Came across this lovely little article in Wired magazine. Within it Guillermo Del Toro talks of a new type of storytelling:
In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform “story engine.” The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction.
The aspect I really liked is his praise for GTA’s sandbox mode, or the simple ability to ignore the game objectives within GTA and create your own narratives. Admittedly that normally means (within GTA) shooting old ladies – but within another platform, this kind of open free platform could lead to some incredibly beautiful stories being told.
As he says:
We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.
Lovely stuff
