Storytelling and Immersion, or We Are Ahead of the Curve

Digging my way back through old Econtalk episodes I came across this old interview with Frank Rose on "Storytelling and the Art of Immersion". Rose's thesis is essentially that the storytelling possibilities of the internet have not yet really been tapped: between the invention of the film camera and the invention of a "grammar of cinema" there was a gap of decades, as with TV and so forth, and it's likely that were are still in the early years of the creation of a "grammar of internet storytelling". What this boils down to, for Rose, is interactivity or immersion: where TV, radio and cinema are one-way, the internet facilitates audience participation in ways that could never have existed 30 years ago. We don't know what will evolve, but we can be sure it will be something new.

He cites fan fiction communities, cosplay, Lost fandom, people tweeting as Mad Men characters, fantasy football, and so on as early examples of this. As somebody who basically only watches sport and old episodes of Frasier on TV, I generally have to take the word of people who talk about these things, but I am prepared to accept the general proposition that these phenomena are real. What amuses and intrigues me is that role playing games are completely ignored in the conversation. Indeed, when Rose said the following:

I think ultimately where it's going to go is some kind of fusion of story and game, which has not really been accomplished yet. I think that is, however, what's implied in this kind of immersive, participatory kind of story-telling...So, in any case, I think where it's going is some form that really hasn't been invented yet that very convincingly combines the very participatory aspect of games with the narrative absorption of storytelling.

It had me muttering to myself like a crazy person something along the lines of, "Duh, it was invented in nineteen fucking seventy four."

People who play D&D are ahead of the curve. We may have neckbeards and stink of cat piss but we have seen the future. We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. We've seen things they wouldn't believe: d20s rolling on the kitchen table, pencils glittering in the dark near piles of squared paper... Today is only one gaming session in all the gaming sessions that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other gaming sessions that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this campaign. It's been that way so many times. All of games are that way.

The future is already here, in other words; it's just not very evenly distributed.