 Hi, my name is Michael Rau and I'm here to talk to you about storytelling with code. And I'm here because it feels like these days storytelling has become the new hot buzzword as a way to sort of solve problems and usually it seems like a lot of marketing people sort of say things like, oh, well if we could just sort of create a storytelling experience, this thing would be better. And I get the sense that a lot of people don't actually know how to tell a good story or what storytelling even really means. So I'm going to talk about a project that I made last year, it premiered last year, that relied on using code to tell a story to create a digital experience. And if you're looking for a very technical talk on the code behind it, this would be like the time to quietly exit because I'm mostly going to be talking about sort of softer general concept-y type stuff as opposed to a really rigorous code review. So also I just wanted to say right at the beginning thank you so much for inviting me. This is my first time at any kind of conference like this before, this is my first time going to like any kind of RailsConf and I feel so welcome by everyone and so thank you all for coming here and being here. So my background and really my job, my professional work is as a theater and opera director. I got my MFA from Columbia, I've been working professionally as a director for the past ten years. I work mainly in New York City and in Europe and so my job is in telling stories and specifically in finding the most effective way to tell a story. I code mainly as a hobby, as a sort of way to relax myself. I've always enjoyed messing around with computers and sort of learning about how computers work and only in the past couple of years have I started really trying to combine my skills as a theater and opera director with my skills as a coder. And I should be totally honest with you right up front, my skills as a coder are like not that great but I still made this thing in Rails that worked and so I feel very proud of that and I'm sure that any of you incredibly talented programmers here as you're listening to me talk could write something that does the same thing and probably better. So while I don't have a tremendous amount of knowledge in code, what I do have a tremendous amount of knowledge and really experience in storytelling and specifically interpreting stories. I make work for large groups of people to experience as a community. I direct plays and operas and often times when I direct an opera it's in a foreign language and it's music that's complicated to understand and I see my job as the person who has to create images that show relationships or images that create meaning. So it often kind of looks like this. So I'll sort of get a story that's been written by Shakespeare or Verdi and find ways to position the actors, to paint the set a certain color, to have costumes that look a certain way that gives people a feeling, that says something about a relationship, that creates some kind of meaning. And while the normal sort of basic, if you think about like when people talk about theater they have like the happy face and the sad face. Those are the two basic primary colors that I have as like a director. But really I work harder to invoke other different more complicated, more interesting feelings just by creating an arrangement of bodies on stage. So really you could say that a lot of my work and a lot of my experience revolves around feelings and how to evoke feelings through stories. But I started wondering in the past couple of years if I could start to challenge myself. What are the other ways that I could tell a story and what are the other formats that are available to us to tell stories? And I was at a bar hanging out with actor friends late one night and one of these actors who is a very lovely person but has kind of a big personality was going on and on and on about how the central truth of theater is the actor and the actor's body and you could never have a performance without that. And I was a couple drinks in, I'll admit. And I said, I think you're wrong. And I started to try to think of a project to prove them wrong. And the project that I came up with is what I'm going to talk to you about today. And the project is a piece of like, I call it a piece of theater. Other people have called it an installation. Other people have called it like a sort of like a show that you read. But I was very interested in office culture and how we communicate with each other with ourselves as a group, as a community now, which seems to be more and more mediated through digital technology. And what I started doing is talking to my friends about like, I think I'm going to make a show where you just do office work. I think that's going to be the show. And everyone told me this was a terrible idea except for one person who started collaborating with me. But what we eventually came up with was this piece that I called Temping. And so yeah, so I was thinking about how office culture works. How we read way too much into emails. How oftentimes voicemails become weird tools of passive aggression. And I started to kind of make the gears turn. I said a rule that there would be no actors in the piece, that it would be a show that would be entirely, that you would never meet a single living soul. Because I wanted to prove this one actor wrong. And that I would instead use sort of the equipment that you would normally find in an office to tell a story. So I gave myself these sort of like four tools that I could communicate with the audience member. And then I started building, I think what I look at now is like an overly complicated