20 digitally-enhanced, cross-platform, multi-media, transmedia storytelling projects

In this Sunday’s Observer, I mention five projects that exemplify the ways the Web is used to tell stories. There are many, many more.

Here are the links to the projects I list i the paper, plus some of the ones that were sent to me via email (aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk) or twitter during the research period.

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Some good (storytelling) reads

Want to know more about the cross-platform storytelling phenomenon? Here are a couple of good reads:

Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006) is the cornerstone of the multimedia story, explaining the last decade’s crop of practices from the point of view of media scholarship, predicting how co-production of storytelling (consumers as producers) will transform us. The 2003 nugget in Technology Review where he defined “transmedia storytelling” is here. And if you want to know how he teaches people to do it, head here for a 101.

Frank Rose’s The Art of Immersion (W.W. Norton, 2011) deascribes “how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison, and the way we tell stories”. My interview with him on The Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast from April 2011 is here.

Geek monthly Wired Magazine has run a few “transmedia” articles, but their big splash was in March 2010, here. A nice summary on what’s different:

Unlike quick promotional spin-offs, this new type of tie-in extends, rather than adapts, storylines. It tells various parts of the story using distinct media, exploiting the qualities unique to each platform. So when you watch a TV show, you might follow a sub-plot that spills on to the web, then read the dénouement in a graphic novel. Yes, writers have long created worlds that go beyond the page — L Frank Baum did as much with his 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whose story world he expanded into a musical and other books. But today’s transmedia producers are planning for multiple platforms from the start. They design fictional universes that are consistent however the audience engages.

Monomyth: Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

American scholar Joseph Cambell’s book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, is an analysis of the archetypal hero that exists across world mythologies. He calls it the “monomyth”. Geeks may be aware that Campell’s concepts found their ways into origins of the Star Wars series; director George Lucas acknowledges his debt to the scholar in the development of its arc. I remember writing a term paper on that in AP English in my senior year in High School.

Campbell identified three key stages in the journey s/he traverses: departure, initiation and return. Here’re extra details:

1. The Call to Adventure
   The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.
2. Refusal of the Call
   Often when the call is given, the future hero refuses to heed it. This may be from a sense of duty or obligation, fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or any of a range of reasons that work to hold the person in his or her current circumstances.
3. Supernatural Aid
   Once the hero has committed to the quest, consciously or unconsciously, his or her guide and magical helper appears, or becomes known.
4. The Crossing of the First Threshold
   This is the point where the person actually crosses into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits of his or her world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are not known.
5. The Belly of the Whale
   The belly of the whale represents the final separation from the hero’s known world and self. It is sometimes described as the person’s lowest point, but it is actually the point when the person is between or transitioning between worlds and selves. The separation has been made, or is being made, or being fully recognized between the old world and old self and the potential for a new world/self. The experiences that will shape the new world and self will begin shortly, or may be beginning with this experience which is often symbolized by something dark, unknown and frightening. By entering this stage, the person shows their willingness to undergo a metamorphosis, to die to him or herself.

