Notes on Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds (Margaret Kerrison)
The month of January was spent primarily reading a play every day, for at least the first part of February I’m going to shift focus and look at many of the educational books I have stacked up to read, things that I hope will help how I approach and create creative works. Due to the larger nature of these books I will likely cover chapters at a time instead of the whole book. That’s not true today though.
For the last year I’ve been slowly developing a semi-immersive theater production, something I’m not fully ready to divulge, but it involves game design and so I’m trying to read a lot of books about that.
I started with Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds which I think is the first book of its kind. Written by a former imagineer, this book wants to explore the basic principles behind creating immersive work. While she primarily focuses on theme parks there is a lot of usable information, and she hits on many of the non-theme park luminaries in the genre (Meow Wolf, Odyssey Works, etc.)
The Key Idea I pulled from this is to Start with Wish-fulfillment. If you are asking people to wrap themselves in a new world you need to give them a reason why. What do they gain, what need are you fulfilling in them. For theme parks it’s often excitement, adventure, the promise of a life too amazing to be your own. With IP work it can be as simple to live in the world of the characters you love for a little while.
For my project I’m currently working on a more mundane wish, but one that I hope can be revelatory: Reconnecting with an Old Friend. I hope to bring out the joy and comfort that comes from resurrecting a relationship which has laid dormant for a little too long.
Kerrison provides another invaluable resource within this book: several detailed checklists and questions to ask yourself as you’re crafting story. I don’t have the book on me so I can’t recreate them, but she has adapted the scales of storytelling (who, what, where, when, and how) into a series of detailed and thought-provoking questions which I will probably print out and hang in my office somewhere.
Like so many surveys of art forms there is nothing tremendously new in this book, and it doesn’t help with the building of these experiences, only with the planning of them, but it is a useful resource to touch base with every so often.