back end that could send emails, send voicemails, send things to the printer at specific times to sort of create a story. And then we also really kind of looked at the built environment. Like could there be a desk? Could there be drawers? Could there be a bookshelf? To also use as storytelling possibilities. The show was developed over two sort of beta test runs, first at Dixon Place in New York City, the second at the University of Maryland in College Park. And then it premiered at Lincoln Center as part of the 53rd International Film Festival. It was not a film at all, but the curator who found out about the project was doing a thing on virtual reality. And I was like, I don't think it's really virtual reality either, it's an actual reality. But he wanted it, and so he got it. So to sort of describe what it really looked like, when you walked into the room, you walked into a windowless room in a basement with ugly institutional carpeting with its low drop tile ceiling. And at the end of the room was one of those old sort of fabric-covered cubicles. And when you sat down in the chair, it looked like this. And that was the kind of total beginning experience that you had. I opened up the door for you. I said, thank you so much for coming to work today. Here's your desk, and then I closed the door. And this setup functioned perfectly as an office. The desktop computer ran Windows 8. Your phone and voicemail worked. You could get on the internet and goof around if you wanted to. But most of the show happened through emails and through actual work. So here's the part one of three slides of how the back end worked. And I'm not going to talk about this at all. Other than to say, you can see in the upper corner, the base of it was a Rails app. And then it did a whole bunch of other fancy stuff. It sent emails at certain times. It controlled Hue lights. It controlled speakers that were hidden throughout the room. And that's kind of it. So that concludes the technical portion of my talk. The other thing, so my friend, who I honestly loved to death and is an absolute genius, he built the phone out of an Arduino Nano that also mimicked the functions of a corporate phone so you could pick up the receiver. And it was like you were using a normal, sort of like boring corporate phone directory. But on the back end, we could control and send, like, okay, we need to send them this voicemail now. We need to let them do all of this kind of stuff. So that's the setup for the peaks. And we did all of that stuff first and then set it all up and kind of went, oh no. Because we had all of this technology and nothing to do with it. But I knew one thing. I knew at the very beginning that what was interesting to me was office culture. And so I started trying to figure out, okay, well, is there a way that I can make, and as opposed to an audience sitting there and just watching these events happen, could I make them do things? So the first idea was, well, let's just treat them like a temp. That way, they don't need to like role play in the office. They can just be treated as themselves. And if any of you have ever worked with temps, I'm sure you kind of know that people treat them as like hello disposable person. And that's how the characters that we started inventing would treat our single audience member. The second sort of major idea that we had was to use email as a vehicle for character. I commissioned another one of my friends, Michael Yates-Crowley, who's a playwright, to create a cast of characters that all worked for this one company. So we had about, I think, 10 different characters who would interact with you and even more in a larger company directory. And what we really focused on there was to use text, to use emails to tell you about who these people were. And that part of the mechanism of the show is that the temp would get CC'd on the wrong emails or would get forwarded, something. And if you scroll down to the beginning, you'd really sort of see the relationships of the back and forth that would give the audience clues to who these people were and how they behaved. Like, I particularly like this one for the whole, but I'm going to miss you too. I really mean that. So, but in terms of the narrative experience, there wasn't too much happening because you were just kind of looking at these emails and listening to some voicemails. And then we kind of figured out, all right, well, if we're really gonna do this and we're really gonna make this show work, I think the temp has to do actual work. So we started giving them real tasks. And that became really, this was our third sort of major idea and revelation because that became the core of the narrative and started to sort of derive the experience of the show because the work that you did and how well you did that work determined your storyline. And at the heart of this experience was Microsoft Excel. This is the, I think my friends, when they wanted to make fun of me, they were like, you're making a show that happens in Microsoft Excel. And I was like, yeah. And they're like, so like a first person spreadsheeter. So this is how the show worked. You sat down at that desk, you were sitting down on the real desk, you get some emails from your boss about like, sorry, I'm at an offsite today, wish I could meet you in person. But I believe Sarah Jane has documented her work for you. So you just need to start doing that kind of work. And because you're sitting at this desk and because it's clearly not your desk, there's pictures of like her nephew up, you get the sense of like, this is someone else. And you really kind of, if you dig around the desk, you really kind