Making Interactive Stories Meaningful
Workshop on Story and Character Development through Theatre Game
| Organizer: | Lori M. Shyba (Montana Tech of U. Montana) |
| When & Where: | 1.00 pm to 5.00pm, SFU Surrey room # 2710 |
| Intended Audience: | The intended audience for this workshop is anyone who wishes to release their imaginations and create interactive experiences; be they videogames, interactive cinema, or Python story-games. Beyond having a sense of adventure and an ability to collaborate, attendees need not have any particular skills or background to benefit from this workshop. |
Call for Workshop Participation
In this this half-day workshop you will explore new tools for interactive story generation by experimenting with theatre games, with an aim to create an interactive role-playing scenario that will be presented at a conference luncheon or final wrap-up. The theme and characters of the gameplay will be determined by the workshop participants – something that deals with a current social or political issue. At the performance, conference attendees will able to chip in with their alternative solutions for a serious global issue through a facilitated interactive theatre-game experience.The primary inspiration this workshop comes from Augusto Boal, Brazilian theatre visionary and developer of Forum Theatre and be facilitated by activist theatre art and game developer Lori Shyba, from Montana Tech of the University of Montana. In it, she will set out the principles and facilitate basic exercises of Forum Theatre, familiarizing you with techniques that can liberate creative ideas for videogames and interactive media of all kinds. In addition to games and techniques of Augusto Boal, this workshop utilizes character analysis techniques of acting coach Uta Hagen, and principles and practices of improvisational theatre guru Keith Johnstone.At the gathering of conference attendees, the collaboratively created scenarios will be performed twice. The first time the audience sees the situation and the problems presented, and the second time they become “spect-actors” where they may stop the action and replace a character they see struggling with social conflict, taking the story in new directions. Ideally, all conference participants, whether in the performance workshop or not, will discover new ways to plan interactivity in games and, at the same time, embrace their potential to initiate social change.