Fourth Story Media

Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it’s kaput—or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture.

So begins Scott Brown’s satiric eulogy to the classic Freytag Pyramid model of storytelling in this month’s issue of Wired. With Freytag buried, Brown steps in with a model of his own making – Brown’s Ziggurat (in 4-D!)^tm. To “stress-test” the Ziggurat, Brown runs the “classic hero’s journey,” (Die Hard, natch), through both story machines and parses the chunks. While the Freytag view is bor-ing, the Ziggurat’s breakdown includes a pre-movie ARG, Tumblr blog, XBox game, Sprite commercial, and real time tweets. And, to top it all off, the whole thing ends with the Mymax^tm, “a hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience.”

(via Wired)