of get to know who this woman is who's sitting at this desk. And then there's a couple, we do a whole bunch of like email jokes of like, oh, the printer on four is broken. Oh, there's stuff in the break room. So people kind of relax a little bit. And then they get introduced to this very simple data entry Microsoft Excel task, which you're working for an actuarial company in the suburbs of Chicago. And all you have to do is update these client lists of who's alive and who's dead. And so it's a very simple task. And we thought this would be a good way to sort of like start people in terms of understanding what their work is. And if they don't know Excel or anything, this would be easy for them to do. But this thing started happening. And I'm gonna sort of narrate your experience if you were the audience member. Every time you would change the active status in that yellow column from active to deceased, the lights in the room would slowly change. And this quiet music would start playing. And your printer would turn on. And it would print out a picture of that person's face and a description of text from a moment from that person's life, a really personal moment. And we tried to find some really human moments of a father watching his daughter learn to walk. And so you'd be kind of confronted with both the data, the sense that, oh, it's just a whole bunch of numbers and things in a spreadsheet to then immediately looking right into that person's eyes. And knowing, oh no, they're dead. And then you would be sort of looking at that piece of paper and then the second that you'd finish it, you'd put it down, the lights in the room would return to normal, everything was fine, the music would go away and you could continue on your tests. But it kept happening to you. And then the sort of like next phase of the show was that then your boss emails you and says, oh, okay, we need you to start doing life expectancy calculations. And because of statistics, it's actually frighteningly easy to determine people's life expectancies. And so you would calculate out how long these people in the database would have to live. And then same thing would happen. Each time you'd be like, oh, this person has 10 years left to live, the lights change, the printer turns on, you see their face. And now this time with the knowledge of, oh no, they only have X more years left to live. And then through like a really sort of sneaky, cruel thing that we do, we trick you into calculating your own life expectancy. So then you kind of have to live with that number. And then the show ends with, because you've spent about, if you've done the show, you'll spend about 45 to 50 minutes working for this company. The show ends and really kind of getting to know the person who's desk you're sitting at, because you kind of dug around in their desk, you've listened to her voicemails for you, you've read a bunch of her emails that you probably shouldn't have read. You find out at the very end of the show that she's been fired and that you're being asked to take her place. So the whole piece was kind of a meditation on how much time we have left and what is the kind of work that we're doing and an exploration of both the weird ways that people communicate in offices and also the sense of your own increasing mortality that might show up when you're working in a cubicle. So that's the show. I'm gonna talk now a little bit about what I figured out in, or how I got to this point. Because it was, it took a long time for us to really kind of work out the kinks of this system and to figure out how to make an emotional event. And it really was a surprisingly emotional event. I thought like, oh, people will laugh at this or, and they might have like one moment of like, oh God, that's how much time I have left and that was it. But what really happened, because oftentimes I was the person to like get people out of the cubicle when the show was over, I would open up the door and they would be like weeping in this office cubicle. And I always felt really guilty and bad about that. I didn't mean to hurt you with my art. So here are the things that I know, or that I can be sure about that make an effective story that I kind of learned from doing this piece. The first was to have a really clear narrative arc that because our story was based on user actions, we sort of had to figure out here's the event chain that will lead you down this certain path and here's this event chain that will lead you down another path. And to be clear about where those moments would occur and also the ordering of certain emails depending on when they receive them and how quickly they receive them, that would tell them a lot the audience. They would learn a lot about that character. If you got five emails in a row from a really grumpy person, you then like had a whole different relationship to that character than if we sort of spaced them out or spread them throughout the show in a different way. So narrative arc story flow was the sort of like, and really structuring that and being clear about how to structure that was really important because we wanted to give both people a sense of freedom and then also bring them back to these moments where they had to do the Excel tasks. Characterization also became a really tricky thing to try and figure out because there was no visual information about who these people were. You really kind of only got a sense of who they were through text. And that came in terms of like, well you got a sense of you could hear their voices if they left you a voicemail, but most of the show happened through email. So vocal patterns, email punctuation, how you would sort