Interactivity and Video Games
During our Tuesday class wherein we discussed how to take movies and make them interactive, I noticed that the primary suggestions (and the preferred method of interactivity) was video games. All of our group projects are also video games. What's the deal with interactive stories having to be video games?
Don't answer that. As an avid gamer, I already know the appeals and I'm not disputing how powerful they are. Games make you the main character of the story and, with a little suspension of disbelief, allow you to do things you might never be able to do in real life. But they aren't the only medium for interactivity.
One inherent problem with video games, which they seem to be striving to rectify more and more with each generation, is that the player isn't actually there. Your character may be flying around on an airship, slaying dragons, and saving princesses. But you aren't flying around on an airship, slaying dragons, and saving princesses. Everything is done through an analog stick and buttons. Games offer a lot of interactivity in how the story plays out, but lack a little bit in the interactivity of the experience.
There are some games that work to cover this deficiency. Eternal Darkness is a great example of a game that tries to make the story affect you directly (Janathan actually made a post on this game earlier). As your character slowly loses sanity from battling eldritch horrors, the game will try to make you think you are going crazy, as opposed to your character. It'll turn the volume down, turn the TV off, claim to be deleting your files, and so forth. The Wii console, and the other imitations from various companies, is all about making the player part of the game. You don't simply press 'A' to swing your sword, you physically swing your controller like a sword in order to get that to happen. You don't aim your handgun with an analog stick, you hold your controller like a gun and actually aim at the screen.
The point I'm trying to get at, is that there's another level of interactivity to be had and explored by involving the reader/viewer/player as directly as possible in your story. Let's go back to our discussion of making movies interactive. My group picked Nightmare on Elm Street and we talked about part of a theoretical game being, say, using the Wiimote to simulate drinking coffee to stay awake (among other things). What if, instead, we put our 'player' in an actual house and literally had them pretend to drink coffee or go jogging in order to stay awake? What if we made them physically run away from Freddy Krueger? Instead of having a video game simulate everything, what if we made it all as physically real as possible? I think there's something to that in terms of interactivity.
Don't answer that. As an avid gamer, I already know the appeals and I'm not disputing how powerful they are. Games make you the main character of the story and, with a little suspension of disbelief, allow you to do things you might never be able to do in real life. But they aren't the only medium for interactivity.
One inherent problem with video games, which they seem to be striving to rectify more and more with each generation, is that the player isn't actually there. Your character may be flying around on an airship, slaying dragons, and saving princesses. But you aren't flying around on an airship, slaying dragons, and saving princesses. Everything is done through an analog stick and buttons. Games offer a lot of interactivity in how the story plays out, but lack a little bit in the interactivity of the experience.
There are some games that work to cover this deficiency. Eternal Darkness is a great example of a game that tries to make the story affect you directly (Janathan actually made a post on this game earlier). As your character slowly loses sanity from battling eldritch horrors, the game will try to make you think you are going crazy, as opposed to your character. It'll turn the volume down, turn the TV off, claim to be deleting your files, and so forth. The Wii console, and the other imitations from various companies, is all about making the player part of the game. You don't simply press 'A' to swing your sword, you physically swing your controller like a sword in order to get that to happen. You don't aim your handgun with an analog stick, you hold your controller like a gun and actually aim at the screen.
The point I'm trying to get at, is that there's another level of interactivity to be had and explored by involving the reader/viewer/player as directly as possible in your story. Let's go back to our discussion of making movies interactive. My group picked Nightmare on Elm Street and we talked about part of a theoretical game being, say, using the Wiimote to simulate drinking coffee to stay awake (among other things). What if, instead, we put our 'player' in an actual house and literally had them pretend to drink coffee or go jogging in order to stay awake? What if we made them physically run away from Freddy Krueger? Instead of having a video game simulate everything, what if we made it all as physically real as possible? I think there's something to that in terms of interactivity.
Comments
Still, isn't this a digital arts class? I'd imagine that the scope of the class involves making digital media interactive, not pointing people towards real life. I'm not debating your point, but...
Perhaps the examples I put up in the blog post were a little too disassociated from digital arts. There are a lot of things we cannot do physically that the digital arts may aid us in creating. Theme park rides are an excellent example. There are digital projectors, sound systems, motion detectors, and cameras all over the place.
The Amazing Spider-Man ride (Islands of Adventure) uses screens to show the super villains trying to kill you. The Haunted Mansion (Disney World) uses projectors to make you think there's a ghost riding in your car. Spaceship Earth (Epcot) uses your picture and a touch screen to develop your perfect future. Soarin (Epcot) uses giant screens and motion detectors in its queue to create games where you terraform and move giant boulders with your hands.
Digital arts here aid in creating an interactive, physical, and much more real experience.