Questions from Jan 17th.
I thought I had posted these already but haven’t so here they are:
1) what efforts need to be met in order to intice someone to experience an interactive narrative? How do you bring in an audience?
2) is flow not just a continual cathartic experience? Could we not break down each moment of flow as its own narrative?
3) what genres work better than others for concepts such as SPECFLIC and how does changing the genre affect the role of the participant/audience? and which is it? participant or audience? i.e. if it were a western or family drama, how would that change the process of interactivity?
1) what efforts need to be met in order to intice someone to experience an interactive narrative? How do you bring in an audience?
I think a successful interactive experiencing is one of equal parts good technology and good storytelling, which in traditional film is more reliant on the latter. There are countless films that utilized rudimentary technology while offering cathartic experiences. However, strictly in my own opinion, very few (if any) interactive narratives have had the same impact.
Before the summer I never had a physical or emotional need to play a video game for more than 10 minutes. However somehow I was referred to a game called Journey for PS3. I didn’t even own a PS3 but after watching some youtube videos I bought a console and the game.
What enticed me about the game was the aimlessness of it. That I could operate an identity-less character in a mystical world and occasionally run into another online character yet have no formal communication with them. We could progress together or independently. The story behaves very much like a film narrative rather than a video game narrative. For example in Journey there isn’t a lot of repetition. You experience each level in a different way and your free to roam almost limitlessly. I have sat with people playing games like Halo and the formula is pretty well kill-kill-kill, cut scene, kill-kill-kill, cut scene and so on. Not to say that isn’t super fun. But I feel the emotional attachment to succeed in games like Halo is not with the character your are controlling but with the gamer themselves. This was what was fundamentally different for me between the two styles of games and what brought me in as an audience member.