Meadows, Mark S. : Stanford Research Institute

Mark Stephen Meadows is an artist and writer, currently living in Paris. He was most recently Creative Director for a venture of Stanford Research Institute and prior to that held the post of Artist-In-Residence at Xerox-PARC where he conducted research in reading and interactivity. He has been a professional designer in the realm of Interactive Media since 1993, creating works that defy traditional distinctions of "technology", "narrative" and "visual art."

His 3D animation and interactive design has touched companies from Lucasfilm to Microsoft, and he has been exhibiting his mixed media artwork since 1987 in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe. Meadows' work has received awards from Ars Electronica, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the National Information Infrastructure (NII) highest honors, among others.

Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative

1.1: Introduction
Authors have one thing in common: They have a perspective to convey. Playwrights, journalists, historians, fiction writers, and biographers all have a story to tell. Their story is their perspective.

If humanity were a building, each author would be a window. The view from that window would be the picture each author paints. It's a view that explains a little bit more about the confusing things we call "Life" and "Reality." A narrative is an individual's perspective of the surrounding landscape. It's one small view on the big picture. For millennia, we've used our perspectives and stories to find a larger perspective on what's been called "The Human Condition." And stories are what we rely on. Stories are what we use to explain the underpinnings of reality.

This is why narrative exists: to convey perspective.

Interactive narrative is the most ambitious art form existing today because it combines traditional narrative with visual art, and interactivity. Strangely enough, these three art forms share an important feature: They each allow information to be telescoped or compressed. Traditional narrative has tools such as foreshadowing and epiphany; Visual arts rely on point-perspective and foreshortening; Digital Interactivity uses iconography and expanding menus. These are all tools that do the same thing: convey perspective. This book examines an emerging art form that relies heavily on the role of perspective.

The first goal of this book is to broaden current thinking about narrative. An "Interactive Narrative" is a narrative form that allows someone other than the author to affect, choose, or change the plot. The author, in writing this narrative, allows the reader to interact with the story. This changes the role of the author; it changes what an author does--and in the case of narrative, that's to narrate. Therefore, traditional narration begins to require an expanded understanding.

The second goal is to broaden current thinking about interaction design. Many forms of "content" that are distributed via electronic media are based in narrative, or contain narrative elements, but few of them have recognized the means of integrating narrative and interaction. Fewer still have even recognized the inherent value in doing so.

The book's third goal is to illustrate the role of imagery*. As narrative shifts from the linear progressions of text and speech to a more nonlinear and visual mode of communication, new methods of narrative are emerging. These days we rely less on the linear process of the spoken word because images can often convey the same information in a faster, more precise, and--in many cases--nonlinear fashion. They're worth a thousand words.

NOTE

While other forms of communication lend themselves to narrative (such as audio and video) I have chosen to focus, for this book, on imagery--mostly from the western tradition.

Any traditional, noninteractive story might be thought of as a single path through a structure of an interactive narrative. Despite the changes we see in television, Internet, movies, radio, print, and other media, we're still, effectually, thinking in Elizabethan terms when a story was originally defined in a linear system of a "Dramatic Arc."

This book, in presenting some of the guidelines of an emerging art form, intends to offer alternatives.

1.1.1: How Narrative Forms Grow Together
Our methods of telling stories and presenting information are being welded together.

These days, if you walk into a modern movie theater a video game is sure to be lurking nearby. Sometimes the movie is about the video game (or vice versa). As you browse web pages, video and animation can be seen woven into the page adjacent to the text. We see more picture books--magazines, newspapers, graphic novels, and catalogs--than we did 20 years ago. Many of these are merely references to other forms of narrative. Examples of such referential work are TV Guide, movie-based websites, or projects like Dark Horse's "HellBoy" comic series in which a book and a CD-ROM are intended to be read together as a single story. We see this most commonly with video games and movies. Star Wars, Tomb Raider, and even American football seem to have more than one public face. Contemporary ad campaigns invent billboards that begin to tell stories over the course of a month and encourage us to solve this mystery by visiting a website.

Perhaps one of the strongest indications of this is the fact that a multimillion dollar, multimillion user interactive narrative was distributed several months before the movie AI was released. The narrative, taking place in the same universe, but with a completely different plot, was used as a means of integrating the movie into the real world [2.5.2].

Meanwhile, the integration of traditional narrative and digital interaction are warming the relationship of the disparate languages of books and computers.

1.1.2: The Importance of Opinion and Perspective
All stories contain a perspective. In the case of movies it's a camera. In the case of writing, it's the writer (consider Borges' short story of nested perspectives "The Immortal"*), and in the case of a narrative image it is often the painter.

NOTE

Jorge Luis Borges frequently built stories inside of stories, telling stories from the perspective of a writer whose work was being read by the story's narrator. One of the best-known versions of this idea was the revelation of the "Aleph," the mystical letter through which the whole universe can be seen. The entire universe can be found in this "Aleph." "The Immortal" is the first short story of this highly recommended work.

Until recently narrative has been, most simply, a process of narration. A narrator tells us something--a story, information, etc. But these words and their meaning are, naturally, mutations from earlier languages. The word "narrate" itself originated from the Latin word "narrare" which evolved from the Indo-European word "gnarus" meaning "to know." Therefore, a narrator has knowledge about something and tells us about it. Perhaps a narrator can be thought of as an interface designer, as someone who is collecting information and determining the best method of presentation.

But none of us know everything. We all have our perspectives and opinions. Even the "objective" news sources such as National Public Radio or the British Broadcasting Corporation hand-pick phrases that appeal to specific audiences. This means that, despite our best efforts to be objective, an opinion is implied. Historic narratives, too, are based in opinion. History is written (or so it's said) by the winners. All narration picks which events get presented, in what order, and how.

But that's okay. When we listen to someone tell a story, we listen to his or her particular perspective. We listen to what they experienced or thought and the personal angle that they bring to that small history is the part that's interesting.

Even a narration of simple events in a newscast requires some perspective to exist. A narrative in this way is almost like a kind of image--It can't exist without a perspective of some sort. The context of the person telling the story, the specifics of the way that it's told, and the pieces that are chosen to be relayed all inform the perspective. The particular relationship between the teller and the listener informs the perspective as well.

In the context of storytelling, perspective may be the only thing that exists.

1.2: Perspective
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm."

-- Ambrose Bierce

Perspective is a critical characteristic of narrative, but there are at least two kinds of perspective; emotional (or cognitive) and dimensional (or visual).

If you look at most buildings made with 90-degree angles, the lines that are parallel with the ground appear to be angled to one side. When you look at these angles you know they're made of 90-degree angles but, if you hold a protractor out at arm's length, they don't look 90 degrees. And as you look down the street you notice that the roofs of the buildings are slanting toward a single point on the horizon where everything seems to collapse into itself. That "vanishing point" is a strange place. It identifies where you are standing. This is where your "perspective" ends.

The vanishing point is a point in linear perspective at which all lines that are parallel in an environment collapse and at which all elements in that space cease to exist.

It's also a place that we learned about only relatively recently.

1.2.1: A Genealogy of Perspective
At the end of the 13th century a painter named Giotto di Bondone would sit with his teacher Giovanni Cimabue, spending their afternoons on street corners in Rome, staring at buildings, stretching strings in the air, and drawing.

