Charlie Melcher and Rohit Bhargava: The Future of Storytelling for Audiences

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher. Welcome to the FoST Podcast. I’m excited to share that I’ve just released my first book called The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Changing the World, published by Artisan Books. It’s a richly illustrated and beautifully designed book that describes the revolution in storytelling that’s taking place all around us from media that is flat, fixed, linear, passive, and antisocial to the new wave of stories that are embodied, immersive, agentic, responsive, social, and so powerful as to be transformative. The book also features nearly 50 of the world’s most groundbreaking, immersive experiences and celebrates the companies and people that are creating them. In honor of the book and its message around audience participation, we decided to try something a little different. Today we’re going to turn the tables and have me relinquish my role as the host and instead become the guest. We’ve also invited some of our FoST audience to ask me questions, stepping in as our host is an old friend of mine, Rohit Bhargava. You may know Rohit has a bestselling author and the founder of The Non-Obvious Company. Our episode today is actually the second half of our conversation. The first half lives over on the Non-Obvious podcast, so check that out to listen to us talk about the future of storytelling for creators. And as our host today, Rohit will be leading the conversation as we talk about my new book and the future of storytelling for audiences. I can’t think of a better person to hand the mic to. So let’s dive in. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Welcome to the Future of StoryTelling FoST podcast. I am not Charlie Melcher, as you may have guessed, but my name is Rohit Bhargava. I’m the host of the Non-Obvious Show podcast, and Charlie asked me to come in and be a guest host this week because we have a very special topic, which is we are talking about the Future of Storytelling book for the first time, which is now available in bookstores everywhere, and this is a huge accomplishment, Charlie. So first of all, congratulations on having the book out. It is fantastic.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Thank you. I’m so excited to have it out in the world and it is a book that celebrates a community, and so I’m so glad to now be able to share it out with everyone who’s in it and everybody who has participated in some form or another in its creation over, honestly, over these last 15 years that we’ve been doing the Future of StoryTelling.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Yeah, it is a reflection of a community and we have something very special today. We are going to have our conversation and then we’re going to have a live Q&A discussion about the book. So this is going to be an unusual episode of the FoST Podcast and especially because it’s the first one that we’re going to have available as video also. So this is a announcement of sorts that the FoST podcast will also now be available on video. So you are with the times, my friend. You are evolving as everyone is evolving, and I can’t wait for people to be able to see and watch the FoST Podcast moving forward because I am a big fan and I listen to every episode and now I’m going to have to listen and watch every episode moving forward.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, Rohit, thank you so much for stepping into the duties as the host and for this great idea of opening it up to the community. It just seemed very fitting in terms of the ideas of the book to influence this format. So thank you for that great thinking.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Yeah, of course. I mean, I think that one of the things that makes this book, but also your body of work so interesting and the place where I thought we could start is the imagining of what stories can be that most people aren’t necessarily thinking of and in particular the role that any of us can take as a person who is experiencing that story. So how did you think about describing and changing the way that we think about what an audience can or should do when you are writing this book and in just the work you’ve been doing?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, look, this is just me responding to the extraordinary things that I’ve had the opportunity, the good fortune to be able to participate in. I was going to say to see or have a front row seat in, but that’s not the right metaphor because that’s not the case. This type of storytelling, you don’t sit. You are in it and you are living it. And I’ve had this extraordinary opportunity as the founder and curator of the Future of StoryTelling Summit to be invited into these experiences and have had my mind blown, and I should say not just my mind, but all my senses because I’ve been physically in these stories, in these adventures. And so I realized that the way I grew up with stories being something that I consumed passively sitting at the couch watching the television or sitting in front of my computer and watching that screen, that they were all mediated.

In fact, the word media comes from this idea of everything being mediated through a screen or in a box. The world that we grew up in that was fixed, flat, linear, passive, and antisocial is now being reinvented in a way that is so much more authentically human. We are now able to be in our stories in a way that they’re immersive, agentic, responsive, social, and because of all those things truly transformative and that’s what the book’s about. It’s the celebration of the people and inventing the future of storytelling in a way that’s going to completely explode and transform the way we think about stories. I mean, even the word audience doesn’t describe what you do when you are in a living story, a story that you get to have a role in. We had to come up with a new name and the term that I’ve used is the actience, which has a Latin root from action and participation as opposed to audio or listening. I’m so honored to be able to bring together many of the examples of the best of the best over the last few years. There’s almost 50 examples in the book that are fully illustrated and described as well as seven chapters of thoughtful writing about this new form of storytelling.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

