Transcript of Final Podcast Episode

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If I were to ask you right now what digital storytelling is, you are, perhaps, led to think of the obvious examples. Maybe you thought of Ebooks. I mean it’s literally an electronic book, simple, traditional, a translation of page to screen. Though maybe you thought a little outside of the box and settled on audio books, another classic, another transformative medium. Maybe you got a little weird with it. Maybe the first thing that popped into your head was creepy pastas, stories that exist as either text or even just an image, with a community of lore creators behind each terrifying tale. Or maybe you thought of blogging, like how The Martian by Andy Weir started out. It’s fine that these forms are what immediately come to mind, but what if I told you that there’s more to it. That digital story telling is crazier and more revolutionary than you first imagined? I mean, you're literally listening to one of the many forms that exist right now. 

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In this short little podcast episode, I hope to explore just that. Oh, that’s right, you’re getting a verifiable thesis right now. Or well, more like a half cracked one. The point is: digital storytelling goes beyond just putting text on a screen, though if you’re reading the transcript, that form clearly isn’t dead yet. So, let’s jump right into it.

 

Digital Storytelling: The Future Right Now.

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Cheesy I know, but we might as well have fun with it. First, to define what digital storytelling actually is: it’s a multimedia format. It’s more than just making text accessible on a digital screen, which might seem like the obvious answer at first. Instead, it goes much farther beyond that, by combining classic storytelling techniques with graphics, audio, video animation, and Web publishing. This podcast is going to be a crash course on three major forms of digital story telling. And I know what you’re thinking, that sounds like a lot! But trust me, I’m going to introduce you to some fun and crazy stuff. 

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I figured we’ll start with what’s going on right now. Podcasts. You’ve actually probably heard of these. Whether you like ‘em or not, they’re kind of all the rage these days. Especially true crime, though that alone could be a discussion within itself. Maybe, however, what you're less familiar with is how podcasts are actually used in the fictional sense. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

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A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.

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*Welcome to Night Vale Music* 

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*Sense of Purpose by HoliznaCC0 starts playing* 

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Fictional podcasts have been around as long as the medium has existed, and there are many ways to make one. Arguably, they can be very similar to audio books, with people literally using the podcast format to read their own novels in order to build a following. But they can also be audio dramas, where the writing is dialogue-heavy and acted out like any form of visual media would be. You can frame them in many different ways: Welcome to Night Vale (the audio from which you just heard the excerpt) is a radio show, whereas Ostium Podcast is treated as an audio journal, and Alice Isn’t Dead is both acted out like a “real” truck driver is recording their journey and referred to as a clear piece of fiction with its “part blank, chapter blank” structure. There’s even a podcast “movie”, which is literally a movie length audio drama, called Treat, starring the likes of Kiernan Shipka. 

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Now, podcasts themselves seem easy enough, right? I mean, speak some words into a microphone, add some music, maybe a sound effect or two, call it a day. How hard can it be? Except the podcast as a medium is more layered than that. The voice of a podcast isn’t just our everyday voice. In a podcast, the audio can’t sound too written, even though it’s a script. And yes, I’m reading from a script right now. If I suddenly began to sound exquisitely academic, and only chose to use the most abstract of lexicons to speak in, you’d probably shut me off after the first couple of minutes. But if I speak like normal, and um, like, I don’t know, um, like, know what to say, like uh, you’ll probably shut me off after the first couple of minutes. The voice of a podcast has to fall somewhere “naturally” in the middle. Plus, when it comes to music or sound effects, each much be chosen with certainty.  

 

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*Depression by HoliznaCC0 starts playing*

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The music tells us exactly how we should feel.

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*Before the Big Bang by HoliznaCC0 starts playing*

 

It sets the tone.

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*As the Sidewalk Burns My Feet by HoliznaCC0 starts playing*

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And choosing it willy-nilly could completely change the mood of what you’re trying to say.  

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*Music cuts out* 

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Even no music at all tells us something about what we’re going to listen to.

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*Sense of Purpose by HoliznaCC0 starts playing*

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Podcasts are something that can be made by a single individual or a team of staff, and they exist as the perfect middle ground through which they be created either in the casual or the professional publishing sphere. It makes the medium unique on this list, but not very unique in the actual scope of how digital storytelling can be achieved, which has plenty more examples of these middle ground mediums. 

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However, now that we’ve focused on a medium that can be created through either casual or professional means, perhaps we should focus on just one side of the scale. To properly push the limits of digital storytelling as we think we know it, it’s best to look at a professional medium that you may or may not know about. For that, we shift our focus to visual novels. I find that they’re similar to podcasts, they both have shared elements. The key difference between the two is that visual novels rely on visual depictions of scenes and characters rather than just relying on audio. Oh, and there’s also the fact that Visual Novels are video games.

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*Video Games by HoliznaCC0 starts playing*

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That probably caught your attention. Visual novels are narrative-style literature with interactive elements, that are aided by static avatars, usually depicted in an anime art style, with occasional live-action visuals. They came about as a Japanese genre of video games. In America, visual novels refer to anything from literal novels in the visual format to puzzle games with strong story telling aspects. They range wildly in genre from romance to horror, each with varying proportions of interactive elements vs storytelling. It’s also important to state that these games are mostly point and click games, meaning the real game is spending hours clicking through scenes in order to read the story.

