Digital Storytelling - Pro Blog post 4

My experience with digital storytelling I guess begins when I started playing video games. After reading the article "Place-Based Digital Storytelling" by Chisholm & Trent, it got me thinking about how playing an online multi massive role playing game (MMORPG) could be counted as digital storytelling. A MMORPG consists of creating a character, which is a different persona than that of the player sitting behind the computer screen, as in the game, the player will only see the character they created, non-player characters (NPCs), monsters, and other players' characters that were created. Most MMO's (multi-massive online) will have their own game lore, as well as quests that the NPCs can give the player to earn better equipment, items, and experience. The quests will sometimes explain the lore, but most people ignore it to get to the game's content. For example, I play an MMORPG called "Dark Age of Camelot" which has three different lores of storytelling in it, but one does not need to know the lore to play. The game is divided into three realms, and each realm has x amount of races, and x amount of classes, and race/class combinations. One realm is called Albion, and the main city is Camelot. The races include Highlanders, Avalonians, Britons, and a couple others. The classes include Wizards, Sorcerers, Paladins, Clerics, Theurgists, and many more. One of the dungeons is called Stonehenge Barrows, which is a dungeon in the middle of a Stonehenge, and another place called Hadrian's Wall, which I just found out was a real place and that is just one teeny tiny introduction. But, the creators included lore from stories that players would know, or could research if they wanted to.

Other than gaming, I took a storytelling course at UWM online, and the way we told stories was by posting on online discussion posts on D2L. While we did not record ourselves, it still required us to type out our stories and post them online. However, I would be interested in taking this storytelling to another level by creating a video, as storytelling has always been interesting to me, especially with how far storytelling has come, and storytelling has many forms.

The forms that I enjoy are digital storytelling (as mentioned above), book trailers, and video essays. I feel that these three give the most creativity for creation and output. I feel like these are the three I would use the most in a future classroom to promote writing for students. With being creative, there is not necessarily a wrong answer. One can make up a story in a creative writing class, and create a recording with images. If the student wanted to, they could record themselves telling a story with an accent, or fit their story to a song they enjoy that would fit the topic or story they are portraying or telling to the class. A video essay may intrigue a student who does not like to write, but it would encourage them to write at minimum a script and still require them to search for sources. As for a book trailer, it is similar to a digital storytelling video in the sense that the student gets to have fun making a creative project with images, music, texts, or even voice overs that talk about a book they have read. All these options still require the student to write, but the writing portion itself would not be as daunting to the student.

I got really curious, so I searched for digital storytelling in MMORPG, and found the following two articles. I should have mentioned earlier as well that it is not just MMOs that have storytelling, but many video games do, and there are different varieties or genres for video games. There are: Roleplaying Games (RPGs) such as Skyrim and the older Final Fantasy games that are single player, but have more of an open world feel; there are turn-based or real time strategy games such as Warcraft or Heroes of Might and Magic; and of course one has to mention the Pokémon games which are based off the tv show, but took their own spin with the games, which still follow the storyline of the show in a sense. Anyway, the first article talks about how people want a rich storyline with good character development and that it is more important in gaming. The author says: "As a gamer, you’re not the viewer, you’re the actor! We find ourselves quickly invested in the characters because we’re not just watching them; we’re interacting with them. No other form of media can do this. Gaming places you in the story. " This is what makes gaming unique. I highly recommend reading this article. The second article requires one to download the pdf, but it gives a bit more of a background to gaming as an overall concept, and gives a bit of insight as to where gaming started and where it is going. As I had said earlier, storytelling in general has been around since ancient times, but the modes have changed. Before video and PC games got big, table-top gaming was the next big thing, which is how Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) got so big. While DnD is not digital, it still required the Dungeon Master (DM) to read handbooks and create a story for their group to enjoy. The group would then build their own character on a character sheet, and the stats (strength, intelligence, wisdom, and more) were figured out by rolling a 20-sided die, and their characters would be portrayed with a figurine that would be placed on a dry erase map on the table. Each player (including the DM), would take turns. Some people would take DnD a step further and do a live-action role playing game (LARP'ing) which is where the group would dress up in costume and act out what they are or were doing.

https://www.mmorpg.com/columns/interactive-storytelling-evolution-2000094484

https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AIIDE/AIIDE09/paper/download/799/1062 (will direct you to download the PDF version.)

Role playing is still going on and has been used in classrooms. For example, in a previous class, I was roleplaying as a teacher and a classmate was roleplaying as the parent of a fictional student. We did this twice. Once was for a parent-teacher conference, and the other was to talk to the parent about a problem the student (their fictional child) had. I hope to use this form as well as the other methods to try and make the classroom interactive and fun, and another means of students to learn and be involved with one another.