Next World Narrative

Many of us are reaching for change in ourselves and the world. We’re reaching for each other, and participating in positive social transformation.

We don’t just do this by protesting in the streets (though, this is important!). We do this in every aspect of lives. That donation? Sure. Petition? Yes. The conversation with your taxi driver, or rider? Yep. That policy change at your work? Ah-ha. That article you wrote? Yep! The stop work campaign you participated in? Yep! The diverse characters in the game, film, TV show, or novel you created? Yes. Every part of our lives is open to change.

Narrative design activism is about the action we take through the creative projects we put out into the world, and, importantly, how we make them.

It’s narrative design activism to highlight to overtly include change that is channeled into how we make (our games, films, TV shows, novels, plays, and more*). This is because it isn’t always part of creative activism. Let me explain.

Creatives can be activists in some or all parts of their life and practice. There are areas that people default to putting their energy into more than others. To help illustrate this, I’ve listed patterns I’ve noticed. (Let me know your thoughts!)

Everyday not Entertainment

I know plenty of creatives who are activists about issues (such as changing for the climate and social inequalities), to various degrees, in their everyday, and not with their creative work. Sometimes this separation is unconscious because they learnt to silo different parts of their self (that was me!). Sometimes it is a deliberate split because they’ve erroneously been taught that design is not part of life. Sometimes it is a deliberate separation because while they know their creative work is oppressive and uninspiring, they need the income of conventional design work. Sometimes it is deliberate because they want to maintain an oppressive status quo in a creative industry that benefits them, or promises to.

Faces not Forms

There are those that see their their characters depicted, casting, and crew as activism (whether it is fiction or non-fiction), and they still employ design orthodoxy to make their projects. See Henry Lien’s “Diverse Story Forms and Themes, Not Just Diverse Faces.” This is also seen with initiatives where marginalised folks gain entry to the industry through special programmes, or are given their own niche events & audiences. The idea being that the creative changes to fit the industry, not the industry changes to include all of who they are. Sometimes this is an unconscious separation because they’ve erroneously been taught that they only have agency with implementation, not every aspect of design. Sometimes this is a conscious separation because while they know their creative work is maintaining orthodoxy, it is the only element gatekeepers/stakeholders would approve and they know it is making a contribution anyway. Or, inversely, they wanted it to maintain orthodoxy but they were compelled to include diverse characters, storylines, cast, and/or crew. Sometimes it is deliberate because the creatives want to maintain an unequal status quo for their benefit, or the promise of one, while also benefitting from being seen as progressive. See greenwashing, pinkwashing, blackwashing, etc.

These latter folks are often on funding/investment panels because of their activism, but they find a way to “reluctantly” reject projects with diverse forms, goals, & audiences. I despair at how common this is. But, I also know that they were taught (by society and creative projects!) that unequal treatment is the only way to survive this world. Our activism needs to include their liberation as well.

Industry not Practice

There are also creatives who aren’t using their creative works or their processes for activism, but take action about their industry to try and make things better. They take action on workers’ rights, pay rates, content quotas, open access publishing, respect for different roles, reaching audiences, and so on. Sometimes this is a first foray into activism and is appealing because of the potential personal (or group) benefit and the support of peers. It can be an onboarding to doing more. Sometimes these folks keep the separation because they want to contribute to change while (for the promise of income security) maintaining their professional status with studios and their oppressive practices. Sometimes these folks want to keep enacting and benefiting from oppressive creative practices, and also be seen as progressive. Sometimes there is this separation because they’ve erroneously been taught that design doesn’t change, only the industry around it. Sometimes there is this separation because they’ve erroneously been taught that creativity is about certainty, and so it is best they stick to the design they know.