NOTE

Giotto, born in Tuscany circa 1267, lived until 1337 when he died in Milan. Cimabue, his instructor, died circa 1300, but his birth date is not known.

When Cimabue and Giotto looked at the buildings across the street--wood and glass boxes made of 90-degree angles--they saw roofs that appeared to be twisted and bent to the side. Despite the appearance, they knew these buildings were made of right angles. As they held string in the air and followed these angles they began to see spatial relationships and their understandings of what they were seeing was sharpened.

This invention (or discovery) of perspective had a deep impact on Giotto. While he was painting the fables and myths of his time, he was doing something very new with the discovery (or invention) of vanishing point from both a dimensional and emotional standpoint. He was depicting the physical and geometric location he was standing in, which put the viewer in Giotto's dimensional perspective while he was painting.

Prior to this time, paintings of the Western tradition lacked this sense of location, the visual vocabulary to achieve the relocation of the viewer, and the sense of actually being there as a witness to the events. Putting the viewer in a new dimensional perspective also affected the viewer's emotional perspective.

This is something we still see today in most forms of image presentation. Traditional western movies, such as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, or Shootout at the OK Corral, show characters from knee level. Clint Eastwood towers over the camera, a giant of a man, dust on his boots, six-shooter in his fingers, twitching for battle. But he's seen at these moments from a specific dimensional angle. These camera angles present a character that's meant to be seen as important or dominating when viewed from a lower dimensional perspective. We're meant to think "He's bigger than me" which then gives the character an emotional perspective of importance or power. Mystery, another kind of emotional perspective, is also built this way. When we can't see around a corner we're left wondering.

Thus dimensional perspective affects emotional perspective. This is old news for most film directors, architects, and sculptors.

Giotto spent a tremendous amount of time painting facial expressions. So while putting the viewer in his own dimensional--or visual--perspective he was also putting the viewer in his own emotional perspective.

Doing this increased viewers' participation in the work on both an emotional and visual level. There is a relationship between them. One is outside the skull--it's what's presented on the canvas or screen. The other is happening inside--it's what the viewer is imagining or feeling. Both relate to what is being seen.

Meanwhile, as Giotto was working in churches, busily mixing his paints, other inventions were crackling into existence. The glass mirror was discovered, spectacles were invented, block printing was the hip new trend in Italy, Thomas (The Bull) Aquinas was quietly scribbling the "Summa Theologica," and highway tolls were making a big comeback in England. Things weren't so different then as now--change was underfoot and mainstream society was fascinated, watching it unfold.

What was different then, though, was how people--and specifically visual artists--viewed people. Giotto was working at the sunset of the Medieval Ages, just prior to the dawn of the Renaissance. He was working at a time when the invention of stories mattered less than their interpretation. The people of this era were interested in the retelling of stories (rather than the invention of new ones, as we are today). The Annunciation or The Passion, for example, were stories that had been interpreted and re-interpreted thousands of times by as many people. Each interpretation presented a new angle on the story they already knew.

Giotto was obsessed with individuality and the pathos of the individual. These ideas give his painting a subtlety that's still touching and somehow both familiar and alien. The faces of his characters are soft; sometimes a lower lip is pooched out, a hesitant hand is lifted, or a forehead is wrinkled.

The perspectives being painted are those of both the painter and of the subject.

Giotto wasn't simply interested in the visual perspective of an individual in a story--he was obsessed with it. Giotto was equally obsessed with the emotional perspective of that individual. For him the dimensional and emotional perspectives were linked and even informed one another.

It's worth looking at the Church of San Francesco, in Assisi, where Giotto did some of his best work. His obsession is most evident here. Each bay of each nave in the church is divided into three sections by columns that stab into the ceiling. This makes for an architectural division of the space and Giotto put each of these divisions to use as a painting surface. It's a physical division. When seen from an angle the paintings appear to be scooped or slanted, resting at an odd angle. If you stand about two meters in front of the painting, with your head in just the right location, the geometry of the painting aligns with the geometry of the church. Suddenly the oddly angled lines snap into a horizon, walls lift out of the jumbled geometry, and a virtual space falls back into the wall in front of you. It gives the distinct impression of looking into a series of virtual rooms.

But you have to have your head in the right spot; quite literally. These spaces are about the size of a shoebox. It's a specific location where you need to stand to see it, but its clearly what the painter had intended. It's as if Giotto's ghost is there, standing behind the visitor, guiding them, telling them where to stand, his fingers gently on their temples, his voice whispering in their ear, "Fermi li, rimani in piedi li." (see note.)

NOTE

"Here, stand right here."

It was this approach--let's call it a Perspectivist Approach--that allowed Giotto to depict for the viewer both the dimensional perspective and the emotional perspective of the people in these stories he was painting. But it's a four-fold perspective: the point of view of both the subject matter and the visitor, represented dimensionally and emotionally. This crossroads of architecture, the church, painting, and mathematics, were the crossroads where Giotto worked. And it was at these crossroads that Giotto, sitting with his strings in the air, next to his teacher Cimabue, discovered the vanishing point.

And vanishing point gave us perspective. And perspective is a point-of-view.

The curtains rise on the 16th century. We're still in Italy, though now a bit north, in Florence. Booksellers, printers, and type foundries are now distinct industries. The postal service is the new privilege of the middle class, and a German sailor named Martin Behaim (an interface designer) has made a spherical map of the earth called a "globe.*"

NOTE

Herr Behaim's globe is on display at the museum of Nuremberg, in Germany.

The greatest hits of Aristotle and Aristophanes were making a big comeback with their recent reprints, and italic print was invented to facilitate the new burst of translations. In 1504 Raphael Sanzio, a painter and a contemporary of Michelangelo, used mirrors and a primitive photographic device (called a camera obscura) to shed enough light on the mysteries of perspective to continue the work Giotto had started. These events all changed how people saw the world and inventions such as the globe, camera obscura, and mirror were the tools that have since affected our modern perspectives.

In retrospect, the work of these people and the effects of their technology is evident:

Despite the bouts of famine, syphilis, and plague, this was a reassuring period. First, this dramatization of linear perspective and vanishing point put the observer on par with the observed. This was risky business when you stop to consider that the mother and son of God were the images being depicted as if the viewer was somehow in the same room or on the same level. The church was known to have severe reactions to unapproved methods of interpretation. Second, because the observer was being considered by the painter as the painting was composed, or laid out, it also gave the observer the perspective of the painter which was, in those days when painting was in some cases actually prayed to, quite powerful. Third, and most importantly, the invention of linear perspective gave humanity an appropriate point-of-view where everything could be seen at once. With this introduction of perspective, the entire world that was depicted in the painting was presented from the best possible vantage point to provide the densest information at an appropriate moment.

It was the beginning of a kind of telescoping. It was the beginning of a compression of information--a form of interface design that allowed the most important information to be presented at the most appropriate time from the appropriate angle. Which is what everyone still wants; to be able to see it all, from our single point of view, at the just the right time, and know that we "get the picture."

These trends that developed out of the first half of the millennium influence how we see the world today. Our modern means of telling stories are the children of these parents of perspective.

