All about everyonea blog about engagement

Taking a trip to Liver Land: Collaborative play, participatory storytelling and social engagement

I shot this short video of my children, Nye and Tove, playing together, because I wanted to illustrate how children work together to create narrative structures during imaginative play, making the connection between how we first learn to engage with one another and how we use social networks in much the same way.

The only problem was, in the video, Nye tends to lead much of the play. He is the older of the two. Tove, on the other hand, is quite happy to be involved in a less dominant fashion. She looks up to Nye and as a close, younger sibling, is naturally influenced by her older brother’s behaviour.

I could have recorded their play another time, when both of them were actively engaged on a more equal footing, but after watching the video I realised that the way Nye and Tove were playing was still relevant to a comparison to how we use digital, social systems, perhaps more so.

Like Nye and Tove’s game, a social network is a shared venture. In order for it to work, participants must actively work to create stories by taking on the roles of both author and audience. The roles have to be fluid and instantaneously interchangeable. Each protagonist must be both actor and audience.

During social, participatory play, children actively take on roles within the story, in order to create it. The children involved often play in groups of two or more, although just as often by themselves, without any adult involvement. So, the children are the audience as well as the authors and the one does not exist without the other. Even in singular play, we consume our stories as we create them.

In online social networks, more participants are generally needed to watch, listen and support than they are to create and publish for the systems to flourish. The two roles of author and audience feed off each other. Engaging authorship gets rewarded with a supportive audience. And, like Nye and Toves collaborative play, the audience can be the author and the author can be the audience, simultaneously.

Nye and Tove’s engagement with each other to create a story, played out, heightens the quality of experience. Their joint involvement also adds an element of the unknown for each, an element of serendipity. In this way, Nye and Tove’s shared story becomes more than the sum of it’s parts.

Social networks exist upon a similar framework to that of Nye and Tove’s social play. They are set up to enable the communication and sharing of ideas and stories. Nye and Tove’s framework is the room and the objects within it. Social networks similarly provide us with props, platforms, and shared objects for us to connect over.

Mostly, we inhabit social networks in much the same way as Nye and Tove inhabit their story space. We actively author our own stories, and are active in the process of telling other peoples stories, by forwarding links, content and comments.

Watching how Nye and Tove play together, using imaginative, participatory storytelling, also made me think about how we use collaborative play in order to realise new ideas and experiment with a shared sense of reality. It struck me that we never really lose the desire to do this.

Social gaming has been developing for some time now. From the popular MMORPG environments of Second Life and World of Warcraft, to ARG gaming and participation dramas, such as The Truth about Marika.

Social gaming is a rapidly expanding area, with more and more start-ups appearing. For me, the development of this area, specifically around ARG related development, represents an opportunity to start seeing how virtual, digital systems can change our physical, social engagement.

At the moment ARG is about gaming, but there are increasing attempts to use this format in other ways. Serious ARG games have started appearing, so called because they attempt to bring real world issues into play, so to speak, in order to try and deal with real issues. Nye and Tove’s play is, of course, fun, but this is also how they learn.

It’s going to be interesting to see how things develop in the intersection of physical and virtual collaborative engagement, especially beyond the realm of gaming.

Tags: arg, engagement, participationdrama, play, social, socialmedia, socialnetworks, storytelling