Collaborative Storytelling
During the gaming convention I was at recently, I played in a couple of games that involved a lot of collaborative storytelling. It was fun for me to get to stretch some of my writing muscles in a setting where I wasn’t writing down the results, but rather working with other people to shape the stories orally.
One game involved each of the players taking on the role of one of the Fates. However, in addition to that role, we were put into pairs and given another character to control. As each of the Fates had an agenda they wanted to see through, this meant there was sometimes a bit of negotiation with the person I was paired with, while other times, our agendas aligned nicely and we had no difficulty deciding on the action for the character we were controlling. Though I hadn’t met the person I was paired with previously, we were both fairly easy going, which made working with him to shape the story a lot of fun. We surprised the person who had established the setup for this game several times, which was also delightful! This particular game felt like it exercised a lot of the muscles I use when I’m writing characters in conflict with one another, but in this case, each individual character was sometimes at war with themself internally, which was reminiscent of internal dialogue when a character is coming to a decision on something.
Another game, which used the Prime Time Adventures system, involved us creating “the best TV show that never existed,” which in our case was heavily inspired by Skeleton Crew (a recent Star Wars TV show). In this case, we each created a tween or teen character we would portray, and then took turns putting our characters into situations that seemed appropriate to the genre and the story we were collaboratively building. The facilitator of this game took on the various other characters with whom we interacted and helped provide the moments of conflict for our characters. We had a lot of great moments in the course of this game, and it was very cool to see how each of us shaped the scenes we needed and negotiated the interactions amongst our characters. This game involved being choosy with which scenes we played out and which scenes we skipped, which is an essential part of revising larger pieces, wherein you might find that one of the scenes doesn’t really add much to the plot and can thus be dropped.
Finally, one of the GMs for the games had been planning to work with a co-GM, but as they hadn’t quite finished the plot they planned on using, they tossed out the elements of the plot they had finished, allowing the players to help them finalize the ideas. Then, once we had effectively “storyboarded” the plot, we used a stripped down version of Prime Time Adventures to set the scenes and play through them. In this case, we also played a few additional characters aside from the ones we had developed in advance of the game, and we fleshed out more elements of the plot through our selected scenes. In this case, the game had a lot in common with working from an outline that someone else created, which isn’t likely something that many authors have done exactly, but it also shares commonalities with retellings of stories, in which you might be following the same plot beats that a much earlier author established.
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