1.2.2: Objective Linear Perspective
By the 1700s interest in the perspective of the individual shifted to interest that was outside of sense-based perception such as sight and sound. This was, at the time, one of the primary roles of mathematics. The three Laws of Motion* had been published, the pendant barometer invented, and the Rococo period was in full bloom filling the Western world with the cloying trends of domesticity, mathematical harmony, and the taming of nature. Times were changing and our interest in control was increasing.

This interest in control and mathematical rigor had much to do with a perspective that belonged to no one in particular, but everyone in general. It was an objective perspective. But, ironically, it's the individual perspective that allows perspective to exist at all. Millions of people can't all stand in the same place and still view the world from the same perspective.

NOTE

Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion:

LAW 1: Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a right line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

LAW 2: The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

LAW 3: To every action there is always opposed and equal reaction;' or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and directed to contrary parts. Less notably but of equal importance for some of us, billiards was introduced just a few years later in bars and coffeehouses of Berlin.

It didn't seem to matter--we had new inventions to keep us busy. In the mid-1800s Monsieur L.J.M. Daguerre was dabbling with silver-coated plates of copper and capturing--as if by a butterfly net--actual light.

But something was missing through the 18th and 19th centuries and it was something that Giotto had started to introduce hundreds years earlier; something to which we're only now returning; the importance of the individual's perspective.

1.2.3: Subjective Linear Perspective
The more things change, the more they become their opposite. First, Giotto helped push the Medieval Ages out of a period of authority and objective authorship (namely, that of the Church's) into a period of humanism in which the individual perspective came to be seen as an entity of its own. Then the Renaissance took advantage of that shift and, by extension of those ideas, pushed it into increasingly extreme arenas until the clergymen and clerics became scientists and mathematicians. The objective approach to perspective came back in fashion at that time of the 1800s. Fast forward another one hundred years, and now, as a population of over six billion people, flying over the planet's surface, communicating across massive distances at instantaneous speeds, delivering addresses over the television, firing TCP packets back and forth across continents, are all presenting individual opinions. And it's happening in a way where there no longer appears to be a single authority, author, or authorization needed to get the opinions and point of views across the globe. We now are all authors and readers in a tangle of communication and multiheaded interaction.

The arrival of new technologies and their use in our culture has seen, especially in the course of the last 50 years, an increased emphasis on the perspective of the individual.

We know about this. This is the time is where contemporary--and interactive--narrative begins.

1.2.4: The Perspectivist Approach
Earlier we called Giotto a "Perspectivist." This is to say that Giotto had an approach that allowed him to consider the painting's multiple viewers from both an emotional and dimensional perspective. The painting was then composed with that person's specific emotional and dimensional perspectives in mind. These perspectives were not separated, but parts of the same unit.

The Perspectivist Approach is the fundamental mindset of any author of interactive narrative. This approach comprises two principles.

First, it bridges foreground to background. It resets the spatial relationships between people and their surroundings. The integration of the imagery with the walls of the church is as good an example of this as any. The place is a part of the experience. This is a way of looking at dimension and image from a holistic point of view. It doesn't necessarily separate the painting from the wall, but considers the totality of the environment as a single mode of communication.

Second, it bridges context to decision. The Perspectivist Approach looks at the environment and its context as being a thing that braces the actions of the occupants of that environment. A fish swims because it is in the water. A bird flies because it is in the air. St. Francis expels the demons because they're inhabiting Arezzo.

If you have foreground, background, context, and decision, you have the bricks of which the plot structures of interactive narrative are built.

1.3: Narrative
Literature is language charged with meaning.

--Ezra Pound

Surprisingly, both the denizens of the Internet and their fearless leaders remain largely clueless about the currency of their medium. Most websites understand the Internet as being little more than a globally-distributed brochure. The interactive, social, and narrative capabilities of the web remain unexplored so the return on the investment that most companies made is still simply an investment that's burning fuel on the launch pad. This lack of understanding contributed to the Internet downturn of the late '90s. The majority of the sites that have returned revenues have usually involved a synthesis of commerce and community.

The Internet is fueled by two commodities: Attention and Reputation.

America Online, for example, has managed to convince its users to pay for what others are giving away. In fact, they've convinced their users to pay for what others are paying to give away. Due to the fact that the money-meter is always running, AOL users pay to upload their writing while other users are paying to download that same content. So, in effect, the users pay to allow AOL to profit from their contributions. Additionally, AOL managed to convince these same users that all of the rest of the content of the web should follow this same commodity model. Their users quite literally bought this story and assumed that AOL, a subset of the Internet, subsumed the Internet and was their gateway, or "portal" to it.

AOL's approach is a vitriolic and intelligent commodification of the users of the service (or, more accurately, those users' attention and reputation). In fact, it was an intelligent commodification of the unassuming public and our markets of stock and trade. AOL leveraged an unassuming public. So much so that the company was able to use Internet stock funny-money "assets" to buy Time-Warner, and most notably their flagship subsidiary CNN.

But AOL could have done much more and, currently in league with Time-Warner, it's positioned to take advantage of the benefits of interactive narrative in the coming decades. The recent integration of Harry Potter movie releases and the interactive vignettes that have appeared on America Online are early indicators that they're waking up to these capacities. It seems likely that they will distribute largely narrative-based content. But how they integrate this with their previous model is the interesting question of "How do we use interactive narrative to make us some money?" Simply, we will soon see "AOL users" becoming "AOL writers." More so than we do now. This might be among the reasons AOL Instant Messenger was so important. The ways in which writing is becoming interactive will surely affect narrative's future.

We'll have to wait and change.

Those sites that have featured some form of narrative (occasionally named "Content") relied on traditional modes of impression-based advertising and "click-thrus", assuming that their audiences would tolerate this outdated form of informational pollution called "Advertising." In many cases they've been right; users, specifically American users, have tolerated this. But if the authors of these sites understood the value of narrative in their "Content Offerings" and how interactive narrative works they might have changed their financial models and means of making money.

The model is very much like the BBS, or bulletin board service. As some users build, more users are interested and the guy in the middle collects the coins. Ultima Online and other gaming systems understood the Internet well enough to take advantage of these approaches. This is the commodity of attention.

We'll see this sort of approach become increasingly common. AOL and other "portals" will begin to integrate large-scale multi-user environments that are narrative based. Users will feel more emotionally connected to what they are uploading and will include their friends and associates in the process. It's a matter of integrating projects like Simnet or Everquest with the cultural models of the bulletin-board service, or BBS (on which AOL still relies). This is the commodity of reputation.

In the small town of Lille, France, this traditional BBS model is being cracked. Team ChMan � the producers of an labyrinthine and a very rich narrative named Banja* � have done an excellent job of pointing a direction for communities that integrate narrative and interaction. Banja is a story about a character (named "Banja") that lives in a world with a population of other characters. While there is a consistent metaphor, storyline, and interface to the entire community, there are a series of services, games, and online community activities that make this a promising competitor for a system like AOL.

NOTE

Banja won the 2001 Ars Electronica Golden Nica, the highest international award for digital art. A few months later it also received the Europrix 2001 for the best interactive fiction and storytelling. Banja can be found at http://www.banja.com

As wireless entertainment and interactive television networks come to understand the process of personalization, investment, fascination, and captivation [4.3.1] these networks would be wise to offer content that encouraged their audiences to contribute and build the networks they struggle so hard to anticipate, build, and maintain. The structure of these networks will branch easily to interactive narrative. This is because they follow the same rules of fascinating users with a story and captivating their attention with increased investment. Part of the reason video games, for example, are so addictive is because the reader invests so much into them.*

NOTE

These investments include time, attention, money, energy, concentration, and, in some cases such as Quake Arena and other online competitions, personal reputation.

