" A Long story should never be boring" - Gypsy Roma Traveller Leeds

Continuing on with our research on User Generated Content, I have realised the potential and importance of audience participation upon the success of a storytelling experience. After distributing questionnaires to our class in order to determine whether story telling is actually still current in today's youth, we extracted some findings which proved quite useful.

We also wanted to find out what an audience wants from a story and if they prefer new interactive experiences as opposed to traditional story telling methods. From the data extracted in our questionnaires, we were also able to obtain whether factors like gender affected certain aspects of our overall findings. A considerably larger number of people felt that a good story telling experience was dominated by story over character resulting in 10 people out of 11 choosing this answer.

What was consistent was that almost all participants, bar one told us that the last time they felt involved in and gripped by a storytelling experience was in the past couple of weeks. Another startling result which we found when we compares male answers to female answers was that only 3 out of 11 females had taken part in interactive experiences online, whereas as all of the males had participated in at least one of the following three: ‘Take this lollipop’, ‘Ipad for Alice’, ‘The beauty Inside’.

We then did a poll on Facebook to find out if people would rather experience a story through the traditional method, or through an interactive experience. Our results were unexpected as we had predicted that people today would opt to take part in an online/interactive experience, but after voting in the poll, more than 75% of the class opted for the traditional story telling method.

The Brief

So we have been given our question for the brief which comes in the form of the Digital Fiction Factory, represented by Ian Wareing:

"The Internet, social media and other open systems have allowed for user generated content (UGC), crowd-sourcing and other forms of audience participation to prevail in digital media. But how do we translate these features into storytelling experiences, without treading on the toes of the author?"

Since given the question we have been carrying out various research in order to determine an answer for this question. Interactive storytelling is something in which our current technologic climate has allowed to flourish alongside the media industry. We are all familiar with interactive experiences like the 'Million Pound Drop' where such shows rely on audience participation as central to their success.

Another massive part of our daily lives is spent online on social networking sites such as Twitter on Facebook which have brought about a revolutionary change in the way we communicate and interact. With the aid of laptops, mobile devices and tablets we are now able to experience a story in a whole new way from the traditional storybook method. The popular Channel 4 drama 'Hollyoaks' experimented with this type of interactive experience in their online experiment titled 'The Morning After' in which characters from the show were brought to life via social networking site 'Bebo'. Projects like such help to provide a richer story experience for an audience who would otherwise not be able to engage with the characters, and also contributes to the success of the show as a whole; creating more participation results in a greater amount of publicity. See below