And one of the things that we did, and this part of the experiment of our conversation is that we had part one of our conversation, which was over on the Non-Obvious show, where we really took a deep dive into what it takes to be a creator in this future of storytelling and tell stories in a new immersive way and the mindset required for that and how technology relates to it. And we really focused a conversation on what does it take to create stories like that just based on some of the insights that you had learned and written about in the book. In this second part of the conversation, we wanted to turn the camera so to speak, or maybe the microphone or whatever metaphor you want to use a little bit more towards the audience and to talk about what it means to be an audience in this new age of the future of storytelling. And in particular, and this is a question that I’d like to ask you, what does it mean to be a good audience member in an age like this?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, the fundamental shift of an actience from an audience is that they have a role to play. There’s an agency that’s afforded to the people formally known as the audience, and that lets them in to the act of creation in the story. Now, sometimes it’s a very small role or just a little bit of influence. Sometimes it’s choosing A or B, like a choose your own adventure story. But even there you have some agency, you’re getting to decide which way the narrative goes, but sometimes it can be fully engaged. You think about some of the Nordic LARPs live action role-playing games where you embody a character and there is no script. The entire story that unfolds over a weekend is improvised and brought to life in a particular environment by the people who are playing it. So the actience has agency. They have an opportunity to co-create, they have a role to play. The decisions they make are not trivial, like I’m going to go left or right, but they have moral consequences. The story unfolds in a way that is really profound, almost like a Sophie’s Choice. Think about the difference between watching Sophie’s Choice and having to choose between which of your children’s going to live in the story. The power that has to affect you emotionally and to stay with you is an order of magnitude above a more traditional story form.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Well, it’s interesting that you talk about this difference in this, and I’m kind of thinking about situations that I’ve been in. People in a moment are wanting to do something and in another moment they’re wanting to not do something. And I wonder if you thought about that continuum of when someone wants to be a member of the actience and when maybe they just want to be audience.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

No, it’s a great question, and I’m not trying to suggest that all traditional forms of media that are linear and passively consumed are going to go away. I think certain people have a character that doesn’t want them to step in and take on the responsibility of having a role in the story. It’s not for everyone at every moment, but the payoff on these kinds of stories is so great that at the right times, once people start to get familiar with it and comfortable with it. And I do think that’s an evolution, that apocryphal story of how people ran out of the movie theater when the train started to come towards them in early days of cinema because they thought they were going to get hit by the train. In that case, the audience had to learn how to be comfortable with and interact with that medium.

Well, that’s true here today as well, but think about how popular gaming is. There’s an expectation from the explosion of popularity and gaming that people get to have agency, and if you can marry that with the emotional power of narrative and stories and characters, that’s where I think the future storytelling is headed. That’s the kind of living stories that we’re talking about, and there’s just no doubt in my mind that there’s a very large number of people who are hungry for these kinds of stories and ready to take on the role, to put on the costume, if you will, and get to act in their stories.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Some of those situations where you’re bringing people into a moment or an experience or a story, part of the first challenge is to create some sort of level of comfort for them so that they’re willing to be a little vulnerable and be part of the story. It does take that willingness to get outside of yourself a little bit, and I wonder if you could speak to that and how do you become a good host of a story that is immersive so that someone’s willing to be part of the actience?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I think it’s an excellent question, and I think that it’s actually one of the foundational challenges of this next generation of storytelling is that people who are used to telling stories are used to controlling the narrative a hundred percent, right? They’re not giving any agency to the audience. It’s like, here’s my story, I’m an auteur, hope you like it, if not tough. And now they have to start to figure out how do they welcome the audience in? How do they relinquish some of that control and still create something that’s powerful and a great experience? One thing that is very important in that kind of design is to create some sort of safety and trust, allowing people to know that there’s a way out, that there’s an opportunity to stop and exit if they need to or if that they feel uncomfortable. And then the other thing is really to design these types of stories in a way that is providing a kind of care, a kind of intimacy, an ability to bring someone along and not have them fail. I don’t know if you’re an escape room fan.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