Corporations, whether they're online gaming companies, interactive television networks, wireless networks, or Internet conglomerates would be well-advised to provide large-scale metaphors (such as e-world or Ultima online) that encourage their audience to come and assist in the building process. This process made the web successful in the early 1990s, and it wasn't because of the technology.

1.3.1: The Changing Definitions of "Narrative"
Here, in the tradition of the Western world, narration has come from the single voice of the narrator. It has been a spoken tradition of narration. But what if there are multiple people working on it? What if it's a visual narrative? What if its entirely silent and nonlinear? What if it's a play in 18th century London, or a movie in 21st century Los Angeles, or TCP/IP packets from Quebec? People talk about "High Narrative," "Episodic Narrative," "Guttural Narrative," "Multilinear Narrative," and "Narrator's Narrative." What do these things mean?

Narratif (ve), n.m.. Récit, exposé détaillé d'une suite de faits.

Narrative (n): 1 : something that is narrated : STORY 2 : the art or practice of narration 3 : the representation in art of an event or story; also : an example of such a representation

Narrativa: 1 f. Narración (acción). 2 Habilidad en narrar las cosas.

Erzählung <f,; -, -en> 1 <i. w. S.> Bericht, Beschreibung, Schilderung von wirkl. od. erdachten Begebenheiten; jmds. ~ mit Interesse zuhören; die ~ ist frei erfunden

Aristotelian Definition
The Poetics, one of the very first serious treatises on narrative and dramatic structure, was a series of lectures and writings delivered by Aristotle*. Poetics defines the plot (this important part of narrative) as an imitation of an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Aristotle does it like so:

"We've considered that a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself because it's a whole of some quantity (because a whole doesn't have to have a quantity). Now a whole is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning isn't necessarily after something else but is followed by something. An end naturally follows something--either as necessary or as consequential--and has nothing following it. And a middle follows something and is followed by something else. Therefore a well-constructed plot cannot begin or end at any point the author would like. Beginning and end have to follow the forms described."

--Book 7, Poetics

There aren't many guidelines for what makes a story interesting, exciting, or unnerving. There aren't many guidelines on how a story begins or ends. But this passage does identify that there are parts that work together to form a beginning, middle, and end. Aristotle points out that, basically, there are causes and effects that occur over time.

NOTE

It's worth noting that Aristotle was considering a world in which stories were occasionally read, but more often orally narrated.

Freytag Definition
We can also consider the analysis of Gustav Freytag*, the German novelist, dramatist, and critic who invented a familiar diagram commonly called the Freytag Triangle (or Curve or Arc or Pyramid). This 19th century gentleman, apparently dissatisfied with Aristotle's holistic approach, sliced the classic plot into three primary servings. His rework of Aristotle's definition pointed to the increase, culmination, and decrease of the plot. Plot is expressed as a function of time along an horizontal axis. The density of plot, or the interest that the reader has is expressed along a vertical axis. This "thickening" of the plot is a reader's (and author's) concentration on a problem that is being solved. Perhaps feeling some pressure from the abstraction of Aristotle's definition, and living in a time when narrative was beginning to change, Freytag broke the structure of narrative into three primary movements.

Figure 1.1 Feytag's Triangle.

NOTE

Freytag (1816--1895) wrote a book called Technique of Drama which was published in 1863. He outlines his famous triangle there and presents the different angles of narrative with it. In his exposition he uses the actions of the main character to determine the rise or fall of the plot.

The "Peripeteia" is the problem and the "Denouement" is the process of solving that problem. This implies that every narrative will have (in addition to Aristotle's beginning, middle, and end), a series of time-driven events that hit a "peak" at which the complexity of the plot is a maximum along a continuum of time.

The Freytag Triangle makes some sense because it can represent very complicated narrative arcs. One of the defining characteristics of a novel is that it contains multiple plots. For example, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamozov contains at the very least three simultaneous plots, and each of these contain subplots that have their own pyramid structures, making Freytag's Triangle into something that can be continually subdivided:

Figure 1.2 Feytag's Triangle - subdivided.

But this basic diagram of the Freytag Triangle hasn't been emblematic of all narrative since Elizabethan times. The diagram is great for linear narrative or narrative that is interested in presenting a problem and then solving it. Edgar Allan Poe, however, as one inventor of the Mystery Genre, wasn't as interested in presenting the problems as presenting the solutions to them. Poe simply lopped off the "Desis" and the most revealing portion of the "Peripeteia," allowing the gradual solution of the problem to serve as the story itself. He was interested in what cause produced which effect. If the effect is the characters looking for clues to the crime, then the crime was generally committed early in the story. This isn't true of his work universally, but it does help to see into the heart of narrative literature structure as it's been evolving over the centuries: Readers tend toward a process of investigation.

Poe wanted to bring his readers closer to the story. To do this Poe turned the reader into an investigator. This brings us one step closer to interactivity.

Figure 1.3 Feytag's Triangle - no desis.

The Crisis, or Problem, of Narrative
For an author, the plot determines the actions that appear in a linear narrative. The plot doesn't exist if there is no time in the story (a series of actions can't exist if there is no time, so the plot couldn't either). Time determines speed, pacing, suspense, and movement. Plot is there for the what and how. Time is there for the when. But it's the coordination of these two that make an interesting story.

The problem, or "conflict" of a story is the heart of the dramatic arc. The nature of the problem, when it occurs in the story, and how it is solved are the things that determine the quality and quantity of a narrative. The problems or "conflicts" most authors chose tend to be something universal because it becomes a story that appeals to a larger population. It also becomes a story that addresses important issues because these are problems that humans have been struggling with throughout history. Fear, Struggle, Love, Desire, and Society are all issues that are both universal and personal and it's the specific relationship of the personal to the universal that makes them so poignant for a reader.

The "problems" and their solutions are told from the perspective of a narrator. This is the basic approach of story. The specifics of the problem and the perspective can determine the story's success. Regardless of the choice of the story material, stories are generally structured as Freytag and Aristotle point out because this is how writers have traditionally been able to captivate their readers. This is because they are writers. Ironically, the writers are mimicking the orators. But it works. This is how Shakespeare is able to turn the description of love into a feeling of love, through a familiar process of oration. Its one thing to read about the love of Romeo and Juliet. It's a different thing to feel it on a personal level.

Or maybe not. But there is something going on inside of our skulls when we read this. There is a symbology and imagery that we, the listeners, generate. This symbolism and imagery creates feeling from the linear process of reading and listening.

