It's an unfortunate feature of working as both a novelist and a games designer that I end up sitting through a lot of panels, round-tables, conferences, discussions and other exercises in head-nodding where digital people try to get to grips with storytelling, or where story people try to understand the digital world. Both these types of event have their aggravations. When digital people run workshops or colloquia or jams (there are infinite names for the basic principle of bringing people together in combination with coffee) about storytelling, they often seem not to notice that quite a lot of very clever people have been thinking very hard about stories for, oh, the past 3,000-4,000 years. I've heard people suggest that maybe stories have a "pattern" or "structural ordering" that holds together their parts, without apparently realising that a lot of people have written about this, from Aristotle on. And let's not even get on to the people who say things like "data is a story", "products are a story", "your robo-vacuum cleaner has a story to tell you".