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https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/jun/16/british-library-is-getting-into-gaming-digital-storytelling>
"When you walk into the British Library, the first thing you’ll see – apart
from people sitting in every available free space, writing on laptops or in
notebooks – is a glass tower encasing rows upon rows of books, stretching up to
the ceiling. It’s fair to say that this place has a lot of experience when it
comes to displaying stories. For digital, interactive stories, though, the
classic glass case doesn’t really work. These tales often invite the reader to
play a part in the narrative and shape their own experience, but this can be
difficult when you’re standing in an exhibition room with people looking over
your shoulder, waiting for their turn. Allowing for interactivity in the finite
and often restrictive setting of an exhibition is not an easy task. But in its
latest exhibition,
Digital Storytelling, the British Library has tasked
itself with just that.
It is not the first time the British Library has featured digital works:
however, it is the first time that an entire exhibition has revolved around
“the ways in which digital technologies have shaped how we communicate and tell
stories”, as the curators put it. It features highly regarded commercial
classics of interactive digital storytelling, such as the Inkle’s 2014
steampunk narrative fiction game
80 Days, and Nyamnyam’s 2019 Elizabethan
comedy narrative adventure
Astrologaster, sitting beside intimate personal
narratives such as
c ya laterrrr, an autobiographical hypertext account of
the loss of author Dan Hett’s brother in the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist
attack. Despite the modest size of the exhibition room, the curators (Giulia
Carla Rossi, Ian Cooke, and Stella Wisdom) have selected a wide range of pieces
spanning genres, topics and emotions, made with a variety of digital tools.
Nearly all of the pieces are snapshots of recent history, waypoints for some of
the ways that digital media have been used in storytelling.
Windrush Tales
(3-Fold Games) is the only piece still in development; this exhibition contains
its first playable preview. It is an interactive narrative game based on the
lived experiences of Caribbean immigrants in postwar Britain. As Giulia Carla
Rossi, co-curator of the exhibition and curator for digital publications in
contemporary British and Irish published collections, highlighted: “It feels
special to be able to have this work on display this year, which marks the 75th
anniversary of the arrival of passengers from the Empire Windrush to the UK.”
The preview of
Windrush Tales is one of the highlights of the exhibition,
both as an experience and as an invitation to think about digital
storytelling’s present and future, rather than its recent past."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
