Let me know what you think.

- I run an Online Drama blog, and link to more shows here
http://www.storygas.com

My favourites at the moment?

The Guild mentioned above,
and Hardy Bucks (- which is down to the final two in Irish State broadcaster RTE’s Storyland Online drama competition – which is a great online drama initiative from a legacy broadcaster)
More details here:-
http://www.storygas.com/search/label/RTE%20Storyland

Best, Neil

And thanks for reminding me about Where are the Joneses too. That’s a really good example of a crowdsourced comedy, where character and plot decisions are made on a wiki. Really should have been in my list. Thanks.

Great collection – I did something similar a while back – so a bit dated now but there are some notable examples. In particular, I am big fan of the Guild – series one was funded by fan donations, before they got picked up for corporate sponsorship in series 2

Simon

When I watched Andrew Piller from Freemantle talking about Freak at the C21 Social Media Forum recently, one of the points he made was that although “all of our experiences are underpinned by community”, they went into it knowing that they would retain control: “We’d never let the audience decide the story but how they get there, the everyday decisions, can be affected and influenced by the audience”. I wasn’t sure if this was a nod to community involvement in a very limited way, or a justified and realistic retention of editorial control in order to tell a story. It’s clearly a tension.

Letting go of the reigns isn’t something that dramatists do easily or naturally, with the exception of improvisation.

It also makes me think of the puppetmasters who design and run alternate reality games. They often have to be very improvisational, responding and reacting to a community which sometimes needs steering in a particular direction and sometimes needs to be listened to and have their ideas or creations taken on board.

I’ve been thinking recently about creating online stories without having to construct the narrative or do much writing oneself. Mainly because it seemed the common thread between two things I do and they’re giving me vague ideas about things to do next. (As they’re projects I’m involved with, apologies if this comes across as self promotional; it’s just that they’re what I’ve understandably been thinking about.)

I’ve been running The Diary of Samuel Pepys for years but it was only recently that I started putting snippets of his life on Twitter. I thought it might be kind of nice but I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well a few fragments a day works as a continual narrative over a long period of time. I really enjoy reading it. It fits in really nicely around all the other snippets of friends’ lives — you get the gist of Pepys’ story through a very small amount of text. And, even better, I didn’t have to write any of it. It’s not fiction, but it’s still an enjoyable story.

The other thing is Pretend Office, an email list of people all pretending to work in the same company. Over time it’s evolved various narratives with no planning and no one having to write more than a single email at a time. It’s hit and miss — some ideas work, others fall flat — but watching characters and plot lines evolve out of nowhere has been fascinating and I’m wondering if this kind of idea can be used for other things.

Pepys and Pretend Office have very different sources — one existing, one made-up as it goes — but neither requires much preparation and it feels like there’s something connecting them (even if it’s merely that they’re both text and both experienced solely online).

That’s an interesting idea. I think of it as reintroducing elements of the epic form. Epic poetry was interesting because the audience were often significantly more socially important than the performer. This meant that the performer was forced to be aware of how his performance was going down with the specific King and nobles he was performing to and would tweak it to appeal most to his audiences situation and mood. Of course even though new technologies enable this kind of change, it will only happen if artists start to treat the audience with more respect than they have been used to.

The other kind of change I’m interested in is in shaking up who is socially expected to be creative and to create works that are worth serious consideration and commitments of time to enjoy and think about. We’re still looking at professionals creating things for consumption by the plebs. This social dynamic is completely backwards for what I think is desirable (and again, backwards compared to epic poetry). I hope that the current establishment of creatives can help with a social transformation that encourages the creativity of every individual rather than trying to stop that cultural change. Some of that change will come regardless of what the current creative establishment do, but I think that some of the best of it will only come if it’s facilitated by people with vision.

I didn’t play ‘I love Bees’, but I’d find it hard to believe that the participants, in sharing clues and ideas and dashing around to phone boxes around the world to record and share their recordings, were not caught up in the story in a very different and much more powerful way than if they’d just been given one episode every week for a month.

Equally, i think there’s something about putting a drama into a social space like Bebo or MySpace, together with all the expectations (and even constraints) about how you interact and what you do there, which has the potential to be much more than just a convenient way of getting people talking about it, or sharing it with their friends. I think there are norms, conventions and expectations online, especially in the way the web is used socially, that mean great opportunities for drama online. It doesn’t mean re-inventing drama or throwing away everything we know from television drama; it’s more about finding ways of using what the web is good at to do it well.

I’m very interested in the possibilities the internet gives us to re-examine some of the theatrical elements of drama which broadcast media has to overlook. Manfred Pfister’s ‘The Theory of Drama’ and Manfred Jahn’s ‘Guide to the Theory of Drama’ are useful here. A dramatic narrative (such as a play) is different to other literature (such as a novel) because:

• the actors work together with producers, directors, designers, choreographers, musicians etc (collaborative modes of production)
• the performance is to an audience (collective form of reception)

Of these two features, much of the latter is necessarily ignored by television and film. Pfister talks about how

“the collective aspect actually increase the intensity of the reception. If you read the printed literary text of a comic scene on our own, we are generally less inclined to laugh than when we experience it with others in the theatre”

and the feedback from the audience to the stage, improving the actor’s performance, stimulating improvisation, and more.

I like the idea that online drama, through social and participatory use of the web, can recapture some of these theatrical elements of drama through collaborative production and collective reception.

As you can probably tell, I’m researching on the fly here. I’m obviously going to continue to read and explore this area, so I hope people will have some pointers for me and more examples to share of what’s already working.