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So, with the basics out of the way, what makes visual novels so special. Why are they interesting? Well, without getting into a whole bunch of Japanese terms, we can still address the fact that visual novels often have their own dynamic of genres that make up the medium. This means that, against normal standards of American storytelling, visual novels rely on an entirely different set of tropes and clichés with which their stories are based on. But these ideas are not completely foreign ideas to American audiences either. So, what ends up happening is that we get an amalgamation of story devices from both Japanese and American media, that work cross-culturally and create entirely unique experiences for viewers. Take for example:

 

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*Intro to Doki Doki Literature Club*

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*Day Jobs by HoliznaCC0 starts playing*

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Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel created by an American gaming company called Team Salvato, a game, in which on the surface presents itself as a cutesy romance visual novel, but actually holds much darker secrets, which are only hinted at with its warning to all viewers: “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.”  It expertly utilizes the expectations of a very common visual novel romance trope, in the form of a harem narrative, where a bunch of girls vie for the main guy’s affection. It then proceeds to flip it on its head with an underlying psychological horror taking place between the scenes, hidden amongst classic lore building techniques found in American games. MatPat of Game Theory, breaks down many of these lore techniques, with example like utilizing underexposed images for fans to play around with and literally hiding secrets within the game’s code.

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The medium exemplifies the idea of how the digital sphere creates a cross-cultural platform for storytelling experiences. Thus, showcasing how digital storytelling breaks the boundaries of what traditional story telling often finds itself trapped in. Fans of the video games exist all around the world, and thus visual novels will continue to be a globally digital phenomenon.

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So, if we have the middle-ground of podcasts and we have the professional scope of the visual novel, we should probably discuss a casual medium as well. This is where perhaps my favorite of the digital formats comes in: AKA social media AUs.

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This is perhaps the most unique medium on this list, there is actually no professional equivalent to it, meaning you’re unlikely to find a company producing any of these. Whereas visual novels rely on a creator knowing at least some professional knowledge of how video games are created, even if they’re being created by an independent over companies; social media AUs (where AU stands for alternate universe) rely only on the creator having casual knowledge of how social media works. And before anyone says that social media is a job of its own, I know. But making social media AUs does not require any knowledge on how algorithms or marketing work. It’s simply about understanding what posting on individual apps looks like. Also, what I find most interesting about them, is the fact that it’s a solely fandom-utilized medium.

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A social media AU refers to a kind of fan work that is defined by fan-created graphics that look like social media accounts for fictional characters. The story is told through a series of social media posts, most commonly utilizing fake Twitter profiles, Tweets, and direct messages, though also often incorporating fictional texts, Instagram posts, and Snapchat interactions as well. The stories are created through the use of apps, some of which have been developed specifically for the creations of these AUs.

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There are some examples of published work that could fall into this category, like Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls book series, in which each book is written in a pseudo instant-messaging format, or Brett Wright’s rewriting of popular Shakespeare plays using text lingo, including emojis. But both of these fall just short of the actual social media aspects of the medium, as it is commonly used in the non-professional sphere. This is a form that is also very new in its existence, and therefore is mostly popular amongst younger fandoms like the K-pop fandom.

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In fact, the medium itself became popular in 2018 with the creation of BTS Outcast, a horror AU on Twitter by an account under the name @flirtaus.

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This medium perfectly exemplifies where digital storytelling goes beyond what traditional storytelling has to offer, but it also hints at how its existence is arguably unstable. The cultural understanding of the digital sphere required for social media AUs to exist is amazing to consider. Video games existed before the Internet, and though radio is a different medium than podcasts, it also utilized audio dramas in the same way podcasts do. But social media AUs do not exist without the Internet. And I could go on and on about more digital formats that are just like that. This discussion could go on for hours if I really wanted to explore every nook and cranny of how far digital story telling can stretch. I never even got to discuss Interactive websites, or YouTube videos, or even literature as apps. However, despite the idea that they would all cease to exist if the Internet just shut down, I don’t see that happening any time soon. And so, I think it’s important to keep an eye on digital storytelling as we head toward the future of what storytelling can be. The possibilities of digital storytelling are vast, and I truly believe the genre will continue to grow.

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*Pause in speaking*

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I’d like to give thanks to the content I have mentioned in this episode, and I highly recommend you consider looking each of them up. Check the bottom of my transcript for a comprehensive list of everything I have talked about. Special thanks to Welcome to Night Vale, Doki Doki Literature Club, and HoliznaCC0 for providing sound effects and music.

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*Small Towns Smaller Lives by HoliznaCC0 fades out*

 

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Comprehensive list: 

• Welcome to Night Vale (by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor) 

• Ostium Podcast (by Alex C. Telander)  

• Alice Isn’t Dead (by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor) 

• Treat (by C13Features) 

• Doki Doki Literature Club (by Team Slavato) 

• BTS Outcast (by @flirtaus) 

• Game Theory (MatPat) 

 

HoliznaCC0’s songs were found on the Free Music Archive at: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/holiznacc0