Untrace is a short interactive narrative.
A character looks both at the traces that she comes across in his/her life and at those he/she leaves.
The story is an opportunity to play on the digital traces left by the reader, voluntarily and involuntarily, as well as those left by other readers.
Source: http://i-trace.fr/detrace/
Détrace est un court récit interactif sur le thème de la trace.
Un personnage se penche à la fois sur les traces dont il/elle dispose dans la vie et sur celles qu’il/elle laisse.
Le récit est l’occasion d’un jeu sur les traces numériques laissées par le lecteur/la lectrice, volontairement et involontairement, ainsi que sur celles laissées par les autres lecteurs/lectrices.
Source: http://i-trace.fr/detrace/
Loss, Undersea is an interactive narrative/multimedia semantics project by Fox Harrell in which a character moving through a standard workday encounters a world submerging into the depths -- a double-scope story of banal life blended with a fantastic Atlantean metaphor. As a user selects emotion-driven actions for the character to perform, the character transforms -- sea creature extensions protrude and calcify around him -- and poetic text narrating his loss of humanity and the human world undersea ensues. (Source: MIT Icelab)
The world of game development is heavily male dominated and sexism is notoriously endemic in online gaming and videogames. In this context, as a feminist woman and sole writer, developer and designer of an interactive digital narrative, I am something of a rarity. Doing it all myself may seem perverse, especially in a field where collaboration is common, but the ability to author code myself is empowering and, crucially, gives me independence - a development environment of one's own - a classic feminist goal. In this presentation, I will discuss how these factors are reflected in the interplay of genre, narrative, discourse, gameplay, game logic, character development and thematic content in my interactive digital narrative, Stitched Up (currently a work-in-progress).
In an extremely rare inversion of the 'Damsel in Distress' trope, a common plot device in video games, the central male character in Stitched Up is a 'dude in distress' (Sarkeesian 2013). A powerful female antagonist has trapped Joel in a perilous situation and he must be rescued by his wife, Sarah (both Joel and Sarah are player characters). However, rather than action adventure, I describe Stitched Up as a psychological thriller. Moreover, its feminist narrative themes, problematizing the idea of home, significant others, working women, parenthood and masculinity, suggest similarities with the emerging literary sub-genre of Domestic Noir.
To create an interactive narrative that is capable of exploring these issues, I am drawing together concepts from second-order cybernetics with Possible Worlds theory from narratology. Combining these abstractions provides me with a framework for not only thinking about character-driven playable narratives, but also a methodology for authoring and designing them. I am drawn to Possible Worlds theory because, unlike structuralism, it does not regard fictional characters as purely semiotic constructs but regards them as make-believe life-like persons, able to arouse emotions in the reader. Influenced by cybernetics, along with the concept of feedback and 'the art of steering' (cybernetics' etymological root), I am exploring the idea of the fictional character as a Black Box in order to simulate psychological depth.
An observer can only infer what is going on inside a Black Box from its inputs and outputs. Stitched Up is text-driven but highly visual and I am coupling my dialogue-based game engine with a responsive abstract visualisation system for the characters' internal emotional data to deliver subtextual layers of meaning. These combined outputs will affect the choices that reader-players make, the inputs. This stimulus-response model, which is my core gameplay loop, functions as a kind of rudder for the reader-player to steer a course through Stitched Up's narrative universe of Possible Worlds. How the reader-player chooses to interpret the characters' behaviour will determine the kind of story they experience and its outcome. The 'Damsel in Distress' trope invariably decrees a revenge-driven story, Stitched Up's 'dude in distress' device challenges that edict.
I am drawing together concepts from second-order cybernetics with Possible Worlds theory from narratology. Combining these abstractions provides me with a framework for not only thinking about character-driven playable narratives, but also a methodology for authoring and designing them.
Anastasia Salter's publication in the journal Syllabus includes a preferatory essay and syllabus for her course in practice-based course interactive narrative.
