add the blue links and interactivity and the path starts to meander towards unfinish as the traditional boundaries between the text and the context change. In some cases, this change is profound.

The concept of “Unfinish”.

This causes Lunenfield, to make a rather important observation- “Technology and popular culture propel us toward a state of unfinish in which the story is never over and the limits of what constitutes the story are never to be as clear again.”

What is happening to create this state of unfinish is that the story around the story is becoming more predominant than the story itself. Gerard Genette calls this “paratext” which is the collection of materials and stories that surround the original narrative.

If anybody here is familiar with the personalities of the WWE ( World Wrestling Entertainment) you have been exposed to this. Hit the site and each of the so-called “Superstars” is involved in a feud or alliance with the other “Superstars”. Each one has his or her storyline and it unfolds week- after — week and match after match. This business is huge in North America and millions of people follow the WWE as though it were some kind of cult. My favourite was Dwayne Johnson or, as he was then known: “The Rock”.

One of his stories was that for him to star in the movie “The Mummy Returns”, he was suspended from the WWE. Once that finished he returned and started feuding with his arch-nemesis, Booker-T.

When I watched a match on TV, Rock appeared, the crowd went wild and thousands of “Pro Rock” hand-lettered signs, held up by rabid fans, appeared on the screen. So we have the Rock live. But I could also purchase the Nintendo WWE game and have Rock on the screen. I could visit the WWE web site and purchase Rock videos or T-Shirts. I could read about him in Rolling Stone because he is on the cover. I could visit his site. I could participate in several internet chats and contribute my stories and theories to other rabid fans. What we have here is a classic example of paratextuality revolving around a “property” of the WWE that has, in fact, not become “The Rock” but several “Rocks”.

As Lunenfeld so succinctly puts it, “The result of such dubious corporate synergy is the blending of the text and the paratext, the pumping out of the undifferentiated and unfinished product into the electronically interlinked mediasphere. Final closure of narrative can not occur in such an environment because there is an economic imperative to develop narrative brands; products that can be sold and resold”.

Never forget, ours is as much an economic medium as it is a creative medium and that our stories now need as much of a return on investment as they do on personal satisfaction and experience. Our stories, as I have pointed out, are now moving across multiple media and have to change to meet the needs of that media.

What I find fascinating about the concept of “unfinish” is not the fact it is digital or technological or even driven by the profit imperative.

What makes Interactive Story Telling so compelling is that it is rooted in communications history and starts with orality, moves through textuality becomes experiential through interactivity and somehow the story never ends as it moves into a state of unfinish.

What we do started tens of thousands of years ago when somebody turned to somebody else and said, “Here’s what happened out there.”

If, as I pointed out, our stories will never finish, then how do I end this story knowing that I really can’t end it? Simple. I choose to.