Narrating Futures / Storyplaying

This series explores a hitherto unidentified type of narrative: Future Narratives. Future Narratives preserve essential aspects of future time, namely its openness and undecidedness. They do this by operating with ‘nodes’ as their basic unit – situations that allow for more than one continuation. Future Narratives can be found in print, in film, in video games, in scenarios of world climate change, and in other simulations of future trends. Cutting across all media and genre classifications, this burgeoning corpus still lacks a theory and a poetics. This series offers both – and detailed case studies.

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This series explores a hitherto unidentified type of narrative: Future Narratives. Narratives are traditionally concerned with past events or with events that are happening right now, and narratives process them into a meaningful sequence. In contrast, Future Narratives preserve a characteristic feature of future time, namely that it is yet undecided, open, and multiple, and that it has not yet crystallized into actuality. They do this by operating with ‘nodes’ as their basic unit – situations that allow for more than one continuation. Future Narratives can be found in print, in film, in video games, in scenarios of world climate change, and in other simulations of future trends. Cutting across all media and genre classifications, this burgeoning corpus still lacks a theory and a poetics. This series offers both – as well as detailed case studies. Firmly rooted in narratology, the project has interesting interfaces with philosophy, the theory of history, media studies, game theory, decision theory, and futurology.