Impact Documentary not Impact Entertainment

There are creatives and stakeholders who take action with the stories they tell, the design process, and their audiences, but only in documentary, education-based works, and serious games, not entertainment in general. Sometimes this separation is because creatives and stakeholders have been erroneously been taught that people don’t learn from entertainment. Some of the most impactful films, TV shows, and games were not made for impact. Take Jaws as an example, and it’s impact on shark policy and public fear of deep water (and for me, dipping my toe on the floor from my bed). Sometimes there is this separation because funders are limited by government policies that don’t allow them to invest in anything other than hedonism. Sometimes this is this split because investors have been erroneously taught that creative orthodoxy is the only market. Sometimes there is this split because creatives who work in entertainment fear they won’t be taken as seriously by their activist peers. Sometimes there is this split because creatives haven’t yet learnt how to be responsible with their design and make something undeniably entertaining.

Status Quo not Structure

There are people, including activists, who aren’t working creatives but who use storytelling in their campaign speeches, videos, and even use existing creative projects. More often than not, despite their goals of changing the status quo, they often use status quo design. Sometimes this separation is because design orthodoxy is what reaches them. Design orthodoxy is uplifted by the status quo and so reaches newcomers and those who aren’t inartistic professions. But, it needs to be said, design orthodoxy is not what many creatives work with, and their skewed representations of craft have been the subject of design activism within screenwriting, playwrighting, literature, as soon as the new oppressions were invented. Sometimes this split is because they’ve been erroneously told by trusted creatives who themselves have been misled about how design works. Sometimes there is this split because they’ve erroneously been taught that orthodoxy is the only entertainment market, even though there are activists sharing data on different designs for different audiences. Sometimes this is because the activists have taken on the oppressive ideas informing in design orthodoxy, and so they don’t see any contradiction.

Attuned without Accountability

There are creatives who are activists about the processes, methods, and techniques to the extent it frees them to design their way. This often excludes any interest engaging with prosocial design (in their fiction or non-fiction, or even in their peer relationships), or for social change goals. Sometimes this separation is because the issue with design orthodoxy isn’t just that it is anti-progressive, it’s that it thwarts most peoples’ creativity full stop. Sometimes this separation is because finding a process attuned to them is their first step on a journey of creative liberation. Sometimes there is a deliberate separation because they want to maintain and benefit from creative orthodoxy, but they personally can’t do conventional processes. Sometimes the split is because they crave novelty but they loudest voices around them steer that interest in the direction of a selfish status quo.

Aligned Practice

There are creatives that don’t silo their activism but instead continously attend to it, to the best of their ability, where they can, in every aspect of their creative and personal life. This is the least common because of impediments mentioned above.

I’ve been through every one of these areas of focus and I’ve found that what helps me align all of them. (Which doesn’t mean I’m perfect at all!) I’ll quickly share what that is rather than leaving the conversation there!

Narrative change activists talk about it, and so too do system change designers, and information communication researchers, among others. It’s got various names, including a “deep narrative,” “mindset,” “cultural narrative,” “paradigm.” This repetition doesn’t mean it is right and always will be. It means that there is a community of interest around it, lots of energy being put into it, and it resonates with me.

It’s about the underlying, cultural stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. It gives us the deep logic — the underlying worldbuilding or theme in writing terms — that contribute to what we do in our everyday, with our peers, our craft processes, the structures and mechanics we use, what we make, and so on.

I find that attending to deep narratives gives me a continuity of practice and cumulative insights.

I’ll be sharing the work people have done in this space and my own, too. I’m running a workshop on the restricting and liberating deep narratives that inform how we talk about craft, and will be sharing more in other formats as well. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

* There are those in games familiar with the term “narrative designer” as a noun to describe a job which involves, among other things, being a ‘team synthesist;’ playwrights familiar with the term “dramaturg,” which involves, among other things, attending to the meanings of the collective representations; and literary writers familiar with the term “narrative design” to include the form work of writing. I’m using the term less as a noun and more to denote the focus on designing. With the emphasis on the various meanings (narratives) associated with our design work on teams, industries, cultures, and more.

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How to cite this page:

Dena, Christy (2026) “The Landscape of Narrative Design Activism,” Next World Narrative, 23 June. Last updated 24 June, 2026. www.nextworldnarrative.org/articles-2/the-landscape-of-narrative-design-activism/

Here are the latest additions to our Liberatory Craft Library! Some just realised, some newly discovered or recommended, and some just remembered.

