Reflections: Stories to Tell
It was just two weekends ago that I traveled to the second highest mountain in West Virginia. Nine friends spent the weekend on the top of the other second highest mountain in West Virginia. Yes, apparently, there are two "second highest mountains" just miles apart from each other in the Alleghenies and much of my weekend was spent looking out over my balcony on one peak across the jewel toned hills to the other and wondering just what my friends were doing.
I also spent time reflecting on Eldritch. It is very much unlike any project that I've worked on before and, to be honest, it's not a project that I ever saw myself a part of. When it comes to "transmedia entertainment", I come from a ludic background (games and play). Eldritch is much more a dramatic narrative. Interactive fiction is such a broad term and I've worked on dozens of projects that have used it but I have never felt as connected to it as I have over the past couple weeks.
Just over a month ago, sometime in mid-September, I got the call about the trip. We had been talking about going to the mountains and had sent Mike, the asst producer, on an internet search for cabins, but when I answered the phone that night, I had no idea what laid in store for me. I could barely understand Brian through his excited shouts. A rustic cabin on top of a mountain that you could only reach via an antique train? It sounded great and we laughed excitedly (and, perhaps, a bit wickedly) for a few minutes before hanging up the phone. The next morning, I woke up to the news that the cabin had been rented... by us.
Panic set in.
Two weeks to develop the next book in the series? A book in which we were going to ask players to travel to the middle of nowhere West Virginia? I must confess to being convinced we were both insane and that the trip would be a complete failure.
I started screaming about the need for more ludic elements. Puzzles! Challenges! Missions! Goals! These are things that I understand. These are things that I can do. But somewhere, I knew that they are not the heart of Eldritch Errors. No, Eldritch is a story to be experienced it is not just a game to be played.
Panic, once again, set in.
I am not a writer. This is something that I tell myself, and Brian, repeatedly. And so, for the next few weeks, I felt very much out of my comfort zone. I was being pushed in ways that I wasn't sure that I wanted to be pushed. It wasn't until I looked across those mountains that I realized I was experiencing something awesome. That an experience I had a hand in creating was going to extraordinary places and taking people from all over the world with it.
I won't go into all the details of the weekend, one of the participants has written an amazing four part summary that does a much better job than I ever could (1,2,3,4), but I will say that I have never been so awed by the power of immersion, belief, and story creation. When you spend twenty four hours on the top of a mountain with people who are very much real acting out characters who are very much fiction, where is the line of reality drawn? How does the story change for people who have woken up to the screams of a very terrified and upset character, comforting her and promising to do what they can to help? What happens to the story when it is being written, collaboratively, by actors and participants, each with their own goals and desires, at the time that it is being told.
These questions (and so many others) are swimming around in my head. It's at turns exciting and terrifying. I feel very much connected to the story in ways that I never thought possible. More so, I feel a connection to the participants who are building the story as much as we are. Much as the lines between reality and fiction blur, so do the lines between creator and participant. It's an incredible project and one with many lessons to teach and stories to tell.