Inititation

1. The Road of Trials
   The road of trials is a series of tests, tasks, or ordeals that the person must undergo to begin the transformation. Often the person fails one or more of these tests, which often occur in threes.
2. The Meeting with the Goddess
   The meeting with the goddess represents the point in the adventure when the person experiences a love that has the power and significance of the all-powerful, all encompassing, unconditional love that a fortunate infant may experience with his or her mother. It is also known as the “hieros gamos”, or sacred marriage, the union of opposites, and may take place entirely within the person. In other words, the person begins to see him or herself in a non-dualistic way. This is a very important step in the process and is often represented by the person finding the other person that he or she loves most completely. Although Campbell symbolizes this step as a meeting with a goddess, unconditional love and /or self unification does not have to be represented by a woman.
3. Woman as the Temptress
   At one level, this step is about those temptations that may lead the hero to abandon or stray from his or her quest, which as with the Meeting with the Goddess does not necessarily have to be represented by a woman. For Campbell, however, this step is about the revulsion that the usually male hero may feel about his own fleshy/earthy nature, and the subsequent attachment or projection of that revulsion to women. Woman is a metaphor for the physical or material temptations of life, since the hero-knight was often tempted by lust from his spiritual journey.
4. Atonement with the Father
   In this step the person must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in his or her life. In many myths and stories this is the father, or a father figure who has life and death power. This is the center point of the journey. All the previous steps have been moving in to this place, all that follow will move out from it. Although this step is most frequently symbolized by an encounter with a male entity, it does not have to be a male; just someone or thing with incredible power. For the transformation to take place, the person as he or she has been must be “killed” so that the new self can come into being. Sometime this killing is literal, and the earthly journey for that character is either over or moves into a different realm.
5. Apotheosis
   To apotheosize is to deify. When someone dies a physical death, or dies to the self to live in spirit, he or she moves beyond the pairs of opposites to a state of divine knowledge, love, compassion and bliss. This is a god-like state; the person is in heaven and beyond all strife. A more mundane way of looking at this step is that it is a period of rest, peace and fulfillment before the hero begins the return.
6. The Ultimate Boon
   The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what the person went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to prepare and purify the person for this step, since in many myths the boon is something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies immortality, or the holy grail.

Return

1. Refusal of the Return
   So why, when all has been achieved, the ambrosia has been drunk, and we have conversed with the gods, why come back to normal life with all its cares and woes?
2. The Magic Flight
   Sometimes the hero must escape with the boon, if it is something that the gods have been jealously guarding. It can be just as adventurous and dangerous returning from the journey as it was to go on it.
3. Rescue from Without
   Just as the hero may need guides and assistants to set out on the quest, often times he or she must have powerful guides and rescuers to bring them back to everyday life, especially if the person has been wounded or weakened by the experience. Or perhaps the person doesn’t realize that it is time to return, that they can return, or that others need their boon.
4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold
   The trick in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life, and then maybe figure out how to share the wisdom with the rest of the world. This is usually extremely difficult.
5. Master of the Two Worlds
   In myth, this step is usually represented by a transcendental hero like Jesus or Buddha. For a human hero, it may mean achieving a balance between the material and spiritual. The person has become comfortable and competent in both the inner and outer worlds.
6. Freedom to Live
   Mastery leads to freedom from the fear of death, which in turn is the freedom to live. This is sometimes referred to as living in the moment, neither anticipating the future nor regretting the past.

Even more, including “the heroine’s journey”, is here.

Topic: Storytelling

Once upon a time, media told stories in a linear way by leading readers/listeners/viewers from the beginning to the end via the bits in the middle. There was a build up, a climax and a denouement. The end.

Now things are different. The web has had its wicked way with stories, allowing tellers to mash up, mix up and generally mess around with formats and functions.

But are new media storytellers really doing anything different than what’s come before, or are previously marginalised ways of telling stories now mainstream? What impact has the disjointed, participatory and multi-media environment had on the way we consume stories in other media? For this fortnight’s Untangling the Web, I’ll ask a few sages their advice before crossing the proverbial Joseph Campbell bridge and heading into the woods of self-actualisation (on my own) to find out.

Spin me a yarn at aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or on Twitter, @aleksk (#uttw #storytelling)

Public Service Announcement

This week’s Untangling the Web column will be delayed a week. Instead of reading all about your online self in this Sunday’s paper, the esteemed author Eli Pariser will be sharing an excerpt from his new book, The Filter Effect: What the Internet is Hiding From You. If you’re interested in more more more about this, tune into The Serendipity Engine, a project I’m working on that aims to counteract the outcomes that Pariser describes.

Expect to find out all about the web and the self on in the Observer New Review on 19 June.

Also, over the next few months, I’ll be covering even more about the unexpected ways the web is tangled up in our social and cultural lives, including: music, youth culture, charity, friendship, storytelling, education and death.

If you’d like an in-depth look at any other topics, do get in touch! Mail me at aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or tweet me @aleksk & tag your tweet with #uttw.