Writing and reading is a very detailed relationship of symbology, even a layering of symbols. In this example, the symbology practically flies in your face. Love has wings, it has flown into a dark place where it may be killed, and, as an overall metaphor for the story, this symbol is how Romeo and Juliet first confirm their love for one another. The symbols and the relationships of the symbols are the very heart of the writing. The symbology that is used represents the actual problem, or crisis, of the story. The writing is often, as is the case with Shakespeare and hundreds of other authors, a symbology of symbols. Thomas Pynchon, for example, uses the arc of the story to represent the arc of missiles that are discussed in Gravity's Rainbow. In The Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges uses the image of an infinite library to describe a story he tells about the same. The symbols are a layering process. The author relies on this foundation of simplest symbols--letters--to then build more symbols through words, phrases, paragraphs, and chapters, and introduces a layer of context to that symbology, and, finally (as with epiphany, foreshadowing, and foreshortening) provides a particular perspective on a particular plot.

And so a narrative is built, symbol by symbol, brick by brick.

1.3.2: Reading, Writing, and the Blurry Lines in Between
Writing is an interface between the medium and the message, and between the author and the reader. Humans are adept at this basic process of turning symbols into meaning. Text is a very old interface. Therefore authors and illustrators bend it to new uses whenever the opportunity is available. Software designers, also, have relied heavily on this in their work.

Software development is similar to writing. Its a generation and presentation of symbols for the sake of communicating a more complicated series of relationships. A programmer writes lines of code, in a language, "authoring" a particular executable.

Simply put, running an application is an interactive form of reading.

When reading a book or even a sentence, there is a beginning step. A book and a sentence both have a beginning that is formally denoted. There is a middle and, hopefully, there is a solution to a problem that is posed. The reader is recognizing symbols and making associations. The reader controls the pacing, the level of participation, and the dwell-time (that is, how long they spend with the text they are reading). But the part that interests the reader are the symbols and the solution of the problem-set. Consider the desktop metaphor. The symbols of the desktop represent relationships between other things. These relationships inform the user of the software's function and their capabilities as a user.

Or consider Microsoft Excel. Launching an application follows the same steps as reading: a beginning step is followed by the middle, which offers a solution and then the process is closed. In formal programming terms these are referred to as ("init"), ("run"), and ("quit"). In Java, this is formalized literally as a part of the language, in, for example, the "applet" structure. The user of the program, however, is recognizing symbols for the sake of solving a problem. The user determines the pacing, the level of participation, and the "dwell-time" or length of time he spends using the application. In the end, he or she is most interested in the solution of the problem or set of problems. A user, after launching an application, ends up participating in a form of reading.

It's no real stretch to say that running an application--specifically applications that include an interface of symbology, such as a GUI (Graphical User Interface)--is a form of reading. With that idea in mind, we will, in this book, refer to all video game, web, and computer users, in general, as "readers."

An interface designer or a programmer may be considered a writer. Interface design relies on symbology, signs, metaphors, and codes. These are the same tools that a writer uses. This is certainly the verb that is used in some software development circles: "writing code" is a term commonly used. The product of their effort is written lines of text, and the person at the other end of the line is a reader. Steven Johnson*, in his book Interface Culture rightly points out that the interface sits between the medium and the message. This is as true with a book as it is with a software application.

NOTE

Mr. Johnson is right to point this out, just as Brenda Laurel is right to point out that the interface is what sits between the user and the computer. Any interface worth its function is able to serve multiple simultaneous uses.

What is more, is that the reader--or user--acts as a kind of secondary writer while they are participating in this form of interactive reading. The reader, in the case of applications that require input (such as Excel), is also adding information and meaning. Subsequently they become a writer as well. The roles of the reader and writer get blurry because both roles (reader and writer) are adding information and meaning to a dataset.

This blurring of roles is one of the inherent characteristics of interactive narrative. This is also what makes it difficult for us to understand.

But, there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of "plot" in Microsoft's Excel. It's staid, boring, and mathematical. It's missing soul and passion compared to a work by Dostoyevsky or Poe. The interactivity has little soul or meaning to the process of running an application and so this notion of "reading" Microsoft Excel or "writing" to the spreadsheet is an anemic form of creativity.

Is plot what's missing? We want, when we read, some form of story, or plot. This makes the material being read relevant to our lives.

The Plot and the Use-Case Scenario
The word "plot" comes from the early days of French and means, as it's still used in English and French, "a portion of land." Why would the idea of a plot be used to represent a story? Is a story a kind of topology?

As we've pointed out, a plot is the author's planned organization of the events of the story. Plot, in determining What and How, is a topology, but it's a planned topology that has an implied opinion and perspective. A story's organization is essentially the author guiding the reader through the solution of the problem that the narrative presents.

Let's assume that there are three parts to any plot (as per Aristotle and Freytag, et al)

the "Desis" (beginning) or the introduction of the problem,

the "Peripeteia" (middle) or the problem itself and

the "Denouement" (end) or process of solving the problem.

Mixed in here we have all of the symbology that makes the plot interesting and allows the reader the ability to understand what's happening.

In software development and documentation there's a concept called "Use Case Scenarios." These charts are interesting because they diagram the function, flow, time, and interaction between a user (or reader) and a particular piece of software. An example of a simple use-case scenario might look like this:

Figure 1.4 Use Case Scenario example #1.

The equivalent to plot, in the interactive world of software design, is the use-case scenario.

Just because all use-case scenarios don't follow the Freytag or Aristotelian structure doesn't mean they aren't a story structure any more than ending a piece of music without a tonic note indicates that it's not music. Dessert doesn't have to be served for a meal to exist. Liturgies don't need to be played for someone to die, and a denouement doesn't have to exist for a story to be compelling.* Calling a use-case scenario a plot is an over-simplification, but the basic function of tying events together as a function of time is the same.

NOTE

Whether it qualifies as classic drama is not our concern. Whether it qualifies as potentially compelling narrative is.

A use-case scenario and a plot are similar, however. They're both read, both present a problem to be solved, both work by using symbologies that are used to generate larger meaning, and are both authored environments that are meant to be read by another party.

New art forms change old rules.

We're getting closer to understanding a kind of narrative that can be interactive. We at least have possibilities to consider. A use-case scenario, like a spreadsheet, still doesn't feel like a narrative because it lacks a sense of story that is being told by someone. We might be able to apply a use-case scenario and tease out a form of interactive plot, but this still doesn't mean that its worth reading as an engaging narrative.

Microsoft Excel doesn't "imitate life," as Aristotle explains a drama should. The imitation of life (and the interpretation of that imitation from a reader's perspective) is what differentiates a narrative from other forms of writing. This is why characters are such an important part of a story. Characters, be they protagonists, antagonists, or narrators, offer perspective, deliver opinion, provide interpretation, and generate a kind of emotional foundation the story is built upon. The plot alone, regardless of how carefully its diagrammed, gives little to the story as it's perceived by the reader. To return to a previous example, this is another method Shakespeare uses to turn the description of Juliet's love into a feeling of love: through the characters.

A character that is present in an environment, someone who cares about something, someone who has some form of opinion, perspective, or passion, is something that gives a narrative a life.

The Moral of the Story
We've been referring to the development of applications as writing and the use of applications as interactive reading. Narration can play a role in this. The key difference between narration and this software-related writing is the opinion implied in the story-the individual perspective. The human element of interpretation needs to be present for writing to become narration.

A piece of writing requires an opinion--call it perspective or call it point of view, before it becomes a narrative. If this isn't self-evident, read the output of an Excel spreadsheet. If you still see a narrative line (such as the birth and death of a company) then it's worth recognizing that it's the opinion of that data that instills a sense of narrative. If you still see a narrative you're working too much.

