Bane, (Post-) Week 7

I've been thinking about flow charts and story paradigms pretty extensively this week -- related, of course, to keeping our game as "experimental" as possible. By "experimental" I suppose I mean nontraditional structure -- but increasingly I'm coming to realize that we need to alter the underlying storytelling paradigm, not just the order in which the various story beats are revealed. The monomyth simply won't be sufficient for a multifaceted story such as this; there needs to be a ground-up difference between our narrative and the myth arc to which the developed world is accustomed.

I'm still having trouble articulating what this non-monomythic story might look like (after all, how do you discover a story that has rarely, if ever, been told? Such a story would be antithetical to ancient/primal existence, wherein time could not have been conceived of but as a unidirectional construct), but at the moment I've been thinking primarily about Celtic knots and puzzle rings. What would likely be most successful is if we design a flow chart that can be inverted/reshaped into four different configurations. Another thought that occurs to me is that of a cat's cradle, each design both standing as an individual, but also setting up its successor. What our group requires, then, is four different configurations per stage -- each single configuration must naturally lead to three counterpart storylines.

A point is one-dimensional. A line is an accumulation of points in the second dimension. Applied to the third dimension, a line can become a cube, a form to which we are accustomed (since humans interact with our world in three dimensions). The monomyth, then, is a slave to the third dimension. In order to tell a story that exists in a more complex world than our own, what we require is to tesseract the monomyth.

This is an extraordinarily difficult concept to articulate verbally: our best bet is a method of visual storytelling/interactivity with the audience.