It's All About Perspective & Plot (Chapter1)
The idea of an 'Interactive Storytelling' class is the most complicated concept to explain to anyone who asks me which classes I'm taking this semester. ..
I must admit that the first chapter in Pause & Effect makes the elements of an 'Interactive Narrative' identifiable and the idea of this class much easier to explain. Of the the sections we've read so far, I must say I was most interested by the topic of perspective and how it plays such a crucial role not inly in the visual, but also in the emotional development of a story. I feel like I've taken all the camera angles and the variations in perspective for granted. The book discusses how artists can tell a story with merely perspective and how the use of at least two kinds of perspective, emotional (cognitive) and dimensional (visual), can be tools used to emphasize and develop a narrative. The idea of perspective has definitely evolved from the 13th century when Giotto first used the idea of a vanishing point to create visual and emotional effect. Now, changes in perspective and angles are seen in movies all the time to establish the importance of characters, generate an emotion or reveal certain aspects of the narrative. The perspective approach finally bonds the viewer with the environment on an emotional and physical level which ultimately makes the use of perspective successful.
This revealed to me that there is SO much an artist/director/designer can manipulate to guide the audience towards a particular reaction and therefore tell a successful narrative, even if it's just a two dimensional painting.
The second chunk of the chapter concentrated in discussing the idea of plot and how it must be organized to effectively tell a story that's coherent. This is extremely important since often an interactive story involves user decision making through the four steps: Observation, Exploration, Modification and Reciprocal Change. Therefore, multiple paths will evolve depending on the separate decisions. Our group, like the others, have stumbled upon the endless outcomes and paths our story can take and so we've been working with different kinds of graphical representations to display the plot, one much more complicated than the good ol' Feytag Triangle.
Comments
However, I did think the viewpoint it was alluding to was refreshing. I especially enjoyed the section on the user as the writer and the writer as the user, specifically in regards to coded applications (Microsoft Excel was a weird example to use).
Overall the explanation of the ideal as a "coming movement" made me chuckle a bit. Also the use of America Online as a shining example of retroactive restructuring. I think that was the first time I've heard that name in at least two years.
I'm intrigued to read more of the book and I'm sure it has more timely insights.
The narrative section was a little boring to me, since I don’t feel it brought up anything new or different.(except maybe the AOL thing, which is a little before my time so I’m not entirely sure what he’s talking about) When he talked about the moral of the story, I was a little confused since I know to be the moral of the story as the overall message, or what you were supposed to have learned. He said the moral is that the narrative needs an opinion (called perspective), so does this mean an interactive narrative doesn’t have a moral by old standards?
When discussing interactivity, what stuck out the most were the “Inside the skull” and “outside the skull” concepts. It made a great point that the “feel, experience, meaning” of a story has to be proportional to the “look, design, symbol.” Like the book said, it’s what “makes the art of interactivity interesting.” The final section of combining everything he talked about was more informative than any other section. The three different structures of interactive narrative discussed were good models to sort of model our stories on, so those will definitely be kept close by. Overall the chapter was interesting and informative and I look forward to what else the book has to offer.