From action transfers to stories on the iPhone

Do you remember Action Transfers or  Kalkitos (or “Trasferelli”)? With them you could compose a story . You had just one chance, and you could neither change your  mind nor make mistakes – unless you had unlimited economic means. Now there is an iPhone application that comes to the rescue: with Fablescapes you can pick and drag your characters, on a fixed wide background, and stick them where you want, in your favorite size and position. Traditional Action Transfer ended there; Fablescapes manages to respect the spirit of that way of playing, while adding interactivity.

One of the main problems any “story composition” application has to meet is ease of use, as you are asking the user to create a story, which is an effort, and so all the rest should be really easy. Like you can provide ready-made characters and settings, and this is in fact what Action Transfers provided. The same are provided within Fablescapes, along with a very simple user interface. I’ve put the story creator at test with my 6-year old daughter together with her 2-year old brother, and they played it again and again: it works.

Actually I (a grown-up ) didn’t like it much at first: only two scenarios? Can’t save? So few objects? I was on the wrong path: what is there is more than sufficient, and the non cluttered interface is child friendly.

The application helps creating a narrative in a parent/child team. It is also one of those cases where the parent’s sense of guilt when letting a small child play alone with an electronic device is relieved – because of the intelligence of the activity.

Narrative model

In Fablescapes there is more study than meets the eye: this is a storytelling application and the creators know what that means.

In an interview I had with one of the game creators, Vincenzo Santalucia, he explained that the structure of the game scenario respects the traditional three-part division of a story, and provides three main locations for each scenario: preparation for the journey, fearful place, final triumph. There is open sea and meadows in between, so one can create intermediate steps of course, and use them in any order. The structure and the choice of characters is influenced by the Monomyth and Hero’s journey theory. Main characters have three different states, corresponding to the different phases.

Final considerations

Fablescapes is an iPhone / iPad (iOS) application available on iTunes produced by the Italian software house StreetSoft.

A version two is coming with an additional scenario (two are provided in the current one, pirates and medieval settings) and the possibility of saving the stories. It will be a free upgrade for holders of version one.

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