On the Most Minimal Story Ever

Visual not Verbal

What is the smallest story?

Not the shortest story but the smallest?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while.

And as I’ve recently been writing about experiments and sort of thought experiments, hypnosis and mental imagery, this seems the right moment to include it.

I will try to express it scientifically.

Every time I’ve tried to say it before, to students or to friends, they haven’t really understood what I find fascinating about this question.

What is the smallest amount of information in which a story can be told?

I don’t mean words.

I mean bytes. I mean pixels.

In order to convey this, I probably need an animation.

An animation would be the experiment.

Could people understand the story told by an incredibly simple animation?

In one version of the experiment, they’d be told they were watching an animated story. In another, they would simply be shown the animation and asked afterwards what it had meant to them.

I don’t have the tech skills to do an animation.

I will have to make do with describing it and then illustrating it.

Imagine four pixels all in a horizontal row. We see them close up.

They have two states. They can either be black or white. That is all the information they can convey.

I will now try to tell a story with these means.

A quarter of a second passes in between each line, as you scroll.

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This, as I hope you understood, is the simple story of a plucky pixel trying to make the difficult voyage from left to right.

If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

I hope, by the end, you were rooting for the little guy.

Maybe it didn’t work at all for you.

Now, Plucky Pixel isn’t my attempt at the smallest story, but an initial demonstration of what a small story might look like.

What minimal means it might use.

It’s up to you to think about what a smaller story, requiring less information, would look like.

And what the smallest of all would be.

For example, is this a story?

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I don’t think so.

It doesn’t, in itself, convey anything other than a routine progress.

It’s like watching a bus drive past a window. That’s not a story. That’s just a route.

If all you showed people was this animation, they would probably say, Something moved from left to right or There was always one light and two dark. They wouldn’t extrapolate struggle, desire, meaning.

My definition of a story is that it contains something or someone in the wrong place.

A story is usually about that something or someone attempting to end up in the right place.

The Plucky Pixel is in the wrong place to begin with because it is on the left and wants to be on the right.

Through the animation, we get (I hope) a sense of PP straining to go further in the desired direction.

That’s this —

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When PP disappears off to the left and we don’t see it for a while, we get the sense (I hope) that it is building up its strength.

The Plucky Pixel story could be that of a high jumper trying and failing twice to clear the bar, but succeeding on the third go.

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It could also be what we see when we watch an ant trying to climb a very smooth surface, left to right, or a water boatman attempting to swim across a stream that’s flowing almost too fast.

These are the kind of small events we watch, and turn into a story.

Now I can hear a lot of hey buts out there.

Hey, but it’s only humans tell stories.

And —

Hey, but you’re relying on animation techniques that took humans generations to develop. Show this to a neanderthal and they’d just see pretty flashing lights.

That’s true.

I’m not talking about a spontaneously arising story on a distant and uninhabited moon.

There aren’t any stories out there.

My smallest story takes place among us.

So the challenge is, tell a story with these minimal, binary means.

Here’s my go.

I’ve reduced it to one pixel, seen at half second intervals.

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(No!)

I think it benefits from re-reading.

: )