The lecture on interactive storytelling begins with a belief taken from Aristotle: “the role of storytelling is to imitate life and make us feel emotions.” After this, David Cage briefly explains the essence of traditional storytelling and its limitations. Because the author of a novel, play, film, etc. is all-powerful in his art, a very basic part of humanity – the ability to make choices – is taken away. In this sense, the individuals being entertained consume the information passively. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, films, plays and the like are “hot mediums” – mediums that do not require much input from the audience.
However, interactive storytelling is an extraordinary medium – one that is still ‘waiting for its Orson Welles or its Stanley Kubrick’. To better illustrate the exciting possibilities of the narrative format, David Cage plays a section of the game “Detroit: Become Human” and asks the audience to make choices during the play, adding an immersive component to his reading.
After giving attendees a glimpse of what his work looks like, Cage explains what it takes to actually prepare for the experience. While a movie script can be around 100 pages, an interactive script can be between four and five thousand pages. The astronomical escalation of workload is directly related to the fact that in an interactive medium the creative must consider all possible choices and all possible outcomes. This results in huge tree-like maps, with each branch being a variation on the story.
At the end of his lecture on interactive storytelling, Cage continues to say that he is happy to have dedicated twenty years of his life to this industry, praising the experience as a unique collaboration between the ‘writer [who] creates [the] narrative landscape” and the audience who “becomes the copywriter, […] the co-actor and the co-director of the story.”