Narrative requires opinion. But we're not suggesting that the opinion has to be of the narrator or the reader. This is a big swerve from the course of traditional narrative because, traditionally, the narrative opinion is the opinion of the author. Sometimes, with narrative that contains interactivity, the interpretation is made collaboratively (or simultaneously) by both the author and the reader.

A moral that concludes a story is generally a summation of the opinion of the story; it's a distillation of the story's purpose. Without it the story wouldn't exist. The moral of our story here is that all narrative needs an opinion. This might also be called a perspective. Finally, this function of personal perspective and interpretation is more important to interactive narrative than is the curve that Gustav Freytag outlined. The Freytag diagram could contain the process of using Microsoft Excel. But we all know that this is not a narrative form. It's the human element of the perspective that's significant in stories, not the quantities or its charts.

Stories seem to be a way in which we report to one another on the events of life. We don't need machines to do that. We need individual opinion and perspective.

1.3.3: Tropes and Other Figures of Speech
"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance."

--Aristotle, Poetics

Metaphors are the foundation for visual design, narrative, interaction design, and fine art. A metaphor is a set of symbols that has enough redundant information that a new meaning emerges [1.4.4]. A metaphor is a pattern that provides a telescoped perspective on a different set of information.

Metaphors don't care whether you know the equation or not--they just give you the sum. Metaphors build on an assumed basis of knowledge and they also include a strong emotional punch being both more concrete and direct than maxims or aphorisms. What's more interesting is that they rely on both the author's and the reader's imaginations to fill in the gaps. Metaphor informs us on how to modulate our action by influencing our thinking and perception. Metaphor magnifies implications, sorts the clutter of imagery we carry around in our heads, and connects pieces that weren't. By placing a metaphor between two ideas the reader gets a whole new picture. A metaphor is another kind of lens. A metaphor adds information by comparison:

The best graphic design, story, or interaction design, contains a metaphor. The metaphor can be explicitly spelled out as "desktop" or "dungeon" or it might be something that is implied through the continued use and interaction with a system. The more it is implied the more it is abstracted. Abstraction almost always needs to be used for any metaphor to exist. Abstraction of metaphor, as long as it has some form of self-consistency, is fine, provided it serves the reader with increased amounts of information and redundancy. Just as a desk was considered an environment that facilitated information management, so it was used as the metaphor for the modern computer.

Over 10 years ago, Ted Nelson, one of the pioneers of hypertext design, pointed out some flaws with the desktop metaphor, saying,

"We are told that this is a "metaphor" for a "desktop." But I have never personally seen a desktop where pointing at a lower piece of paper makes it jump to the top, or where placing a sheet of paper on top of a file folder caused the folder to gobble it up; I do not believe such desks exist; and I do not think I would want one if it did."

His point is that the more a metaphor relies on an example the more it should follow that example's characteristics. Which is not entirely right because we, as humans, have the ability to separate and contextualize meaning from information. Nelson is pointing out that a high degree of consistency should be used in metaphor. Nelson is pointing out inconsistencies in the design metaphor of the desktop.

Finally, for our use here, a metaphor is a consistent relationship of symbols. As are fables and myths (the most complicated form of figures of speech and an advanced, narrative, form of metaphor). A myth generally has an invented, original metaphor. This opinion, this invention, is what makes it a myth.

Fables, allegories, and myths are another step up the ladder of implied meaning but they also differ from metaphors because the context isn't generally implied and, because of this, the real meaning of the narrative usually comes last. In some cases, in more complicated fables, the meaning and context don't become clear until the very last sentence. "And they lived happily ever after" is a classic.

So finally, it's all in your skull. And the author's. Somewhere between the two of you there's an interface of symbology, perspective, and perception of meaning. The interpretation of the meaning is what makes reading a story worth the effort.

Oddly, this is the case with paintings, narratives, and interface design.

1.3.4: The Relationship Between Imagery and Narrative
It's natural that interactive narrative include imagery. Narration is not limited to text. Narration originated in speech and has been neatly transferred to text, but text is a close cousin of image and an image can be a kind of "non-verbal text" (as it's called in many educational and academic circles). The relationship between text and image now ranges from complementary to competitive. Magazines, television, Internet, newspapers, dashboards, money, clocks, comics, packaging, advertising, clothing, maps, games, and even the email that we send frequently offer examples of text and image, set next to one another.

Using images and text together is as natural as combining words and music. But this wasn't the case back in the days of Queen Elizabeth or Gustav Freytag.

The frequency of marrying image and text has increased as publishing technologies have become more available. It seems to be something we've been waiting to get our hands on, as if there were a kind of barrier to image communication. Which there is, be it a photograph or an illustration. The barrier to make an image--the costs of many sorts--are higher than for writing. This is part of the reason why more people write and part of the reason (I'm guessing here) that imagery is used less than words in western society.

The computer, however, makes image production easier and simpler. Desktop publishing, digital photography, and photomanipulation are all powerful tools. Copying and pasting is sacred. The stuff gets easier by the day. The image is important in its own right. And the increased presence of imagery in our daily lives can make text that accompanies it more personal.

The coupling of imagery and text is one of the most trusted bullhorns of professional communicators. Marketers and advertisers want to speak as directly and as personally as possible to the reader. These are the fulcrums of influence.

The presence of imagery becomes the crowbar. Newspapers know that they're trying to transport you to the scene of a crime, so they show you an image of the location. Television, inherently image-based, uses text to represent more general and abstract ideas that are not image based.

These days, it means that images are used for general representation, text for specific.

There is something very immediate in the communicative power of the image (the phrase "worth a thousand words" comes to mind here). I have a friend named Sarah whose child, at the gurgling age of 13 months, is already communicating "Hungry," "Tired," "Sleep," "Finished," and "Thirsty" through hand-gestured American-style sign language. It's easy to understand how this happens since sign language is simpler and easier to learn than spoken language. But in this case no less communicative. Children can learn it faster than the phonetics, intonations, and syllabic subtleties of the spoken word. This mother and daughter have learned to communicate through the spoken word of imagery faster than if they had waited for speech to arrive.

The image is a powerful thing when it comes to communicating ideas and it's been coupled with text--even being able to replace text entirely--as a means of telling "stories.

1.3.5: The Role of Narrative Today
Narratives seem as common as the buildings we live in. No matter where we turn we see some form of narrative nearby. The meat and potatoes of any television diet is narrative. Newspapers contain substantial doses of narrative by relaying stories of what has happened in the last day somewhere else. Books, magazines, essays, pamphlets, and posters are generally representing a narrative. Movies certainly are narrative based and now, with the trailers and even the damn advertisements that often precede them we see even more narratives. When we meet people on the street we exchange narratives. When the telephone rings a narrative is often waiting for us on the other end.

Narrative serves to inform, educate, and entertain. It provides meaning, background, context, and incites interest in what's next. In the past two decades advertising (to pick an example), because it uses imagery, has become more aggressive, more interactive, more personal, and more metaphorical. It has also taken on increasingly narrative components. This is because advertising's goal has been to fold the viewer of the ad into the ad itself and by reflecting the desires of the viewer, the ad not only is able to tell him or her what to do, but when to do it. This is usually done in the form of a command coupled with an image. It's a gossip gone gospel.