✊ Why do this? We’re guided by mutual flourishing: which means recognising that this is collective work and we’re all responsible for co-making our creative cultures and the world.

📜 Articles

👉 Ivan Pintor Iranzo’s “From Rhetoric to Archetype: Screenwriting Manuals”

“in what ways do screenwriting manuals and analytical studies complement each other and how do they exchange contributions?”

👉 Shane Agid’s “How What We Ask Shapes What We Can Imagine: De-Coupling Design and Punishment”

“I focus on what shaped these questions, and how the questions in turn shaped the possibilities for design that emerged from them, in ways that matter deeply to the imbrication of architecture, design, and punishment.”

📖 Books

👉 Lucy Ives’ Three Six Five: Prompts, Acts, Divinations

“Many exercises take the form of play, encourage collaboration with friends, strangers, and non-human beings, and operate off the page, often in the world, in the spirit of discovery rather than result.”

👉 Sarah Lynne Bowman, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, and Simon Brind (Eds)’s Implementing Transformative Role-playing Games, Uppsala University

“This textbook explores implementation practices for running transformative analog role-playing games, such as transformative leisure, educational, and therapeutic applications.”

📺 Audio Visual

Victor Navarro Remesal’s talk “The Making of Zen and Slow Games”, Center for Digital Play, IT-Universitetet i København

🔖 Reports & Guides

👉 Kemi Alabi et al’s “Building Irresistible Movements: Best Collaboration Practices for Organizations and Visual Artists”

“How can organizers and artists best work together to harness the power of culture and create a more just world?” (through Monica trinidad’s ace Youtube video “Artists are workers | getting paid to make art for social change” https://lnkd.in/gR4KCJxB)

👉 OKRE & UKIE’s “Building a Unified Framework For UK Video Games Impacts”

“It provides research frameworks for the sector’s wide ranging impacts along with a reframed sector definition and interactive supply chain visualisation.”

👉 UNESCO‘s “Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity: we share, we act, we build”

“Digital transformation has fundamentally reshaped the creative landscape. Never has creative content been so abundant, nor the tools so widely accessible. Yet for many, stable employment and fair pay are out of reach. … These challenges urgently call for collaborative global governance.”

Explore these and more in the Liberatory Craft Library. 🙂

[This is preparation reading for the “Bad Story Guru Medicine” workshop!]

Many of us love the challenge of creating something we imagine.

Many of us also love to contribute to positive social change through what we create.

We can also be imaginative in how we create and how we contribute to change.

We can put effort into designing how we design, and in most cases we need to.

Applying creativity to our processes is not straightforward, though. This is because of the common ways design is framed. For instance, how we justify a structure, the reasons we give for using a technique, and how we explain design and the world, in general.

It’s often a framing that says we can’t change design and we can’t be a part of changing the world.

These anti-liberatory framings, and others, are spread by just about all us. I know I have.

At the very least, you’d have colleagues and stakeholders who pre-emptively insist that you can’t do that and you can only do this.

Often they feel emboldended because their framing is echoed, or first heard, in popular manuals (screenwriting, writing, game design, etc) authored by “story gurus.”

What Does “Story Guru” Mean?

By “story guru,” I mean the definition Bridget Conor uses: where it refers to the authors of screenwriting manuals who are the most widely cited. “Design guru” is a term, too, and applies to those in games, product design, and so on. I’m referring to all of them, really.

But I’ll note that screenwriting gurus have been big part of the conversation for a lot of people in film, TV, and games. You can’t throw a search query without their books or someone repeating the ideas of their books coming up.

Of concern for us here is less the narrative techniques and methods they encourage, necessarily, it’s the way they frame craft, design, creativity, you the creative, the industry, the world.

While story gurus can vary in the structure they put foward, most use the same strategic framings.

