A Visual Analysis of "Narritive Telephone" S4 E1
Dr Jason Hamer | 11th April 2025
Narrative Telephone is a game played by a group by "nerdy-ass voice actors" that puts their memory and story telling ability to the test.
"For the uninitiated, here's how the game works: Our storyteller of choice will be starting us off by recording a short story. They will then send off that video to the next person, who will only be able to watch it once. That person must then record themselves recounting that story to the best of their memory before sending their version off to the next person—and so on, and so forth until everyone has gone."
As the story is passed on, it becomes more and more corrupted (often quite quickly) but it can be hard to figure out exactly where it all went wrong. That's where data comes in. By analysing each of the re-tellings, we can pinpoint where certain plot points disappeared, who changed the moral of the story, and, maybe most importantly, who did the best job at keeping the story they were told in-tact.
This particular story -- authored by Matt Mercer -- follows the journey of Vox Machina's Grog Strongjaw through Kymal as he is pranked by the ever mischievous Archfey, Artagan. You can listen/watch the story and follow along with the data visualisation here (warning: crude language).
Each horizontal bar in the interactive visual below is a representation of a story being told then re-told from top to bottom. Each segment of the bar represents a key plot point in the story, with ribbons connecting them between re-tellings so you can track it over the game. You can change what the segment colour and width represents by using the arrows next to the legend to help analyse the progressive corruption of the story. Have a play!
Please view on a larger screen for the interactive viz
Key takeaways: