Guillermo del toro on the "story engine" of the future

In Wired magazine, Guillermo del Toro talked about the future of movies and other media:

 “In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—films, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single platform ‘story engine.’ The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction.”

 He indicated that such a story engine could tell many stories simultaneously:

 “We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We're still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you're following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else. “

 That sounds like a game scenario, and del Doro says that although game companies are conservative about trying new things, “in the next 10 years there will be an earth-shaking Citizen Kane of games.”

I don’t even have a PS3… maybe that’s why I’m having a hard time envisioning this story engine…although I can imagine that it could be possible to get drawn into, for example, a drama that has a weekly TV episode (which could be delivered via the computer), augmented by mini-episodes that appear on your mobile phone or as messages via email. Maybe something like Second Life, but one that comes to you instead of you having to go to it. Certainly food for thought as writers struggle to see our future… (and one thing that needs to be re-booted is the ‘search’ function at the Wired website—trying to find this article there was like pulling teeth. As usual, I should have Googled right from the start).

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