Despite the watered-down content of most television programming today, narrative writing took like fire to the dead-wood forests of the broadcast world. Newscasters, sports announcers, and meteorologists all have their story to tell. Writers of sitcoms, episodic series, and advertising spots aggressively broadcast carefully designed non-interactive narratives. This is why the sitcom, series, and episode has come to be the primary modus operandi of broadcast/network television.*

NOTE

The liquid surface of the television is not one to be watched lightly. 483 scan lines flashing at roughly 32 frames per second isn't only hypnotic, but downright dangerous. It has a deep impact on the somatic and peripheral nervous systems (including, in some cases, dizziness, nausea, and coma).

Regardless how people are convinced to invest their time and attention in these forms of content, the role of plot and character are central to all of these, because, finally, what else are we really interested in?

1.4: Interaction
The most engaging interactive narrative relies upon flow; that is, uninterrupted participation in the unfolding action. Poor interaction design can interrupt flow and degrade the experience.

--Brenda Laurel

Interaction can be described as many things. Catchwords abound; "Engaging," "Immersive," "Participatory," "Responsive," and "Reactive."

Interactivity is a continuing increase in participation. It's a bidirectional communication conduit. It's a response to a response. It's "full-duplex." Interaction is a relationship. It's good sex. It's bad conversation. It's indeterminate behavior, and it's redundant result. It's many things, none of which can be done alone. Interaction is a process that dictates communication. It can also be a communication that dictates process. It provides options, necessitates a change in pace, changes you as you change it.

1.4.1: Interactivity Isn't a Feature of a Medium
This is why, like smoke and fire, communication is implied wherever there is interactivity.

Interaction operates on something. It is a form of dealing with pre-existing material. It's modification, not generation. This means the role of the author, or the person that is generating material, is both more difficult and more important than before digital interaction because increased attention has to be paid to what is being generated. But its also formalistic and, because it operates on something it is governed by rule sets.

Interactivity requires rule sets and constraints in order to function smoothly. Consider the rules of driving: traffic lights, street signs, sidewalks, dotted lines and speed limits. We interact, ultimately, with one another while driving and it's always a curious lesson to see who is flipping off whom for what reasons.*

NOTE

In the Middle East drivers generally honk to say "I am here" and in North America drivers generally honk to say "You shouldn't be there." These are unspoken rule sets of interaction just as shaking right or alternately kissing on the cheek are rule sets for introduction. They govern our interactions.

As Nathan Shedroff, design consultant, founder of Vivid Design Studios, and author of the recent publication Experience Design puts it,

"... interactivity (so far) can really only occur between two people, whether or not they use a device between them to aid in the experience. This, then, is the key: interaction is what people can (and get to) do. It's not about things moving on screen. It's not about a particular technology..."

With any good interaction the rulesets are iterative and often unconscious, providing a framework for minimizing damage and maximizing meaning. In the case of traffic lights and the interaction of driving it's getting from point A to point B. The stoplights don't tell you where to go, they just tell you when. The constraint of the grid of the street isn't there as a means of dictating generals, but specifics. If you want to get from the northwestern corner of town to the south-eastern it's perfectly possible, you just have to take lots of little 90-degree turns.

The fact that you can conduct general decisions within the framework of specific guidelines is a key trait in good interaction design. Interaction isn't a feature of a medium. It's a process of communication that, like any form of communication, follows a set of rules and guidelines.

1.4.2: Three Principles of Interaction
These may also be named "Interaction Design Constraints."

Interaction, like any other form of communication art, can be informed by a set of principles. These principles guide the quality and depth of the interaction. If the principles are considered in the process of development, the quality of the design can be improved.

Three principles of interaction are:

input / output

inside / outside

open / closed

The First Principle, the principle of Input / Output: Input should create output and the output should create input. It's the interaction cycle's ability to add information that defines the interaction's quality.

First, the response time between the input and the output should be quick enough for the user to have a clear sense of what change they are affecting on the system. In the early days of the web Stanford, Microsoft, and Xerox-PARC all spent many hours showing that a person won't wait more than 20 seconds for a page to download. After 20 seconds he or she clicks to another page or stops the download. This is because there was a need to know that some change was being affected to the system--within 20 seconds.

Second, the ability to control the input should be present. If you push a button next to a door you expect someone to answer. The input should facilitate more input. And the input should provide the user with a new capability. As this happens the line between stimulus and response thins. And as the line between stimulus and response thins, the depth of immersion increases. This is why you can't do something else if you're immersed. This is why, if it's really interactive, it's consuming.

The Second Principle, the principle of Inside / Outside: A Dialogue should be created between the Internal and External Worlds.

"Inside-outside" refers to the relationship of two sorts of interaction. I also call this the difference between "inside the skull" and "outside the skull" interactivity.

Inside-the-skull interactivity is a process of extending what the user already knows. It is the world of the reader's imagination. Take, for example, reading. It works with existing iconography (the alphabet) and metaphor (little red riding hood) and relies on the reader's interior understandings to build a visualized and emotional suspension of suspicion. "Inside-the-skull" is the world of meaning. As William James puts it, "Fantasy or Imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt." Inside-the-skull is the art, metaphor, and subtle cues that build things like dreams.

Outside-the-skull interactivity is based on what we are experiencing on an empirical, or experiential, level. The framerate of the video game, the haptic feedback of the joystick, the hues of the colors, or the 32-bit stereo depth are all elements of craft, not art. These timed and physical elements are the components of interactivity that many authors think are the only pieces worth paying attention to. This is a mistake because technology is not only an extension of ourselves, it is a reformation of the world around us. Authors of interactivity that are not paying attention to both the subject and the object of an interaction (the subjective and objective perspectives) are missing one of the key values of interactivity. This key value is the proportion of inside-the-skull and outside-the-skull information that makes the art of interactivity interesting.

The writers of the video game Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy have done a marvelous job of capitalizing on this by increasing their out-of-the-skull narration. They released movies. They increased their audience's understanding of the "backstory"--the implied narration of the video game--but also, by making Lara Croft a living character on the screen with a photorealistic environment (and, uh, topology) they increased the visual depth of the video game for game players.

In 1992 Paul Sermon, an installation artist who has worked at the edges of digital technology for more than a decade, was commissioned to produce a project he named "Telematic Dreaming" in which there were two rooms. Each room contained a bed, a camera that was above the bed, and a projector that was next to the camera. One museum visitor was in each room, lying on each bed. The result: Two people were seen lying next to each other, but, of course, only one was physically there. The other was a projected image from the other room.

The success of the project was based on its ability to work with both inside-the-skull and outside-the-skull interaction. If you were lying on the bed your external world was being immediately informed that there was an image of a person there next to you. The power of this project was that the sight of the projected image of the person overlapped with the intimate meaning of the bed (the internal, inside-the-skull, world).

The Third Principle, Open / Closed: The system should get better the more it's used.

Closed systems are boring. Open systems have something to give back. This can be tested by going outside and kicking two things. First kick a brick. As soon as you kick it, the brick will move. It's a response that is expected (and potentially painful). Next, go kick a person.

The reason why the interaction with the human is more intense than the interaction with the brick is because the interaction with the human gives something back that is unpredictable. The human is independent and unpredictable. The human is an open system. The brick just rolls over--it's a closed system.