From the preface to her essay:
Students in game design programs, such as the Simulation and Digital Entertainment program at the University of Baltimore, often aspire to become makers of digital works. In the service of those needs, the University of Baltimore’s game design program integrates courses on design, programming, and technical art. Courses that make games an object of study are essential to providing these students context and in introduction to the potential of the medium, but they are often viewed as secondary by students focused on immediately applicable skills towards employment in the industry. My approach to resolving this apparent disconnect was to propose a new course in Interactive Narrative grounded in the process of “critical making,” which Daniel Chamberlain defines as “making a way to better ask questions” (Chamberlain 2013). The guiding questions of both the course and the projects revolve around stories: What are the opportunities of interactive narratives, and how does storytelling in a space with player agency offer new potential for experience design? The content of the course encourages students to contextualize games among media more broadly with exposure to forms including interactive fiction, electronic literature, comics and hypertext, while the practice of the course requires the making of works in these genres alongside study. I taught the course in fall 2013 for the first time following its acceptance as part of the curriculum.
Online social networks and video games are prevalent in today’s society, and using both video game characters and social networking profiles cam potentially be used to help people better understand others’ experiences, delivering meaningful experiences which enable critical reflection upon one’s identity, and on others’ experiences related to identity. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text fields are insufficient to convey the richness of our real world identities. As a step towards conveying richer identity experiences, we introduce our interactive narrative game called Mimesis, which aims to allow players to explore identity phenomena associated with discrimination. The story of Mimesis takes place in an underwater setting with subtly anthropomorphized sea creatures as characters. The player character is a mimic octopus, which is a species of octopus adept at emulating other creatures. The octopus is on a journey that takes it from the dark depths of the ocean to its home in the tropical shallows. Along her way, the octopus will encounter several sea creatures who inhabit the waters and whose actions serve as examples of particular kinds of covert discrimination. These sea creatures provoke the octopus, leaving the player to must choose between different emotional responses to the creatures in order to guide the octopus through a series of short conversations. In this way, the project maps the experience of discrimination onto gameworld based on an underwater metaphor. (Source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/mimesis)
Stop & Smell explores the boundaries of literature and digital sculpture. It invites readers to construct a narrative by interacting with illuminated (fragrant) paper flowers. As viewers smell the flowers, their understanding of the story changes and takes new directions, exploring themes of success, happiness, and expectation along the way. Stop & Smell was inspired by stretchtext literature, stories in which clicking on links expands a passage to include new text that potentially changes the meaning of the original. By incorporating classic features of literary hypertext—fragmented, combinatory narrative; ambiguous point of view; discursive agency—Stop & Smell hopes to challenge the perceived limitations of the page by introducing the affordances of the screen into an analog setting. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)
(Re)Playing The Lottery is a dynamic reinterpretation of Shirley Jackson's famous short story, "The Lottery." It presents a scenario in which the interactor is a a citizen of the small town on the day of the fateful lottery, and must move through the story by making various choices which result in random outcomes - no matter how many times the story is played, past results are no guide to future outcome. Just as the story hinges on the chance selection of a marked ballot from a box, this piece employs chance selection as its central mechanic, demonstrating one way in which interactive media can help readers inhabit and interrogate existing texts from multiple perspectives. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)
“Interactive narrative” is a loaded phrase that invokes different dreams for different populations of people. For new media theorists like Janet Murray (1) and Brenda (2) Laurel, it elicits visions of participatory stories enacted within immersive simulated “holodecks.” For theorists of hypertext and interactive fiction like Jay David Bolter (3) and Emily Short, (4) it suggests branching textual environments and rhizomatic tangles of linked lexia. For researchers in computer science and AI, it has manifested in simulations of believable human characters (5), and intelligent storytellers that direct the action in a simulated storyworld along desirable narrative paths (6). Within the digital games community, theorists like Henry Jenkins, (7) Celia Pearce, (8) and Jim Bizzocchi (9) suggest broad framings of narrative that allow it to infuse and enhance gameplay. Outside of academic research, interactive narrative conjures images of “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, role-playing games, and improvisational theater. For the purposes of this article we take a broad perspective on interactive narratives, which we view as stories that afford active participation on the part of the reader. We assert that a robust understanding of the experience of readers and players engaging in interactive stories is crucial to developing this new medium.
While much work has been done to explore the technological boundaries of computational narrative forms, (10) and extensive theory has been written about the poetics of interactive stories, (11) comparatively little research has been done on how readers approach narrative experiences, and how readerly expectations inform the interpretation and reception of an interactive narrative. (12) In this paper we describe an interactive narrative that we have designed that is experienced via a custom tangible embodied user interface called the Reading Glove. We present three important theoretical perspectives on how readers make sense of mediated experiences and apply them as analytical lenses for viewing the experiences of participants interacting with our system. (13) We have previously written about the design of the technology and the interactions in this system and about the authoring process of the narrative content, (14) and so in this paper we will be emphasizing the ways in which readers experienced the narrative elements of the system. Our analysis of the responses of readers using the system allows us to propose three design heuristics for future interactive storytelling systems.
