Introduction xv
users (players) to tell themselves the story of their adventures within it.
Alternatively, a story may lurk within your conception of that world and
will unfurl during the course of its creation. Or perhaps you have a story
in mind, a full-length one, and are not sure upon which digital stage (or
stages) it should play.
On the other hand, you might not have a full digital story in mind but
are already using digital platforms and social media for various purposes
and would like to add the “story factor” to improve your work.4 Perhaps
you do not think of your work as storytelling or yourself as a storyteller.
This book is especially intended for you. Each chapter explores principles
for better storytelling that can be applied to many situations and at any
scale: how to make that PowerPoint presen ta tion less of a death march and
more of a compelling narrative; how to increase a blog readership’s atten-
tion or better shape a podcast—to any such situation, storytelling proves
a helpful advisor.
What this book is not: It is not a hands-on manual concerning the tech-
nical details of using certain digital media. It does not have the space to
delve into the nitty-gritty minutiae of different video editors, wiki markup,
and blog hosting options. Instead, this book is based on the mid-1990s
Center for Digital Storytelling’s subtle insight: that one can select just
enough technology to be dangerous, an appropriate baseline amount to get
the narrative going (see Chapter 2). The reader is not assumed to be a tech-
nologist, and the book’s language is accordingly accessible.
It is also in the social media spirit to recognize that much information
is provided by experts located elsewhere. I will outline many technologies
in the pages that follow and point to communities and leading experts to
connect with in order to find more information. It is my fond hope that
readers will be inspired to contribute to various digital storytelling social
networks in multiple ways, building still more resources for others.
This book is also not a literary theory-level study of digital storytelling.
I will be drawing on literary criticism along with media studies, history,
and other fields while avoiding jargon from those fields, much as techni-
cal terms are minimized. More literary and theoretical studies of digital
storytelling are certainly needed, bringing to bear the formidable herme-
neutic tools of contemporary literary criticism. There is already a good
amount of work along these lines being done in several allied fields, includ-
ing net.art and gaming studies. Those texts will play an important role in
this book; this book, however, is not entirely of that sort. Instead, we will
explore a wide variety of stories and strategies, applying basic literary and
media criticism in order to inspire creators and their supporters while
entering into texts at enough of a depth to start understanding them.
