What we've done

This work reviewed the literature on the many different forms of narrative that may provide useful structures for creating content that can interact with and/or respond to the audience. Inspired by the work of Janet Murray this work explored the pioneering study of oral storytellers by Milman Parry and Albert Lord along with the improvised theatre of Commedia dell’arte and compare these to the work of tour guides and the research at the University of Edinburgh on creating an AI museum guide. This initial study was published as a paper at IBC2018 titled "From Epic Poetry to AI: Discovering viable algorithms for creating responsive media."

The work then shifted onto how the roles of storytellers and audiences have been renegotiated following the appearance of new technologies like printing, radio and television, taking in the study of narratology to provide a theory of narrative before exploring the roles that narrative plays in computer games and interactive fiction. One key author in this area is Walter J. Ong. In his book Orality and Literacy charts the transitions in culture and story forms following the introduction of writing and then printing. His essay The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction is particularly useful in the way it describes the evolution of the role imposed on the reader by an author. This points the way towards audience roles that can be developed for forms of interaction and agency that work to make more engaging types of storytelling. The question of the audience's role is also a difficulty for producers working in 360 video, AR & VR where the distance provided by the frame of the video is now replaced with immersion.

We have partnered with the Bristol + Bath Creative Cluster Amplified Publishing Pathfinder exploring future models of content creation, discovery and distribution. In July 2021 we ran a workshop and presented a paper at their MIX2021 conference titled Creating cross boundary roles for the audience: developing new relationships between creators and audiences which we then began expanding on to create a white paper because the topic of the role of the audience provoked a great deal of interest. In November 2021 gave a presentation on The role of the audience in immersive storytelling to the Immersive Storytelling Symposium and participated in a discussion panel on the topic of Amplified Publishing and in May 2022 we gave a presentation to the I-docs, Crisis and Multi-perspectival Thinking seminar on The challenge of designing roles for the audience that complement polyphony. During all this time we discovered more and more about the issue of the role of the audience in media, and the original 10 page paper submitted to MIX2021 has grown into a BBC R&D White Paper of over 80 pages in length.

Our paper, The Role of the Audience in Media: how culture, framing and narration give shape to the way stories are understood, includes a potential framework for classifying different audience roles and suggestions for ways of overcoming the problems of role switching in some forms of interactive media. The paper also highlights the changes in audience behaviour that have occurred over the past twenty or so years and how that needs to be met with new audience roles. This paper contrasts the way in which computer programs are designed around a user's existing role and tasks with the way media like novels cast the reader in an explicit or more often implicit role. We explore the way the audience's role in theatre was socially engineered in Victorian times to produce a quiet passive response and the problems subsequently faced by radio in fitting around an uncontrollable domestic environment. We also compare the different approaches taken by cinema and television and examine what happens when the normally passive audience co-opts some films and television events to create a collective, sociable and often queer experience. Moving onto games we investigate the different roles that the player is given and the way that works against structured narrative and the problem of active play being disrupted by cut scenes and constraints. With virtual and augmented media look for examples that move away from computer games and cast the audience in a clearly defined role. Finally we examine the problems of interactive media, picking apart the different types of user interaction offered and examine a number of different examples to see how consistent and coherent the roles are for the audience. We conclude with a candidate ontology of audience roles and discuss the issues faced in creating content for the modern audience who have grown up with ubiquitous connectivity and have different expectations for media to previous generations.

Most recently we have contributed to the AI4ME project's Stream one: "Personalised Media Experiences" with a white paper called "Frameworks for Understanding Personalisation". This paper investigates different aspects of media personalisation from the reasons why a broadcaster might want to provide it, to the different aspects of media that could potentially be varied and the difference between convergent and divergent personalisation and how the former is related to the issue of media accessibility.

Why it matters

There have been many attempts at creating interactive stories, but few of them, outside of computer games, have combined stories with interaction in a way that has had widespread appeal. The common trope of branching narrative has been rediscovered many times, but has several key disadvantages, not least in being expensive to produce, whilst many computer games contain embedded narrative, often in the form of chunks of story in cut scenes that interupt the gameplay. In some computer games the narrative is fixed and the player "wins" the game by working out the role of their character in acting out their part in the narrative

It is generally thought that giving meaningful agency to the audience can increase immersion and thereby enhance their engagement with the story. However, mainstream examples are few and far between. This may be because games developers and authors have focused on developing works of fiction rather than the documentary or feature form. Forms of interactive narrative have the potential to significantly increase the audience engagement with stories that matter to them so finding successful structures that enable their creation could be very valuable to public service organisations.

Our goals

This work aimed to find ways of telling stories that naturally fit with interaction and then to create narrative templates that can be used to create responsive stories using our Object Based Media Toolkit and other tools as well as build awareness amongst creators of linear content of the benefits of creating clear audience roles and how the use of techniques like direct address, breaking the fourth wall, benefit the storytelling.

How it works

We conducted an extensive and wide ranging literature review, drawing on the approach of queer theory, and in particular Jack Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure to remove the distinctions between so called high and low culture, to enable us to compare all forms of audience experience on an equal footing and see common patterns across the different audience roles. We shared our findings with university partners and wider creative communities, with a particular focus on the Bristol + Bath Creative Cluster and the universities in the area. We also shared our work in a lunchtime talk at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol's Watershed.