With my kids, I love them.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So in the early days of escape rooms, which, by the way are not that long ago, this is a really young medium, there was the clock and you either got out in time or you didn’t, and lots of people would fail, and turns out people don’t like to go into experiences and fail. And so the escape room industry discovered that they could create hints or mechanisms so that they could adjust the story depending on the skills of the people playing so that everybody ended up succeeding in the end. It’s really opened it up now because now everybody wins. Everybody has a more fulfilling experience in that story. And I think there are examples of that for different kinds of storytelling where we care for the audience and we make a safe space for them, we give them permission and we also ramp them in. So it’s not just like drop somebody in the middle of a really intense scene from the moment they show up, but rather let somebody evolve, figure out whether they want to be in the front or they want to be in the back. And then also, that’s another thing, having room for different kinds of people who want to interact in different ways.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Yeah, creating that space for people to be whatever version of themselves or whatever part of the story is really important. Charlie, I’d love to know, just as you have been to so many of these experiences and you’ve been a member of the actience in so many of them, what stood out to you? If someone’s listening to this and they’re not so familiar with some of these experiences and they’re curious about what the future of storytelling is going to look like, how would you describe that to them or what sort of experiences would you lead them to towards?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

There are so many different examples of this happening with different levels of immersion. There’s immersive light, something like a projection mapping experience where like the Van Gogh, ones that became so popular where you could walk around a beautiful space and there’s projection mapping on all the walls and you feel like you’re inside the painting, but in reality, the immersion there is purely physical that doesn’t have a very high level of participation. It’s physically immersive, meaning you’re surrounded, but you’re not having a lot of agency in terms of what you do. There are other examples where you get to play more active of a role, and that’s a kind of participatory immersion. And then there’s a third level, which is actually emotional immersion where your decisions have consequences and you feel the weight of your choice. So my favorite examples are where it’s all the way total immersion on all three of those parts of the immersive scale.

And an example of that is when you have a one-on-one experience in immersive theater or when you are playing in LARP, in a live action role playing game where you are physically immersed, you have tremendous amount of agency, how you show up and interact in the story and your decisions really have impact into how the story plays out and so much so that they can be transformative. There’s this term from LARPing that’s called “bleed,” where the role that you played impacts the way you show up as a human being after the story. An example of that might be people go to Burning Man and let their hair down and discover a different kind of dress and style, and then some of that comes out with them into their day-to-day lives.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

So I could keep talking to you for a long time, of course, but I do want to open it up to a couple of questions. So Brent, you are first. Great. Thanks a lot.

BRENT:

Great discussion. Charlie, of all the old stories you’ve watched or read, what would you like to experience? What hasn’t been turned into a living story that you’re just itching to do?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I would say top of my list is “Charlie in the Chocolate Factory.” That had a huge impact on me as a kid, and I want to go to that factory. I want to be in that world. So that’s one that hasn’t been done right yet. And if you’re asking me which IP would I like to license and build one, that’s it.

BRENT:

Beautiful. Me too.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

I would drink from that chocolate river once you figure out how to do that.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Exactly, I’m doing the backstroke in the chocolate river and —

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Okay, I’m out then. I’m not drinking from that anymore. Well, Brent, thank you for the question. Amazing.

BRENT:

Thank you guys.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Thanks Brent. Tsuki, we have another one in the queue?

BOB:

Charles, how are you?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I’m well, thank you.

BOB:

I’m interested in your opinion. The technology has obviously enabled an enormous amount of capability in terms of making these kind of ideas reality, especially AI for example, and the ability to kind of generate as many different nodes of content as is necessary for interactive storytelling. But I also think equally it’s about this audience being sophisticated enough to become actience, and I think now that we’ve got three generations of people who have really grown up interacting with screens more than they’ve done reading, what’s your opinion about that and the relationship between the sophistication of the audience and then the capability of really being able to expand the envelope of what interactive storytelling or story dwelling is all about?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I’m a big believer that social media and existing tools that people are using have been training them for these roles. The fact that so many people are sharing photographs, they’re acting in their own short videos, they’re performing, they’re dancing, they’re singing. We are training a generation of actience members to be able to step into their role to step onto the stage. And video games too, like people playing again, they’re getting used to having agency of making decisions of being social with others in those games. All of those are skills that are being built for this next step where they’re now in these massive worlds and they are playing through their stories. They’re not just on gaming quests or social posts, and it’s shown that there’s this tremendous hunger that people have. And by the way, we just have to say out loud stories are the programming language of the human species.

We evolved to use story to be able to understand the world and ourselves. So if all the stories you’ve consumed over your whole life, which is how you’ve learned about the world, every one of them you consumed in a passive way where you had no control and no input and no ability to affect that outcome, how do you think that makes you feel when the story’s over and you’re going to show up in your real world, in your real life, you’re going to feel kind of passive and maybe a little impotent and maybe like you can’t have a big impact. Okay, now imagine a few years forward and every story you experienced throughout your entire childhood, you and your friends were the heroes of that adventure, and you got to make decisions and band together as a team and win and be able to have these experiences. When you step out of those stories and you face the challenges of the real world, just think how differently you’re going to feel about the impact you can have in the world. And that’s gives me great hope about what living stories are going to be able to do when we have a generation of young people who’ve grown up with them feeling like damnit, they can be heroes and they can change the world.

BOB:

The future of storytelling is life.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Love that. Bob, thank you for your question. I appreciate you. I will turn to the chat for one question, which I’ll read from Renuka. Hopefully I say your name properly. And the question was, “Can you talk through the thought process of publishing a printed book when you’re talking about immersive experiences?” That was the question. Then there was a follow on which said, “What do we see as the next big thing in terms of what we’re seeing the next brand new thing or the next evolution, so past and then forward?”

CHARLIE MELCHER:

There is obviously some tension talking about living stories in print. I’ve tried to address that in a couple of ways. One, it’s a book that you can dip in and out of so you can choose your own path through it so you don’t have to read it in a linear way. It’s also highly illustrated, so you get to see a ton of work and lots of breakouts and interesting tidbits. So I wanted intentionally for people to feel like they could choose their own path. Through this book, we also play to its physical nature. The book has a beautiful cloth case, but even more than that, it has an interactive cover. So just like in theater, you can tell sort of the nature of a character by the costume, by the outfit that he or she wears. We decided that the book would have many different costumes it could wear, and so we designed the dust jacket to actually be 12 different covers.

It’s tri-folded — it’s folded three times, so you can unfold it and refold it. It’s double scored to choose any one of 12 covers to put on the front of the book. And each represents a different genre of storytelling. So you can have a cover that feels like a romance novel, you can have a cover that feels like a comic book. So all of those things were ways for us to try to embody the ideas inside the book, into the physical form. Where I think we’re headed in the near future is having generative AI create narratives and story characters that will be able to be responsive to us. So imagine that instead of watching or reading a character you’re in dialogue with, you’re able to have the conversation with that character and that character continues to evolve in response to how we interact with it. And those kinds of narratives and those kinds of characters are here and coming. Once those start getting integrated into stories, it’s going to be really, really remarkable and it’s going to allow the problem that every immersive experience designer has had, which is to get intimacy at scale.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

We are ready for another question coming in from the live video chat. Matt, welcome to the show. What would you like to ask Charlie?

MATT:

Hi, Charlie. Matt Kirkman here.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi, Matt. Good to see you.

MATT:

Nice to see you, and congratulations. So regarding the potentially antagonist relationship between this playful participatory ance, and you and I have talked about the museum environment where we talk about a captive audience, which is exactly the opposite of that participatory actience. What are your thoughts about the rigors of storyline and this insatiable quest that some institutions have for didactic outcomes and how do they rub up against this idea of agency and co-creation and collaborative consequence making?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

It does require different skills to create experiences. The best designers of living stories of these kinds of experiences are allowing for potential opportunities. They’re creating a world where there’s the opportunity to have different potential outcomes as opposed to needing it to have a linear, beginning, middle, and end. That comes to the one decision point at the end that they want to inflict or insist on. When you do provide an environment for multiple outcomes and people can find their own way, yes, they’re not learning one thing, but what they do learn, they learn much more profoundly because they have a sense of ownership of that learning. They are emotionally, physically invested in that outcome. So it’s a different kind of design and it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. I remember having an interview and we feature in the book Carne y Arena, which is Alejandro González Iñárritu is the creator of that, the wonderful Mexican director. And when he made this immersive experience Carne y Arena, he realized that what was happening was he was being released from the tyranny of the frame. And I love that expression. It’s literal as a filmmaker, the frame, the camera’s looking through, but it’s also a metaphor for all immersive designers, which is that you are now creating a three-dimensional world where there’s a whole array of different potential outcomes and you are designing for a certain kind of discovery and collaboration with the audience as opposed to it’s my way or the highway, or it’s my way, and this is the story. So I think it’s difficult and uncomfortable for a lot of people who’ve grown up in a linear tradition to realize that they still can be very powerful stories and everybody is a little bit uncomfortable with it. There’s no question, both as creators and as ants. So there’s a learning curve here that both have to go on together, but again, going to experience a bunch of the immersive experiences that are in the book. That’s a great way to start to see how different people have solved this problem, how they’ve given some agency over to the actience and still kept some parameters in the story world.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Matt, thank you for that question, Charlie, we’ve got one last one coming in from the chat. Frank posed a question, he said, “As we move into this new world of immersive storytelling possibilities, what are some core elements that go back to the beginning that we don’t want to overlook or lose?”

