Hi reader !

Don't you have the stange feeling that people publishing their first blog entry usually tend to have the naughty idea they should present themselves in a boring starting paragraph ?

I'm Alban, living in France, Paris, playing RPG since 20 years with periods of time without practicing. I started with Fighting Fantasy book.  Hey ! How did you guess ? Today, I work as freelance in advertising, with a multitask profile. I'm essentially in charge of Testing in Khalidine, but I also happen to build, write and help design a few things too. I won't tell how Khalidine is good, because well, I have to keep that for future posts covering my different activities here. Trust me, you're about to hear me clear and loud about that. No. Today, I would like to discuss about Storytelling. You will ask yourself why, probably. Or not.

849

I believe that what we do here is mainly focused on stories. I believe that the people participating as players in a near future will be interested by stories. I believe the world we live in is being more and more driven by stories. I won't turn this post into political analysis. Suffice to say : stories carry our cultures and representations, fuel our dreams, allow us to manage our fears and passions, and eventually shape our opinions related to politics and economics.

Enough, and back to basics. Roleplaying can be conceived as an artistic activity since the player has to participate as an Author and as an Actor, not only as an Audience ¹ . It is the story that binds together these faces. The persons supposed to know what is about to happen and the ones who wrote backgrounds and rules provide only the theme and the frame. Players are the painters of the story.

Now, an interesting question is : What is the status of Storytelling in a digital entertainment era ? It is now common fact : the movie industry is being challenged by the videogames industry. At the same time, these industries tend to work together, even sometimes fuse.  Let's remember that the movies industry has deeply influenced the way we see, and appreciate, stories. The TV industry did the same later. And now, we might consider something logical : Games industry has today such large social and cultural influence.

OK, now it starts being interesting, because when I stop flooding with pseudo-intellectual theories and make the loop come back to Khalidine and talk about others than me, it becomes interesting. Put simply, the players, the writers and the future DMs of Persistant Worlds like Khalidine are building the future of Storystelling. Amazing, hey ? Innovation, you name it, usually comes from the boundaries of systems, and it's not difficult to conceive that modders and online roleplayers constitute today the small but very dynamic and creative « faction » of the gaming society. Arranging their tools and somehow trying to mix the interactivity of roleplaying with digital systems to build narrative content, they might somehow be on the edge of a major social evolution.

Oh. And of course, expect from us more open-ended systems than « Go to 849 ».