Better than storytelling: Four reasons interactivity is the future of PR

Many people in PR, advertising and communications put great pride in storytelling. Are they missing something? Storytelling is a powerful tool. But storytelling is just one way of sharing understanding and spreading ideas. Like any tool, it has strengths but also limitations. There’s another way: interactive experiences like apps, visualizations and games can also be […]

Civilization: A Game in Three Acts

I’m a big fan of games without a built-in story. For my money, the best thing about games is that they can let players create and experience a story for themselves, rather than smacking them down into a linear narrative someone else has dreamt up. I’m not against linear storytellng at all, mind. I just […]

Scale and Storytelling in Civilization

Adrian has been writing a fascinating series of posts on Civilization over at mssv. I’m a massive Civ fan myself. I installed the very first version of the game from floppy disks onto my mom’s computer back in 1992. It was a beige IBM desktop, whose processing power would seem puny next to a lot […]

Drama, not Prose: Storytelling in Games

People say there’s not much good storytelling in games, but I think that’s simply not true. I think, instead, that most people are looking in the wrong place. The other day I was playing Left 4 Dead 2, and something awesome happened: a narrative of altruism, sacrifice . . . and ultimately, betrayal. The stuff […]

Once upon a time . . .

OK – it’s not that black and white. But as usual I’m being bombastic to press the point. There’s room for great stories, and great storytelling, in games. But I think it’s important to appreciate that games offer us access to another learning mode, besides storytelling. Interactivity is one of the defining features of games […]

Philip Trippenbach

Communications strategy in the age of intelligent machines

storytelling