Group Narrative: Democratic vs. Entrepreneurial Group Story Telling

I've been considering how interactive narratives can become increasingly social and group driven. There is a history of this, and indeed the entire prehistory of narrative can be considered a group effort to build a story. But how can we create a technology that enables groups to participate in the unfolding of a story?

There's an example from Czech film history which I can't cite exactly right now where an audience would sit in a movie theater and vote on the process of the story. Of course, this means the story has to be constructed in a branching structure, and one that probably loops back around a good deal due to the shear economics of film making. I might call this democratic group narrative building.

Democratic group narrative building does not always require a branching structure the way it would when applied to traditional films. Plenty of games online use democratic structures in their imitation of real life social situations. The ways in which this constitutes a narrative or could lead to further developments of narrative is a rich debate to be had, but I'll let it go for now.

However, I'll argue that Democratic group narrative building is probably most effective when the narrative is one that attempts to engage the audience (or players) as members of a group making social decisions. It may not always lead to the most interesting story endings, as we all know that interesting story endings are frequently the ones that leave the group surprised.

I'll introduce the idea of the entrepreneurial model, which probably better imitates the ancient methods of constructing a story. In this, the entire group is given access to the story's structure, and has the ability to toy around with it. However, like a group of open-source programmers, the best structures emerge from that group and become accepted by the group and it gets added to the overall structure.

Another example of this is a group of children playing with blocks, all working on some sort group structure out of the blocks. Every child is capable of working on different parts of the structure, but it is one child with a great idea who does it on their own that may make the structure particularly interesting and let it go off in another direction altogether.

It's hard to say exactly how to harness entrepreneurial group story telling in a new way. However, by pursuing this model, there could be really interesting results with bold new stories and ways of telling and sharing stories.