of like put it up on the page ended up telling you so much more about who these people were, what they cared about. And we tried to make them really distinct so that if you, because when you got introduced via email to 10 different people, you really wanted to be able to let the audience keep these things separate in their heads. So finding distinctive traits to denote character became really important. And then also to make sure that each character had a specific point of view or a specific world view that they had wants and desires that they either wanted from the temp or wants and desires that they wanted from the world and that you understood because of their own weird distinctiveness why they were acting in a certain way. And then along with that idea that if we could create a sense of you, of the temp understanding their world view so that you understood their characters wants and dreams and how they intersected or conflicted with another character's wants and dreams or conflicted with your own like the audience's wants and dreams, that made for a really good story. It made for conflict. It made for a sense of like, oh, I can look at this person and their life choices and that can be a moral for how I behave or a way that I can either be like, no, I would never behave that way or yes, that's how I want to be in this world. And that's what kind of made that story much bigger that if you understood the boss's point of view and also the person who got fired's point of view it would become a much more complicated thing as opposed to like bosses are evil, don't fire people. And then the last sort of like chunk of things that we figured out was that we started off in an early version of the show by explaining too much about who everyone in the office was by giving the audience too much information and really what helped was if we started to hold back to let the audience imagine more about who these people were so that it became down to like, oh, what if we just punctuated in a weird way as opposed to having someone casually drop a hint in their email about why they're acting in a certain way. And that, giving that space, leaving the audience room to interpret something made the audience engage with it more. It reminded me kind of how in ancient Greek theater every murder always happens offstage and then someone runs on stage and tells you what happened and they describe it in this really gory way that often is more effective than watching someone like fake stab someone on stage. So leaving that space became a sort of further more important design choice for us. And then lastly, to leave room for the audience to explore in the way that they wanted to explore. Because we could, the story was pretty non-linear if you chose to do the tasks in a different order. The show could handle that pretty well or if you chose to focus on one aspect of the story. Some people got really into the whole Excel death thing. Other people got really into the sort of moral choices of do I side with the boss? Do I side with this person who's desk that I'm sitting at? And you never met any of these people but we wanted to give people, depending on whether or not they, what they were interested in, a lot of leeway in the experience. So giving that sense of agency and I think it's connected to that sense of imagination of allowing people to pursue the story that they're interested in made it much more effective and that we could also, that we could serve a lot of different people that many people were interested in one part of it and then a lot of people were interested in another part of it. So this is the quick sort of like recap of the thing in terms of things that I learned. Think about the narrative arc when you're designing a story. Think about the character, both in terms of how do I make characters distinct and how do I make their motivations clear to the audience and then lastly leave room for agency, for choice and for imagination. Cool. So that's my talk. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer some questions about it and if not, I'll see you around and please come say hello to me because I don't know anyone here. Are there any questions right now that we can? Okay, yeah. It's gonna be, it's going to Harvard University in 2016, no, in 2017. It'll be installed there as part of the like American Repertory Theater season of Solo Works. So only in the way that I have like read some interactive fiction and been like, this is cool stuff and I played around with twine and that kind of thing. And I think there is something, I'm really fascinated in text and how when, as opposed to like a film where everything is explained for you visually, I find text to be this like much more personal experience. So I like both reading books and like playing around with interactive fiction stuff. But that's as far as the influence is. That's an excellent question. I did it a ton of times and, oh sure, the question, and tell me if I'm wrong, is how did you like achieve empathy for the audience and how did you know what they were feeling and when? I'd like to say it's years of professional training as a director, that that's really my job is to sort of be like, is this good or not? But I think it was a combination of each time trying to forget everything that I knew and walk in with a totally open mind and if anything, even the slightest little twitch of like, oh, I feel uncomfortable in this way or I don't like this, to note that. We also went through like, as I said, like a really extensive beta testing phase where after each time we would let someone do the show, we would sit down with them and be like, so, tell me