storytelling

It's an increasingly social world out there on the Internet. How can you best take advantage of it?

After years of being a devoted reader of CNET News, I'm honored to join the wonderful team of bloggers here. My blog, SreeTips, is going to offer quick, useful advice on the changing digital landscape, with a focus on social media in all its permutations. My goal is to save you time, money and aggravation as you navigate the digital world.

In my workshops at Columbia Journalism School and around the country, I tell folks that social … Read more

For all the accomplishments of the video game industry, there are still barriers that interactive entertainment has yet to break. Many games look fantastic and play well, but with few if any exceptions, there remains a stubborn wall between the player/observer and the characters in the game world (sometimes linked to the evolving "Are games art?" debate). There are many symptoms of this phenomenon, from stiff animation to stilted dialogue to unconvincing voiceover work, and the situation now is only marginally better than it was when I started writing about games more than a decade ago (many players can name a handful of choice performances, but these are the rare exception, rather than the rule).

Coming closest, in recent memory at least, to bridging that gap (which is much deeper than the typical explanation of an "uncanny valley" between near-photographic images and reality) is L.A. Noire, a gritty detective story set in 1940s Los Angeles. The combination of careful writing (much rarer in interactive entertainment than it should be), a cast of competent professional actors, and a few bits of new technology, puts the game leaps and bounds past the typical action/adventure experience, where it usually feels like most in-game conversations exist only to push the kind of dull exposition that would make David Mamet's head spin.

I've criticized some of my otherwise favorite games for this very problem, saying of Dragon Age, for example, that the game was buried under uptight, wooden characterizations that come off like the dated, stagy delivery of an old fantasy film. Arguably among recent games the inventive detective thriller Heavy Rain probably came closest to surmounting these obstacles--or at least bravely attempting to.

So, why is effective storytelling, as seen in television programs such as "Mad Men" or "The Wire", such a difficult task for video games, where paradoxically nearly any setting, character, or event imaginable is just a few keyboard strokes away for an able team of programmers and artists? … Read more

According to a recent study by IDC, the iPad has definitively dominated the tablet market, accounting for almost 90 percent of tablets shipped worldwide in the third quarter of 2010. It stands to reason that fourth-quarter results will probably be even higher after the big holiday season. Now that many of the early naysayers have come around to the larger iOS device, I have to think the launch of the iPad 2 in April will be leaps and bounds more successful right out of the gate.

I got the first-generation iPad when it came out for obvious reasons, and probably won't be buying the new iPad personally at launch time (though we will certainly have them here at CNET for testing). But what about you? Are you one of those who decided to wait for the second-generation iPad?

As usual, Apple is not telling us much about its shiny new device, but there have been plenty of rumors regarding a higher-resolution screen, front- and rear-facing cameras, and much more at the various rumor sites.

I'm interested to see who is planning to pull the trigger on the new iPad in April. Let us know your plans in the comments.

This week's apps include a strange interactive storytelling app and a shooting game that cleverly uses the iPhone 4's gyroscope technology.… Read more

In Hollywood, everyone knows that movies are king. Television makes money, and video games are a fantastic way to extend a franchise, but movies get the prestige. Vanity Fair doesn't have an annual Emmys party.

That's been the way it is for years, but the fault lines under the entertainment industry are shifting rapidly in favor of a more cohesive and multimedia approach to storytelling, and those who refuse to adapt may well be victims of a major shake-up in the way things work.

The protagonist in this story? A relatively new and increasingly popular concept called transmedia … Read more

Is it a presentation tool? Or a visual storytelling tool? Visualization software? Or a zooming editor? Budapest-based Adam Somlei-Fischer, founder and lead designer of Prezi, and Peter Halacsy, founder and CTO of Prezi, were interested in soliciting feedback on their product’s category when they visited frog design’s San Francisco studio last week and demoed their tool. Having marketed mind-mapping software previously in my career, I felt sympathetic: At the time, we went through a similar exercise, and after endless discussions and focus groups we ended up with a label only a committee could come up with: “enterprise productivity … Read more

As children, many of us had fun with Mad Libs. You remember these; the game asks for a set of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech, which are then inserted into a story with hilarious results. StoryMaker operates on the same basic premise, and is just as much fun.

The program's interface is rather unattractive, but it is simple and can be easily navigated by kids. There are large buttons for the program's four main functions. The first button let users play the game. The program asks for words in various parts of speech, and at … Read more

Matt Webb pointed out in his LIFT presentation today that humans “take pleasure in watching things unfold.” True – even if the events are a quasi-authentic account of something that has already happened.

Coincidentally, the Spanish site Per Soitu reports about a fascinating example of “fake authenticity” and the emerging trend of using Twitter for storytelling. On February 23, 2009, exactly 28 years after about 200 soldiers and paramilitary members of the Spanish Civil Guard toppled remnants of General Franco's dictatorship, a group of Spanish Twitterers revived minute by minute the historical coup d'etat that occurred on February 23, … Read more

Capzles takes the idea of telling a story with a photo album or a vacation video and puts it all into one multimedia package.

The start-up calls its product "social storytelling." Of course, this means the stories you make with its Web-based authoring tool are eminently shareable with anyone and everyone.

Using a patent-pending Flash-based technology, photos, video clips, and audio files are uploaded to Capzles in a linear, chronological strip. Each image or file can be scrolled through horizontally and selected. Each can have a caption, links, and a blog.

It seems best suited for creating stories … Read more