Tell Yourself A Story

Software	EITHER (Probably) Java or JavaScript and XHTML, perhaps with a database management system OR Flash or Director
Covers	Design and development of an interactive system, possibly databases
Skills Required	Programming, interactive system design, perhaps some understanding of databases
Challenge	Conceptual ? Technical ?? Programming ?

Brief Description

Lots of children enjoy telling stories, and lots of parents would like to tell their children their own stories. But thinking of stories and plot developments is hard, so the creative impulse is stifled at birth by lack of confidence. There's a way round this: paradoxical as it might seem, design problems of all sorts are made easier by adding constraints that restrict the space of possibilities to a much narrower and more manageable range. You can make storytelling easier by imposing constraints on how the story must continue; these constraints may also kick the story off in an unexpected direction, making it richer and more complex. So a way of adding constraints to the structure that a developing story must follow can enable children and adults to tell more interesting and unpredictable stories than they could think of unaided. (Constructing coherent stories where all the developments matter to the plot is another matter entirely, but that isn't essential to an enjoyable adventure at bedtime...)

The objective of this project is to develop a system - either a web application or a standalone software application to be distributed on a CD - that generates a unpredictable sequence of constraints on the story. The most obvious and visually attractive way to do this is to select a picture at random from a large selection, which then needs to be interpreted and woven into the story by the storyteller. The challenge is in developing a smooth and attractive interface that enables the storyteller (and hearers) to review the succession of cues and connect the new cue, not necessarily in a linear order.

Variant

A different, less glossy but more intellectually challenging approach would be to use words or word-combinations to develop the story, perhaps developing something like a mind-map.

Extensions

The easiest way to select pictures or other cues is at random from a fixed set with equal probability. However, you may wish to make some cues more frequent, or to make the probability of selecting particular subsequent cues depend on previous ones.

If you want to develop a much more technically fancy product, you could add the ability to record and upload sound files of your developing story, associated with the corresponding on-screen cues, and enabling the users to play them back.

Narratology is the academic study of narrative. If you want to dig into what makes a good story, and how a tool like this might facilitate storytelling, you could investigate what's been written and how to use it. Another fruitful source of insight and ideas might be the work done on digital storytelling - how to make games compelling narratives.

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