[This is a follow-up piece to James Curcio's post entitled "Questions Towards A Philosophy of Gaming, Transmedia and Myth", and in particular, how narrative constructs developed through gaming might transform culture. While this is actually a edited repost of a piece I wrote last year, it is timely given that the game featured as a use case has enjoyed incredible success, some of it attributable to the explorations discussed here. Enjoy.]
An all too familiar scenario. Yet, as marketers and product makers, we are often sitting on a veritable warchest of mythic value and storytelling possibility, whereby games, audiences and social movements have new opportunities to align themselves - to converge - around narrative.
The discipline of marketing, especially in the sense of stifling narrative and manipulating audiences through frequency of message, has made it a dirty word, and dare I say, a dirty practice. So for the sake of exploration, let's reposition it to become something along the lines of an "experience cultivator".
Recently, I came across a brilliant whitepaper from Kai Pata at Tallinn University’s Center For Educational Technology, one that addresses the dynamics surrounding participatory culture, and how storytelling swarms develop into a hybrid narrative ecosystem. Using design as the core discipline, what Pata has effectively done is outline the steps for dynamic artifact creation, as well as the some of the more accessible methods for extracting mythology from everyday circumstance (or creating/recreating it).
