Technology and storytelling have always gone hand in hand. The novel has historical roots going back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years, and that of course, was based on the technology of written language and paper, which made the novel possible.

Huge impact in the 20th century on one of my favorite storytelling media, which is the motion picture, came to be in the 1930s when talkies were all the rage, but the technology actually goes back about four decades before that in the late 1800s, and it took people awhile to figure out what to do with the motion picture medium. Thankfully, for me, at least, by the ’70s, they had definitely figured that out, so there’s some wonderful memories of watching motion pictures and really getting immersed in stories as varied as Star Wars or The Godfather.

Now, as we approach a whole new set of connected technologies such as the Internet of things, virtual reality, augmented reality, and of course, mobile, we’re coming across some really interesting ways of creating stories with these new media types, so I wanted to dig into some of those today. We’ll start with, I found very intriguing, the medium of chat fiction, which, as you might expect, is about telling a story via SMS, via the text message, which, in a lot of ways, reminds me of the Zork games of my childhood, 1980s, telling a story, via text.

Even though we’re at sort of the early stages of a lot of these technologies, I think we’re seeing the seeds being planted of what will be the next great storytelling medium. I’m not going to place any bets. Certainly, the novel, I think, will persist, at least for the time being as a great storytelling medium. In the same way, the motion picture will persist as well.

But what is the next great? One possibility is as we see virtual reality headsets start to become popular, you could see, and you know, they’re releasing movies for these VR headsets, you could see this kind of storytelling manner becoming popular, although it just seems so foreign and isolating, the technology, to me, but maybe that’s the 21st century novel. I don’t know.

Dirk, as you’ve seen the VR technology develop, do you think that that’s the way it’s headed or do you think the social awkwardness of the medium’s just dooming it from being a mass medium success?

My biggest concern about these technologies and a lot of the newer storytelling media are what I’m going to call the demands on the user. I was thinking about this in a very different context. I had the opportunity just last week to talk with Mo Turkington. Mo, wonderful, wonderful game designer who is the, I think the brain child behind and the designer of some of the games that are called the Warbird Games.

They’re basically, they founded a category, they’re called LARPs, live-action role-playing games, and they’re all telling very feminist stories of women who were in very difficult circumstances. You’re playing this as a group. Each of you is taking on the role as one of these characters, these protagonists, and you’re advocating for your own perspective, which is going at odds with perspectives of other people.

But the long and the short of it is, the experience of playing this game, which sounds amazing, and it would be an incredible experience, is all about getting into some of the hardest emotional stuff and getting into really nasty conflict with other people. I’ll use the word play-acting, but I think it’s serious ways, like you’re really embodying these people.

I came away thinking, I’d love to try that, and I can’t imagine doing that regularly. It’s … The demanding nature of it, from a physical perspective of bringing your body into it, from an emotional perspective of exploring these really interesting things is tough. When I think of VR, I think in very similar lines and circumstances.

If I read a novel, reading a novel, certainly from my mind’s perspective, is taxing, I would say. It’s tiring, not unpleasant, but you’re working your little mind out. Video games and the traditional concept, I mean, your thumbs might be working quite a bit and you might be getting a similar sort of mind work as reading a novel, but it’s somewhat limited. It’s not delving into exploring the emotional boundaries of yourself. It’s not delving into physically, kinetically bringing your entire body into it. It’s not delving into different types of interpersonal, whether it be physical, emotional, mental interactions with one or many people.

To me, it’s a totally different thing. I don’t know, maybe I’m old. Maybe the 22 year old out there’s like, “Oh, yeah. I’ll be doing that all night, every day,” but it doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels … I mean, look, going back to when I was young, like going to a rave or something, I wouldn’t want to do that every night. I would do that on the weekend, a night or two, it was frickin’ awesome, but then I need to take like, get ready for the next time again. I don’t want to be doing that all the time.

Reading novels, watching movies, I mean, that’s something that can kind of routinely be part of my life every day. Some of these newer, more demanding forms of entertainment, I don’t see that being the case even when I was 22.

What I mean by that is, as we start connecting our workspaces, portions of our home, we’re going to have all kinds of connected devices that, in theory, could be accessed by the artist, the storyteller. I can imagine an Internet of things, haunted house story connected to my Amazon Echo and Internet of things, connective lighting, and all those things around Halloween time that would probably scare the crap out of me, but I could see how you could use all those elements from horrible sounds of squeaky floors being projected throughout your house or screams or lights coming on at weird hours.

I think by creating the possibility for manipulating the spaces that we reside in and making those digitized in some way opens up a pretty interesting area in addition to virtual reality that could, to your point, be very emotionally fraught if you’re not ready for that.

But this idea of connected environments as storytelling palette, what’s your take on that, Dirk? It seems like that would be both highly engaging and highly intrusive.

I kind of shrug. I’m like, yeah, it sounds cool. There’s a big palette there. There’s a lot that can be done, but I mean, there’s very simple blocking and tackling things about it that we’re nowhere near solving to the point where it’s like the seamless, interesting, integrated part of our lives, even though the technology, frankly, is rather simple at the end of the day, that kind of simple technology isn’t something that gets solved well to this point, anyway.

If we remember that technology has always gone hand in hand with storytelling, so you look at these different technologies whether it’s virtual reality or the chat fiction or my ludicrous idea of an IoT story or the brain-computer interface, and just know that that’s a creative palette there. There are so many media being introduced at the same time right now, I’m sure many will fall away, but it is a curious thing because by the time we work out how to tell these stories using these new media, I’m sure there’ll be something, a more compelling media ready for us to play with.

Regardless, I’m excited about these. Although, at the end of the day, I don’t know if I’m going to be an author for chat fiction or virtual reality or just an observer. Either way, I find it exciting.

You can find The Digital Life on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Player FM, and Google Play. If you want to follow us outside of the show, you can follow me on Twitter @jonfollett, that’s J-O-N-F-O-L-L-E-T-T.

Of course, the whole show’s brought to you be Involution Studios, which you can check out at goinvo.com. That’s G-O-I-N-V-O dot com. Dirk.