Interactive evaluation...

This project has been quite challenging, the brief was very open to what we could do and the only restriction was the final outcome had to be interactive. To get a good idea of what direction I needed to go I researched on many theorists and their ideas. I chose to do an interactive story and argued that interactivity enhances the experience of story telling. I based my interactive story on the three little pigs because it was a simple traditional narrative that could easily be incorporated for interaction. I used multi-linear narrative combined with the means of choice for the user to tackle my argument.

I think the overall outcome of this project was very good; I was pleased with the results although I thought I could have made the story more interactive, I found a Flash program called Page-flip but didn’t use it in the end because of the limitations of it.

Structure...

This is my first structure for my first idea which was meant to be a interactive game and story but I didn't use this as my idea was changed.

This is the one I ended up using, it is a slightly reworked structure that had to be changed to fit the theory.

The Journey through the Interactive Story...

The Journey through the Interactive Story, Hilary McLellan:

McLellan talks about how multimedia storytellers must have use of multi linear paths to have the audience discover and explore those paths.

"The multimedia storyteller must be a world-builder, creating minature universes that have their own internal states and mysteries to be discovered by peeling back layers of space and layers of meaning; realms for the audience to explore via the thread of the story."

She also talks about how with multimedia the users can go through the journey of the story and experience emotional satisfactory.

"With multimedia, the story can provide a compelling reason to pursue a journey through the virtual world, together with the emotional satisfaction of an engrossing trajectory through the experience."

I think she needs to define the term multimedia as terms like these are sometimes quite tricky to comprehend as they are broadly used in different ways. Although I think she means the use of intereactivity is part of it too as she talks about 'realms for the audience to explore via the thread of the story' which is not possible without the means of interactivity.

"Interactivity helps to create a sense of action and movement, but it should be fundamental to the story, not something trivial and unrelated, or the spell of immersion is broken."

It is important how the interactivity is used as it has to be relevant to be able to enhance or aid an experience.

Façade case study...

Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we have completed a five year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we have built a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences a story from a first-person perspective.

Façade is a prototype of interactive drama, a new genre of character and story-intensive interactive entertainment. In Façade, you, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time.

Taken from the Façade website:
http://www.interactivestory.net/

This is really interesting as this Façade is almost exactly like my idea, it is a story/drama with interactivity that enhances the telling of it so the users must interact with the story to get a full experience of what it is about.

Façade is more advanced than my idea as this uses technology that will allow the user to interact with the story anytime while getting a unique result each time, my one only allows certain routes to be taken so the experience is more limiting but the core idea of interactivity enhancing the telling of the story is there.

Font style...

Fonts


I quite like this font as it reminds me of fonts used in old fairy tale books, it the capital letter has a detailed design which I want and the readability is pretty good which is important. I think this is the font I would want to use out of all the others.


This has nice readability and it suits the Flash book quite well but the capital letter is plain and I don't think it will give the same effect I was as the first font.


This font is the same as above, the text is easily readable and it suits the book well but again the capital letter doesn't give that grand effect I want.


I really like this font, the capital letter is fairly detailed and the text is quite easy to read but I'm not sure how easy it is when there is a lot of text.

The details on this font is perfect for my book but the lower case letters are too hard to read for text, it would be good for a title but hard on the eyes if used constantly.


Again this is perfect for my book but the text is too hard to read, good for a title but not so good on constant text.

Drawing style...

Patlabour




I have found some interesting style I could use for my animations, the comical puppet style will add a sense of a more traditional element of hand made and it's entertaining to look at. I think this complements the Flash book idea, how everything is of traditional media like books and puppets but on a digital medium.


I have also looked on some traditional style of fairy tale art, cross hatching. I think this style is really suitable for my animation but might be too difficult to pull off nicely as I have little experience in this area of art. Although I think it could be useful for later animations as it will be interesting to see how this art style animates.

A change in idea...

I have decided to change my idea and completely re-work my theory, after feedback from Kate and Sue I decided to not go with any game idea/ theory at all because what my idea was about contradicted my theory, I had in mind to argue that narrative and game can balance each other without turning too much into one or the other. I was reading Marie-Laure Ryans reading on game studies and how they do not balance and I tried to argue against that.

My direction with this is now to argue that interactivity in a story enhances the experience of story telling. By using the structure of multi-linear narrative it creates a more dramatic narrative for the user and it also adds interactivity into the story, the idea gotten from Marie-Laure Ryans book of 'Narrative as Virtual Reality'. Most of the readings I have researched upon for my old idea is also relevant to here so I will look into that in finer details.