StoryMaps: Breaking Linear Time

[TomBaker]

Storytelling doesn't have to be didactic. Audience engagement could or maybe should be a pivotal aspect of communicating.  Thankfully, StoryMaps allow us to pursue interactive fiction or "choose your own adventure" forms of narrative.  While this dialogue-driven RPG were popularized in the 1980's, today they seem to be making headway on the small screen, as evidenced by Netflix's two dozen interactive story (series), including Blandersnatch, Captain Underpants, and Minecraft:Story Mode.

Let's take a look at what (and how) we can do in Storymaps with interactive fiction.

Workflow

I loaded a Creative Commons, Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) story written by Djimon Jayasundera into a Storymap.

There's clearly at least one big difference between a linear and CYOA story in a storymap - much like with a CYOA book - you don't just scroll down the page (or turn page after page), but rather after sections of text, the reader must make a decision for our protagonist. 

In terms of storymap construction, we delineate sections by title-ing each section with text formatted as a sub-heading.  This provides a link when the storymap is published and we hover over the subheading (see image).  With this link, we can then add buttons in other parts of the story to send the reader to that section.

I also added some space between sections to help visually separate sections for some screens.  In my case, I made a transparent JPG, 1 pixel wide and 1,000 pixels long.

I then added a handful of royalty-free images from Unsplash.com to help enrich the pages.

Example

You can read the story, A Shadowed Alley here.  This story is most appropriate for students in high school or older.  It contains some mentions of violence that may not be appropriate for younger students.

Benefits

Language Arts and writing teachers who assign reading or writing fiction can use this approach.  More realistically, asking students to write in a CYOA manner can be fun and challenging - and when written within a storymap allow for great added extras - like photos, video, or sound.  This type of writing is also described as "game books" - offering added appeal to those students who are "gamers" (or the DnD kids of my generation).

Computer science teachers should consider this approach for building your students' capacities to put  game design principals into practice  - without coding.

Admittedly, the story I choose to put into an interactive storymap doesn't have a map, but for those writing their own fiction, consider the interactive map to be a critical part of the fiction.  Perhaps the map itself is used to make choices - rather than boring buttons.  Perhaps the map shows the protagonist's progress as they undertake a journey.  Student creativity seems to be the only limit!