everything. And also, oh, I forgot to mention this, we like watch you on a camera as you're doing the show, which, I mean, makes the show partially like a piece of theater and partially like the world's weirdest psychology experiment. And so, you could kind of tell when people were engaged in that, looking at them through the camera or when they were like not, or, yeah, spinning around in their chair. Yeah, we would, so Asa and I, who's the guy who built the phone, and he and I would, we would be back, we would kind of like have this conversation with the person and then decide whether or not we agreed with them. And because it's art, like, we were just like, well, if you don't like this thing, it's then, so it was mostly that kind of process, but we were really attentive to making sure that no one got upset, or that no one felt really uncomfortable by it because there is something kind of weird about mortality and I was worried that if someone calculates their life expectancy and has a panic attack, like, I would feel terrible about that. So it was more about sort of making sure that if the note was like I really felt uncomfortable during X, that's what we would look at. That's, they are still my friends. So here's the terrible thing, if you guys ever think about this, never do a show that's only for one person at a time. It just does not scale and you will be exhausted by the end of it, so that actor never saw it. But I told them about it and they're still my friend. I would say about like 40% is automated and then 60% is us watching on the camera and just being like click to send the email. There's a couple parts, like that moment where they put down the piece of paper, we really wanted that to be exact and to be really right so that it feels like magic to people. So we wanted to, so we needed to keep an operator but we're trying now to refactor the system to make it even more automated so that hopefully someday we could scale it up a little bit more. Yeah, well, so we learned that having other people nearby or having people do this show together doesn't work. Like they end up critiquing each other's email skills or like arguing about how to do the Excel task right and they never really got into that quiet sort of reflective space that I think is kind of necessary for really feeling the show. But if there was a way that we could get a bunch of offices all sealed off from each other, totally. We called it temping. No, no, no, it was something that we worried about because this is not a show that grandma can come and see and really enjoy. And so because each show is such a unique experience and so personal and because we needed to know your name and to know a couple things about you, we're in that sort of signing up for the show and we're trying to figure out how to do that and how to do that. We're in that sort of like signing up for the show process. We could kind of be like, this is not the nice old person and gently kind of like send them on their way. There's a movie for you over here. Each show, it sort of depended on how good of a temp you were. Like there were some people who like banged through the show in like 25 minutes flat and then some people who would really take their time and it also sort of depended on the operator. Like when I operate the show, I think temping should be a boring experience and so I like deliberately slow things down between emails. When Asa runs the show, he's like stressing you out and so it's sort of like you get piled on in a way. So it feels, it can really vary but we try to keep it so that it goes no longer than 50 minutes because we need about 10 minutes to reset the room and do that whole thing again. I have never done an escape the room and when people, when I was describing it to them, they were like, oh, so it's like an escape the room and I was like, I think but it's like boring. You could just leave. Like there's no, you win. Like you walk out the door. What was interesting to me and what I was sort of fascinated by and the sort of like major impulse for the piece was this idea of like intimacy and the way that digital technology often times and I hope this doesn't sound weird because I don't mean it in like a sex way but oftentimes our experience of intimacy through the internet or through technology is more intense than it can, than it sometimes is when we're in person and I wanted to like figure out a way to capture that or to talk about that with people so that they understand that and I think that's really what I tried to go for is like what's the biggest impact? What's the biggest emotional impact? What's the biggest feeling that I can convey through a computer or through just reading an email from someone? Yes, totally. There were some people who would sit down in the chair and like you could see that they were like not into that experience and there was like one or two people who would like rummage around in the room and then found the hidden camera and then got like super squicked out by that. Like they would like do their work and then just like turn around and look at it. We technically do as part of your like when you walk into the experience as part of signing up for the show you have to fill it in an employee packet where you have to sign a privacy disclosure waiver that says like this company will be monitoring you all time all work that you do will be the property of the company like one of those like really absurd things. So we kind of like wanted to play around with that idea as well. And yeah, a couple of lawyer friends got really weirded out by it. I think this is all the time I have I wanna thank you all so much for coming and listening.