This is an issue because many creatives are self-taught. The recent Olsberg SPI & Screen Australia Capacity Report documents this for film, TV, and games. The increasing fees at education institutions, course closures, and declining enrolments are all part of this.

While unfruitful and oppressive framings of design can definitely be taught at institutions, they’re rife online and at industry initiatives targeting newcomers. This is in part because those newcomers don’t yet know any better.

In her newsletter, ex-screenwriter and literary manager, Audrey Knox, says: “Writers need community. But seeking support from strangers on the internet will result in surrounding yourself with misinformation, discouragement, bad advice, and despair.”

There are plenty of good communities and advice to be found online (here lol!), but, yes, misinformation is rife.

Since we’re all always new to something, though, the solution isn’t becoming experts at everything.

We need a way to get better at identifying misinformation even when we don’t have knowledge and experience in the area of practice. More on this shortly. For now we’re attending to the ‘who’ of misinformation.

Who Misinforms?

We’ve all shared misinformation at some time. We’ve shared advice that isn’t true and doesn’t help others.

I have many times (and will again!). One example is when I was teaching interactive storytelling to film, games, animation, and multimedia students. I carefully curated multiple story structures. I gave the students many options and ways to choose them. Great! But I also claimed they have that freedom as long as they stick to some core underlying structural beats. In other words, I said there are some parts of design that can’t change. (This was due to the influence of a specific story system I ingested that won’t share here because I’m not sure if you’re immune to their tactics, yet!)

I wasn’t trying to mis-inform my fellow creatives, and the structures I shared were helpful! But I spread a core misrepresentation of design because I believed it was true. Indeed, I thought the information would have positive consequences on their craft.

Some of us share craft misinformation because we believe it or we don’t realise we’re causing harm.

It is also true that some people share craft misinformation as a tactic…because they mean it.

It’s important to understand this because it informs how we address the issue. If we think misinformation spreads because we simply don’t realise what it is doing, then we’ll assume that explaining how a framing is oppressive will automatically stop the problem.

It won’t. Some people keep doing it no matter the consequences.

This is why my online workshop is called “Bad Story Guru Medicine.”

But How Do They “Mean It”?

You’ll likely be aware of the distinction between disinformation and misinformation: between people who are manipulating and those who share the ideas because they have internalised them.

How do we know someone is doing misinformation or disinformation?

A good check is whether the tactics are actively maintained or even increased over time.

You see, nothing is fixed. My practice has changed. I change as I learn more from others and myself. But there are some folks who no matter how many times they make things (if they still make creative projects), and no matter how many people challenge them (there are always challenges), and no matter how much the landscape changes, they actively maintain their tactics. (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann call this “universe maintenance.”)

We can infer intent when folks continue to use the same tactics across multiple editions, publications, courses, and they even expand the kinds of bad tactics they use (Chris Neilan will talk this in an upcoming publication).

Bad medicine is treating transformation as one-way.

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I don’t think some folks mean to cause the consequences, though.

I don’t think they’re lying to me about creative practice, either.

A person who helped me with this is author Harry Frankfurt. He makes a distinction between a liar and a bullshitter. (Coincidentally, John August refers to Frankfurt’s book, called On Bullshit, in a recent Script Notes podcast — for a different reason.)

Frankfurt explains that the liar doesn’t want you to find the truth. They try to conceal and distract you from it.

The bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the truth. The bullshitter says things that are true and untrue! They don’t care about describing reality, just whether it serves their purpose.

Frankfurt explains that both the liar and the bullshitter falsely present themselves as communicating the truth.

Both the liar and the bullshitter are united in their aim to get away with something.

So this is what sits better with me: A lot of story gurus aren’t trying to oppress us by leading us away from our creative agency. They just don’t care about what really helps us, only what helps them.

Shane Littrell’s work on bullshitting is relevant here, too. He says that bullshitting is functionally misleading (which is how all of us can participate in it even if we don’t intend to — just communicating something untrue has the effect of misleading).