CHARLIE MELCHER:

What a great question, Frank. Thank you. What I do think is at the heart of great storytelling is that it’s about the human condition. We can take profound information from stories, and what we have to not lose is that ultimately the stories are there to help us learn about the world, to help us interact better with one another and to have greater insights about ourselves and our place in that universe. That’s at the heart of building great characters that’s at the heart of creating important stories, and that doesn’t get lost when you move to a immersive or agentic or responsive or embodied form of storytelling. It’s still at the heart of it.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

It does sort of bring to mind this idea that you do talk a lot about stories and immersive stories as their own sort of distinct experience. The lessons you’re talking about in this book aren’t just, if you’re trying to create an immersive experience, they’re also kind of everyday lessons, right?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Yes, absolutely. Look, I think that as we move forward, we’re coming back to something that is more innate to us as a species. When our forebearers, our ancestors, sat around a campfire and told a story, it wasn’t one person standing up on a rock and giving a 30 minute monologue of a story that she had come up with. It was a living, breathing, social experience. Somebody started to tell the story of the hunt that day and somebody else argued for or controlled the narrative and somebody heckled. And it literally was a living experience that was communal and shared and co-created. And when we invented the alphabet and writing, it shifted to being something that got set in stone and that was linear and hierarchical and fixed. And that was not how language evolved when we were in oral culture. And so some of what I believe is happening now as we move into living stories is we’re coming back to something that’s more innate to us as a species that’s more like us sitting around and joking and telling stories together and making it up.

Or I used to build pillow forts with my friends and we would play characters and we would do all sorts of imaginative play. That’s in us. That’s how we learned about social, and that’s how we challenged our imaginations, and then we kind of grew out of it. But a lot of this stuff has just grown up versions of that, of play forts and characters with your friends. And I will end with the belief that the majority of the people want to experience the majority of their stories this way because it is that much more powerful, emotional, fun, social, and not that films and television and books and music are going to go away. They’re not. They will shift over and they have their place, but the scale and the opportunity for this is going to be, I mean, I truly believe bigger gaming or Hollywood have ever been. We are literally just unlocking those final keys to let this explode. And I, for one, can’t wait.

ROHIT BHARGAVA:

Me neither. I agree. This is a profound shift, and that is what this book is about. I just want to say thank you to the entire FoST production team. Thank you to the FoST community who joined us for this conversation, and thank you to everyone involved for allowing us to do a little bit of experimentation to escape, as you used the metaphor before, the tyranny of the mic, and to try and do something a little bit different, which is what we did here. So a couple of final thoughts for you. Number one, make sure to go back and listen to part one of this episode where we talked about the future of storytelling for creators over on the Non-Obvious Show. I’m the host of that show, Rohit Bhargava, and make sure and by this book, because the book is amazing. And by the way, it is an amazing gift for anyone. So don’t just buy it for yourself, buy it for other people. Charlie would never say that because he is far too humble of a gentleman, but I am clearly not either. So I’m happy to say that and support the work because getting the Future of Storytelling means more people are involved, more people see the power of this immersive storytelling community, and that is what I think we all want. So thank you so much for this conversation. Thanks to everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Thank you, Rohit. It’s an honor to be here with you. And thank you to the audience — actience — for participating.

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST Podcast. My thanks to Rohit Bhargava for being an incredible host today, and my sincere thanks to all of the actience for your excellent questions. You can listen to the first half of our conversation about the future of storytelling for creators on the Non-Obvious Podcast and for a deeper dive into the world of storytelling, please check out my book, the Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World. It’s available now for purchase in stores and online. FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.