Source: article's introduction
Our approach provides an important starting point for designers of interactive stories to begin coherently considering the readers of their systems that we believe is essential for the growth of interactive narrative as a medium.
Megan Heyward's interactive narrative, I Am a Singer, was created in 1997 with Macromedia Director for the artist's MFA thesis and was exhibited widely after its release. Concerned with memory and identity, I Am a Singer tells the fictional story of Isobel Jones, a famous rock singer who has been in an accident and is suffering amnesia. Although she is still able to access the media traces of her life- songs, articles, newspaper clippings, and various items of personal memorabilia, she cannot draw together these disparate threads into a meaningful sense of self. Structurally, I Am A Singer is a narrative built of fragments, of small, discrete but intersecting sequences, mirroring the fragmented consciousness of the singer. It operates on a number of levels – as a pure tale about an amnesiac singer trying to regain her memory, and as a broader exploration of identity and memory.
I Am A Singer was supported by Interactive Media funding from the Australian Film Commission (now Screen Australia ) of $57,400 and premiered as a finalist in the MILIA New Talent Pavilion in Cannes, France. It was exhibited widely between 1997 and 2000 in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, USA, Mexico and Brazil. I am a Singer won several national Australian awards for digital media including Apple Australia Award for Individual Excellence 1998, AIMIA ’98 best title produced by a student, and the US Invision‘98 Awards (US)- Best Digital Storytelling (Bronze), Omni Intermedia‘98 Awards (US)- Experimental (Silver) and Omni Intermedia‘98 Awards (US)- Sound Design (Silver).
Megan undertook multiple creative roles in the development of the work, as writer, artist, graphic/ interface designer, director, sound desiner and programmer. Her AFC funding allowed her to commission singwriter Phil Kakulas of Australian band The Black Eyed Susans to write two original songs for the work:- 'I Am a Singer" and 'Going Down". Black Eyed Susans musicians Phil Kakulas, Kiernan Box, Dan Luscombe and Mark Dawson played on the two tracks and incidental music for the project, which can be heard throughout the work interspersed with Megan's sound design elements. The track I Am a Singer was later recorded in entirety by the band and vocalist Rob Snarksi and released commercially.
Megan built the project in Macromedia Director 4.0, and it comprises approximatley 55 Director files and 10 video files and 50 audio files. The project took several years to fully develop.
Although human interaction with technological artifacts often involves treating them as if they are alive, the dominant discourse in our society portrays technology as the instrument of its human master. In the context of computing, our desire of absolute control over machines manifests itself both as the human computer interaction (HCI) community’s emphasis on “usability” and as popular culture’s apocalyptic imagination of the out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) systems trying to eliminate humanity. It is revealing that, for instance, the word “robot” comes from “slave” in Czech. This paper examines the social and aesthetic limitations of this narrow instrumental view of technology. It proposes an alternative interaction model based on machine subjectivity, that is, constructing and perceiving computer systems as an independent entity in its own right.
Based on Heidegger’s theory of the “enframing” nature of modern technology (Heidegger, 1977), and experiments of modern dance (Copeland, 2004), this paper argues that perceptual and sensory habits, including our interaction with computing artifacts, are political. Both the prevailing human-leader-computer-follower interaction model and the apocalyptic literary imagination are limited by and reinforce the discourse of hierarchical control and power relationship in broader social contexts. Machine subjectivity, on the other hand, offers a playground for exploring alternative relationships between human and “the other” (i.e., computer) and consequentially provides insights to new social orders, such as the ones based on “multi-dominance” (Lewis, 2000).
In addition to political commentaries, machine subjectivity also affords novel aesthetic and meaningful interactive experiences. This paper examines the manifestation of machine subjectivity in a range of cultural artifacts in electronic literature, music, dance and visual arts, and highlights the novel aesthetics and expressions afforded by allowing computers to act independently.
Finally, the paper discusses our text-based interactive narrative system Memory, Reverie Machine. The system algorithmically generates stories about a robot character, who is controlled jointly by the user and the AI system. The tension between user and machine subjectivity, foregrounded in the struggle to gain control over the main character, is used to explore themes such as agency, resistance, and dis/empowerment.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)