He also says that bullshitting is epistemically irresponsible (careless with knowledge), in that it is ‘constructed to sound superficially smart, impressive, or otherwise persuasive without genuinely being accurate, meaningful, or informative.’

Bad medicine is impression management at the cost of others.

It’s disinformation when the story guru benefits at the cost of others…the cost of the creatives they’re claiming to help…and the planet.

Bad medicine is about non-mutual flourishing.

With this, what makes anything we unintentionally mis-inform others with is not just that it’s ‘untrue,’ but more so that the information corrupts our relationship with our practice, each other, and ourselves.

Misinformation is a mis-relation.

This is why I call it “bad medicine.”

It’s not good for you, me, or them.

What To Do About It

The usual approach is mythbusting.

When I grew frustrated with hearing craft misinformation repeated again and again, I felt the need to explain why that stuff is a myth.

Thankfully, before I did that, I learnt from George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!, that mythbusting doesn’t work. Why? Common mythbusting is about naming the myth and then explaining why it isn’t true. With that approach, you end up repeating their framing of the issue. Saying ‘don’t think of an elephant’ gets us thinking of an elephant.

Mythbusting centres their way of seeing the world, their way of seeing craft.

An intervention Lakoff recommends is a truth sandwich: Always start with the truth, then go to the myth, and then return to the truth. I used this method when I gave a talk on liberatory narrative design at a games conference, and explained why I was doing it.

Lakoff also says it’s important to start with your values. Activists draw on these insights. They frame their campaigns and frame conversations based on what is important to them and their audiences. Creative freedom? Adaptability? Etc. I try to remember this, too.

One thing I also tried was designing my classes and production meetings around liberatory design thinking and practices. I created an alternate world without the misinformation (to the best of my understanding at the time!).

A liberatory approach to design creates a way out of that thinking, but I found it also doesn’t stop craft misinformation.

Just being exposed to different ways of making did not stop my colleagues being susceptible to it (like I was). Studies have shown this, too: that just being exposed to accurate messages is not the most effective way to stop inaccurate messages.

Leading with values gets us closer because it focuses on the relationship part. Not truth, but relations.

So, I think we need to:

• Determine what framings of craft are anti-liberatory, which are about non-mutual flourishing.
• Develop responses that don’t uphold these framings but instead bring us closer to what is important to us.

Leading with Mutual Flourishing

To make non-mutual flourishing, to make mis-relations, obsolete, we need to be deliberate in our relationships with our colleagues, design, ourselves…and story gurus. We can’t treat story gurus as they’ve treated us. I don’t want to call them “bad story gurus” as that is doing the same they’ve done to me. (This is why my emphasis is on “bad story guru medicine.“)

As educator Paulo Freire said in Portuguese originally, ‘In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.’

Our relationships with each other are the crux of the issue and the way through. Here are some fellow thinkers in this work:

In Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales says:

The ecological crisis we find ourselves in is in fact a crisis of human relations, with each other and with the entire planet. It is a crisis created by a set of false assumptions about reality, the same assumptions that drive all systems of oppression.

In White Supremacy Culture, Tema Okun says this:

The invitation on this and every page is to investigate how these characteristics and qualities lead to disconnection (from each other, ourselves, and all living things) and how the antidotes can support us to reconnect.

In Right Story, Wrong Story, Tyson Yunkaporta says this:

Right story is not about objective truth.’ ‘Right story,’ he continues, ‘never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land.

Good medicine is about good relations, between the craft advisor and us (we’re all advisors and learners).

How We’ll Do It

I’m experimenting with an approach that explains the title of the workshop: bad story guru medicine.

1. We’ll take on the role of the bad story guru.
2. We’ll use deep cultural narratives and tactics to achieve our goal of non-mutual flourishing.
3. We’ll then look at ways to operate differently, with mutual flourishing guiding us.

Why? Why do this even though we don’t want to treat story gurus as the bad guys?!

Well, as I mentioned earlier: just focusing on mutual flourishing is doesn’t stop susceptibility to misinformation. And there are folks who will persist with the tactics even when they know they’re bad.

