"The Institute" and Storytelling
Caught a fascinating documentary on Netflix Instant this weekend, "The Institute", about an incredibly ambitious ARG ("alternate reality game") that ran in San Francisco over the course of about three years. Players were challenged to unravel puzzles in real-world locations and interact with live NPCs, working out the mystery surrounding a cultlike self-help movement and a missing girl. Really captivating stuff from a storyteller's perspective; ARGs are a relatively new way of telling a story, and seeing the reactions and memories of the participants was really thought-provoking.
The part storytellers really need to pay attention to, though, is the ending. Be forewarned, going to get a little spoilery here.
The end of the Jejune Institute ARG was flat and anti-climactic. On purpose. The gamerunners built up a big infiltration/take-down-the-evil-cult-from-inside scenario, and then...nothing. (Worse than nothing, really: the final event was a bizarre mix of breaking kayfabe in some spots while reinforcing it in others, more or less mocking the players for thinking they were about to enjoy a big cool finish, and driving home the fact that three years of story had a sudden and aggressive anti-ending.)
The gamerunners' explanations actually made me angry. They explained that they didn't want to do play out the ending "in some science fiction and fantasy realm with shootouts and car chases." Bear in mind that this was a game involving mind-powered force fields, a time camera and a girl who could travel into an alternate dimension, and the story arc followed a revolutionary fight against a dangerous and powerful cult. I just can't imagine how any of the players could have come to the wild and inexplicable conclusion that they were playing an action/fantasy/sci-fi game, can you? Crazy. Then this comment gets dropped: "I suppose there was an element of wanting to punish those players, who seemed to be missing what the real story was."
...There are not enough "fuck yous" to respond to that. I have literally used up every fuck you in my fuck-you-knapsack, and now I have to go to the store to buy more.
In any storytelling medium -- books, movies, video games, ARGs, you name it -- there is a powerful bond between creator and audience. We put our emotions in a storyteller's hands and trust them to manipulate us. We trust that they might drag us through some dark and scary places, but in the end we'll leave with something fulfilling: an insight, a new way of looking at the world, cathartic relief, or just a smile or a thrill. That's powerful, precious stuff.
That comes with big obligations on the storyteller's end. First and foremost, while it's both acceptable and expected to play around with audience expectations, that's worlds apart from pulling a bait and switch. If the next novel in the Faust series opened with all the characters getting hit by a bus and then suddenly it became a romance novel about an accountant in Iowa, readers would be pissed -- and have every right to be. It wouldn't matter if it was the best damn Iowa Accountant Romance ever written, because that's not what they bought.
As far as a storyteller thinking it's their place to "punish" an audience for not interpreting their art correctly...yeah, no. Get right outta here with that weaksauce. That's a good way to lose an audience forever. You know what a storyteller has left, when their audience goes away?
Nothing.
