When you walk into the British Library, the first thing you’ll see – apart from people sitting in every available free space, writing on laptops or in notebooks – is a glass tower encasing rows upon rows of books, stretching up to the ceiling. It’s fair to say that this place has a lot of experience when it comes to displaying stories. For digital, interactive stories, though, the classic glass case doesn’t really work. These tales often invite the reader to play a part in the narrative and shape their own experience, but this can be difficult when you’re standing in an exhibition room with people looking over your shoulder, waiting for their turn. Allowing for interactivity in the finite and often restrictive setting of an exhibition is not an easy task. But in its latest exhibition, Digital Storytelling, the British Library has tasked itself with just that.
It is not the first time the British Library has featured digital works: however, it is the first time that an entire exhibition has revolved around “the ways in which digital technologies have shaped how we communicate and tell stories”, as the curators put it. It features highly regarded commercial classics of interactive digital storytelling, such as the Inkle’s 2014 steampunk narrative fiction game 80 Days, and Nyamnyam’s 2019 Elizabethan comedy narrative adventure Astrologaster, sitting beside intimate personal narratives such as c ya laterrrr, an autobiographical hypertext account of the loss of author Dan Hett’s brother in the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack. Despite the modest size of the exhibition room, the curators (Giulia Carla Rossi, Ian Cooke, and Stella Wisdom) have selected a wide range of pieces spanning genres, topics and emotions, made with a variety of digital tools.
Nearly all of the pieces are snapshots of recent history, waypoints for some of the ways that digital media have been used in storytelling. Windrush Tales (3-Fold Games) is the only piece still in development; this exhibition contains its first playable preview. It is an interactive narrative game based on the lived experiences of Caribbean immigrants in postwar Britain. As Giulia Carla Rossi, co-curator of the exhibition and curator for digital publications in contemporary British and Irish published collections, highlighted: “It feels special to be able to have this work on display this year, which marks the 75th anniversary of the arrival of passengers from the Empire Windrush to the UK.” The preview of Windrush Tales is one of the highlights of the exhibition, both as an experience and as an invitation to think about digital storytelling’s present and future, rather than its recent past.
Negotiating the tension of bringing interactive, digital pieces into the physical space of an exhibition is one of the greatest challenges when it comes to displaying stories of this nature. A lot of these experiences are meant to be sat with for a while. They’re intimate and reflective, perhaps not naturally suited to this environment. QR codes on some of the pieces allow visitors to experience the stories on their phones, but the very nature of a couple of these stories means they cannot be properly experienced here – though that would be too much to ask of any exhibition of playable stories. It’s not like we’d go into an exhibition of an author’s work and expect to be able to sit down in a comfy chair and read the entirety of a novel. Instead, this is a sampler, a useful introduction.
One thing that helps is videos showing demonstrations of play alongside some of the more complex exhibits, and which I’d love to see at future museum displays of interactive art and media. As Twitch has proved, watching someone play is a perfectly legitimate way of experiencing something interactive. Created by Florence Smith Nicholls, they not only help clarify how to play or navigate the stories, but also make the exhibition more accessible. Hopefully these playthrough videos will be archived as part of the British Library’s vast collection alongside the games themselves (many of which are already held here) – because when it comes to interactive art and playful culture, archiving examples of play as well the games themselves is vital.
Not a lot of context is given to the history of digital storytelling, for example how personal computers or the development of the internet changed and shaped the medium. Nor is much said about ongoing debates and tensions in this space, such as the role of procedural generation and how these technologies affect the labour of creatives. However, because the fairly small space of the exhibition isn’t filled by these larger themes, it allows room for the pieces on display to breathe and manifest in the spaces they’re given. Physical items that were the inspirations for, or themselves inspired by the pieces help highlight the interplay between digital and analogue. We are given tantalising insights into how and why these stories were developed as they were, in videos of some of the creators talking about their pieces.
This means that the stories themselves remain the focus. Despite the many differences between them, they each showcase what’s possible in digital storytelling. It is very much a “show, don’t tell” approach, which will hopefully encourage those who visit to explore interactive storytelling further after they leave.