So, with the ‘bad story guru medicine’ approach, we not only develop our understanding of corruptive framings (how we’re manipulated), we also understand that there is a who of bad medicine (them and us).

We’ll playfully do it from the perspective of the person who is not concerned with the flourishing of others as much as themselves. We do this to see how easy it is to slip into these tactics, how easy it is to be taken in by them, to understand that this is a human issue, that there are people making these choices, to understand reasons for spreading misinformation (intentionally and not), and to motivate us to do it differently.

We’ll be looking at corruptive framings that are predictable and repeated across multiple sectors (multiple artforms, industries, and aspects of life). So that when we address it in our craft, we’re also more likely to address it in many aspects of our life.

Importantly, we’ll go into the details of how we frame design for mutual flourishing.

We’ll also be doing this in a collective conversational manner, as this work can flourish when it is bottom-up and community-focused.

We’ll develop our good relations with each other as a start.

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How to cite this page:

Dena, Christy (2026) “A Narrative Design Activist’s Primer To Talking About Craft,” Next World Narrative, 3 June. Last updated 21 June, 2026. www.nextworldnarrative.org/articles-2/how-to-effectively-do-myth-busting/

Yay! I’ve joined StartSpace for a year to test the creation of a new service that helps audiences discover prosocial films, TV shows, and games, and helps their creators of such projects connect with their market.

While it is now common sense that there are multiple audience segments, there is still a lot of investment and promotion channelled into stories of superiority.

For a few years, I’ve been noodling on a way to help both sides (audiences and creators).

While I’ve been pitching and getting funding for creative projects, one of the things that helps the process is having an established route to your audience. So, while I’m putting time and effort into designing my own prosocial projects and contributing to enhanced capabilities of fellow creatives with Next World Narrative, I’m also looking at the audience connection side.

“In order for stories to contribute to systems change, energy needs to be spent on both the supply and the demand sides of the equation. In other words, we need to understand both how to support people to tell better stories and how to increase the likelihood that there is an audience ready and willing to hear and respond to the stories.” (Snow et al, Storytelling for Systems Change: Insights from the field)

I, and many others, know there is an audience for prosocial characters and mechanics. It’s been proven over and over again. What can help is having another route to connecting audiences with these projects.

If you’re working in this space, message me! I’d love to connect! 😀

I’m blogging again! Some of you were there when we were all blogging and knew me from my cross-media blog. (It is archived at the Wayback Machine as culturally important work!) I’m excited to be sharing thoughts on a regular basis again. To release what I’m processing, to learn in public. I love being part of the world in that way. I know people use Substack at present (and I read tons of them!), but I prefer to hold my own janky space.

I’m interested in this because I finally realise that the thing that brings me joy and that I feel I’m here to contribute to GAIA is transforming creative development. I’m here to craft games and books and events that are created from my experiences of the world. I have experienced so many things! Multiple professions, artforms, houses, partners, poverty, physical and emotional abuse, employer bullying, dancing, food, cats, trees, sunlight. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to understand why people treat me a certain way, why my personal life is the way it is, and why the world is like this. One belief I’ve had since I was a kid is the feeling I’m here for the exciting time on this planet. I am! We are! All time here is exciting!

A game I was keen to make is one where you’re all fired up about coming to Earth and contributing to co-learning we’re all doing here together (a personal player motivation is chosen). And as soon as you start on the board, you keep getting objectives and events and puzzles and problems. You get so distracted you forget why you’re here. While all existence here is worth it, I do feel that life is not about remembering what you’re here to do at the end. It’s awesome if you remember while you’re still here — and that can be anytime.

I’ve got my arse into gear after decades. But it’s cool because we use whatever we’ve experienced. We’re here to subjectively contribute what we love. For me, it is creative development, particularly narrative (and I mean both all aspects of meaning-making in a project, and bigger cultural narratives), and social interactive design (the process of creating together). And my thinking about how love plays a role in what and how we make and who we’re making with and for.