Post 3: Self-Regulation in non-linear narrative

Say we have 5 events that we wish to narrate:

1. Man waking up.
2. Woman walking down a flight of stairs.
3. Man hearing a sound.
4. Woman dropping her handbag.
5. Man opening the door in a hurry.

Mathematically, we would have 5! = 120 different possibilities. As Chatman rightly observes, although so many possibilities exist, only a certain number are possible. He also notes that events whose relevance is not immediate may be inserted although their relevance must be made known at some point in time. In order for this sequence to make sense, all the activities of the man must generally begin with him waking up. Actually it may not be so, but, due to our personal experience in the manner in which we experience our own day (from the time we wake up) we impose such a constraint on the narrative.

This brings me right smack into the debate on self-regulation and its place in the design of interactive narrative. But first, let us talk about regulation in general. In a virtual game world, the regulation is simply that you can’t do things that the software does not support. All “play” happens with a certain boundary and that is the regulation for you. Self-regulation is a second layer of regulation, not imposed by the game designers or the software, but the user’s personal need for there to be relevance between the various events depicted.

My view is that it is because interactive media offers choice and control that it would be less likely to fail by becoming an “ill-formed” narrative. Works that are considered not very well-formed, which would be torn to shreds if they appeared in non-interactive media, have the ability to succeed in interactive media because it’s not just a case of one-way traffic in that the author has to convince the reader but rather that both parties want to be convinced that the narrative “makes sense”. This need to self-regulate or “make sense” of the narrative by the reader makes lives a whole lot easier for designers of interactive narratives.

Post 2: Crawford

Crawford conversationally defines “Interactivity” as follows:

“A cyclic process in which two actors listen, think, and speak.”

Taken on its own Crawford’s definition does appear to be restrictive. However, I have to admit his definition does a pretty good job at being a useful working definition. What I have issues with however, are some of the examples he provided to illustrate his point.

In my opinion, Crawford only seemed to consider live conversation (and that too certain kinds of conversation) as worthy of being labelled as interactive. He proceeds to dismiss books, movies and plays as non-interactive by nature or of such limited interactivity that it is to be disregarded.

To be honest, his pompous attitude infuriates me and I believe he has grossly overlooked some important issues relating to interactivity. Primarily he has missed out on discussing the time-scale of interaction. Crawford makes an assumption that the cyclic process that he describes must take place over a perceptible space of time, something from a time of a couple of seconds to at most an hour. Although his definition makes no such assumption, it runs through his examples and unsurprisingly it leads (or rather forces him) to roundly dismiss books. We discussed STAR WARS books and fan fiction enough in class to rubbish his arguments about books being non-interactive. He may be right about movies and most plays in a sense that they are more participatory in nature rather than interactive.

Although he writes in the year 2002, Crawford has quite obviously missed out personal blogs and online news media from his discussion of interactivity. This is quite a pity considering that he might be able to expand his scope from considering only “direct conversation” as interactive. He has also missed out on reality TV shows. With such omissions, he has not been able to back up his definition strongly. On a personal level, I feel his definition is a very precise and useful if taken without the assumptions of Crawford.

Post 1: Memento

That was an interesting film we had yesterday. I must admit it was rather confusing but not to the extent that one zoned out of it. So yeah, you could say it was immersive. And if you couldn’t get the plot, you could always cheat and get it from the following websites:

http://www.themoviespoiler.com/Spoilers/memento.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_(film)

So presented here are some of my thoughts about the movie in the perspective of someone taking a module on Narrative & Play in Interactive Media.

Firstly the movie has 2 separate tracks. The colour track and the B/W track. The colour track is told backwards and the B&W track is in chronological order. Although the story is told via the medium of film, I believe that label doesn't do it justice. Somehow the film seems to be more of a murder mystery comic book where you move from one picture to another and imagine what happened in between the events depicted in those two pictures. There is plenty of suggestion going on in the movie. The movie has not told us what to believe; if Sammy Jankis was real, if Leonard killed his wife, or if Teddy was really a cop.

Unlike movies in which there is a limited choice when it comes to interactivity, this film really opens up the boundaries. Opens up but doesn’t get rid of. There is still the framework of Leonard’s mental illness, the death of his wife and the setting. However the viewer is given free rein to “play” within the boundaries set by the movie. We may have seen such things in MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft, board games such as Dungeons & Dragons and RPG games such as Final Fantasy but it is refreshing to see it in a medium such as film which is considered to be really passive entertainment.