STORYTELLING-FIRST DESIGN

I spend 90% of my time thinking about stories and narratives, and like so many other things, narrative formation is getting decentralized. This is my attempt to figure out what’s happening and where it’s heading.Crafting and telling stories is part of what makes humans humans. Stories let us coordinate across time and space. Stories are undeniably ... See more

For a media format to be widely adopted, it’s important for it to be easy to create content with. Similarly, it helps if that format can be used to tell rich, complex narratives. So more simplicity and more storytelling leads to a more valuable and popular media format. But here’s the rub: simplicity and storytelling are inversely correlated. The m... See more

Media formats end up trading off simplicity for storytelling and vice versa as more storytelling requires more complexity, and more simplicity limits storytelling abilities.