xvi Introduction
The New Digital Storytelling straddles the awkward yet practical divide
between production and consumption, critique and project creation. Ulti-
mately a single book cannot do full justice to both. Instead, it can at best
connect one domain with the other, hopefully bringing a kind of stereo-
scopic vision to bear. Put another way, the core of this book surveys the
current state of the technologically enabled art in a way grounded in both
contemporary theory and practice.
Organization of the Book
I begin with a historical sketch in Part 1. The first chapter tries to untan-
gle the Gordian knot of storytelling, teasing out the different models and
modes we inherit in 2017. Chapters 2 and 3 then survey the digital story-
telling ancestry, the two generations of computing and narrative practice
preceding our time.
The second part of this book surveys the current state of the digital sto-
rytelling art. This part proceeds by increasing levels of scale, beginning
with simpler and more accessible technologies (text- and image-based
social media), advancing through richer media (audio and video), and cli-
maxing with the most advanced forms (gaming small and large). These
constitute a series of new platforms for narratives. Some are emergent ones
in the sense of having recently appeared, yielding a good number of exam-
ples, and continuing to develop on multiple levels. Others are more
mature, if still evolving.
It is important to emphasize the persistence of older, seemingly obso-
lete or outmoded technologies. As David Edgerton argues, multiple strata
of technology continue functioning while and after new ones enter soci-
ety. Older technologies and practices can maintain their purposes or
become repurposed for new uses.5 In this book, we examine interactive
fiction, a form robust in the early 1980s, alongside augmented reality, an
information ecosystem still being born as of this writing. Perhaps the most
powerful metaphor for thinking through successive technologies is that of
tile imbrications. As each new row of tiles partially obscures, yet partially
exposes, already established rows, new technologies often overlap the old,
partially but not entirely obscuring their predecessors.
In Part 3, we turn to new narrative forms emerging from combinations
of the storytelling practices sketched out in the preceding chapters. Personal
stories, gaming, and social media have each developed quite far in a short
period of time, so it is unsurprising that they have begun to connect with
each other and crossbreed. Perhaps we can think of the emergent swarm of
projects and strategies under the header of “combinatorial storytelling.”