The real indeterminacy is in how the person will respond, not whether they know they have been kicked. This introduces second-order effects because the person might just jump away or will try to kick you back.

As many software programmers have learned, indeterminacy is the characteristic of a system that gives the system its independence. If you have a system that has a kind of dynamic equilibrium it will be more robust, more capable of handling change, and, therefore, more interactive and participatory. These are characteristics of its independence.

Open systems are more complicated, less predictable, and more interesting than closed systems. Algorithmically generated geometry, such as 3d-flythrough landscapes, are a good example. Algorithmically generated personalities, such as high-end artificial intelligence systems, are an even better example. But what remains the most unpredictable, independent, and captivating of all interactions is other people. There is no predicting the behavior with certainty, but there is almost always a context that defines the response.

This is the reason why multiuser gaming environments (an example of Interactive Narrative) such as the movie A.I. online component, Cloudmakers [2.5.2], or multi-user games such as Ultima Online [3.5.5] have started to take such a share of the time we spend with interactive systems.

These principles of interaction, input / output, inside / outside, and open / closed, can be used to guide authors as they develop narratives that use interaction.

1.4.3: Four Steps of Interaction
Interaction is composed of steps that, like dance choreography, music notation, rhetoric, or any other form of communication art, can be outlined to better understand its basic process. These steps guide the form and shape of the interaction. If the steps are understood prior to designing an interactive system, the quality of the design can be increased. To clarify, these are steps, not (as in 1.4.2) principles. These are actions that a reader follows. These steps are intended to complement and work with the principles listed previously.

The principles are a means of guiding development. The steps are a means of evaluating the result of that development.

Interactivity is, like plot, based on fascination and captivation. It is how people get pulled into a process that continues to draw them deeper and deeper. Interaction can be broken down into four steps which, if the interaction design is done well, generates an increased interest in further interaction. The steps go like this:

Observation.

Exploration.

Modification.

Reciprocal Change.


Note how each of these steps drives the following.

Observation: The reader makes an assessment.

In any system, a simple level of familiarity is necessary to act. And, before any action takes place a kind of awareness of first-level options are necessary. First-level options might include the identification of things like buttons or levers or stairs. The reader might ask, Do I move or does the environment move around me? Do images or text represent some kind of code or set of codes? What is possible? In Myst, an interactive narrative published by Broderbund and authored by the Rand brothers, readers experience this very effect. They are dropped into an environment in which they need to use their skills of observation to determine their abilities in the environment.

Exploration: The reader does something.

After first level options are discovered, a second level is then moved to in which capabilities are explored. The reader finds out what she can and can't do and, effectively, stretches out her hand and finds that she can make a change. But it's a process of unintentional discovery, not conscious change.

Modification: The reader changes the system.

If a reader has made an assessment and done something based on that context, the reader will change the interactive system. The reader bridges context to decision. This is the leap from unintentional discovery to conscious change. At this point, the reader knows at least some of his or her abilities and uses them with intent to modify the system. The modification was created for the user by the author, and because it was allowed (and sufficiently motivated) the level of interaction in the system is increased.

Reciprocal Change: The system tries to change the reader.

And if its interactive and the reader is engaged, the system changes the reader's actions. The fact that there is reciprocal change is one of the defining steps of high-latency interaction. Without reciprocal change the system might as well be a brick or a doorbell rather than a person who has the ability to be somewhat indeterminate and interactive.

Repeat: The reader makes another assessment.

By this time the system is rolling and by going back to step 1, the process deepens and the interaction increases. If all goes well, the system then begins to improve for the person, the inside-the-skull and outside-the-skull worlds start to mix, and input creates more output.

Let's go back; Interactivity is an increase in a reader's participation. It's a bidirectional communication conduit. It's a response. Interaction is a relationship. It's mutually executed change. It's indeterminate behavior, and the redundant result. As far as narrative is concerned it amounts to providing the reader with the ability to alter specifics in the plot.

1.4.4: Designing Information for Interactivity Redundancy and Context - Cues of Interaction
You open your eyes and its completely black. One of those dark situations where you almost feel the blackness pressing on your head... completely numb and silent. Ahead of you there's a point of light. You have a piece of information because you have a piece of difference. Information is difference.

Next imagine that the piece of light--this small, yellow pinprick in the fabric of the darkness--begins to get taller. There's change, therefore more difference, therefore more information. The line breaks off another to its side, and another, spilling out so that it looks like this:

The width of the lines--there seems to be fat and narrow--and the spaces between the lines give us more information.

Two narrow, two fat. Space. Three narrow, two fat. Space. Then it repeats.

It might look familiar to you but I doubt that you can read this without a barcode scanner. Here's the same information in a different context (in this example, a different iconography or alphabet):

The repetition begins to generate a pattern. How we interpret pattern, however, is another issue. We can recognize this more clearly because we might read it as Greco-Roman if not English. It's the same information, but in a different, more familiar (and therefore more informative) format. The ability to predict the pattern is based first on its redundancy and second on its context. In this case its context seems to live in the Greco-Roman alphabet, so probably a romance language, but beyond that we don't have much more information (because these damn things are just floating in space).

A clue: 2 3 4 5 6 7

And the same pattern in its most easily recognized, and most redundant, state:

This would have been easier to recognize had the context of the Greco-Roman alphabet been transcribed in a little more familiar (and, in this case, more iconographic) method. Because the letters have a context they make it more iconographic. An icon is a contextualized image.

These precepts should be intuitive to any interface designer, storyteller, graphic designer, or interaction designer worth their picture. The precepts run like so:

Difference provides information

Repetition provides redundancy

Redundant information (a.k.a. "repetition with variation") provides context

Context allows prediction

Prediction allows participation

Participation is the cornerstone of interaction

I've found that people get very excited when they learn they can predict things because this allows them to participate. They suddenly have a grasp on time that they didn't before, the world seems more manageable, their role in it comprehensible.

But finally, these are all simply means of building metaphor's launch pad. A metaphor is a super-set of symbology. It's a meta-message that allows for very complicated forms of communication. We rely on it whenever we tell a story.

"Meta-messages," as Bateson calls them, come in all shapes and sizes. Their key characteristic, however, is to convey meaning that reaches beyond their information.* Adages, metaphors, and fables all do this and so they serve as strong guides for ways to develop interface, narrative, and to design elements of interactivity that help readers better understand what they are able to do, what the effects will be, and how they can do it.

NOTE

The adage "information is not knowledge" is one way of representing this idea. But in the world of interaction design this adage can be pushed further. Really, knowledge isn't worth much more than information if it doesn't allow for action. In the world of interaction design, action becomes the reason for information.

The key is relying on the inside-the-skull world of the reader.

1.4.5: Designing Time for Interactivity
The Spectra of Permanent and Temporary Times
Writing on cave walls, sending letters, scrawling in books, pecking at a keyboard, and scribbling up a diary are all methods we use to make time and the stories of our lives permanent on parchment, paper, and monitor. Writing is an effort to escape death, perhaps, or a recognition that time is the stuff of life, but despite writing's best efforts, it still generally lacks the luster and the shine of the moment it describes. It's still a description.

NOTE

"Epiphany" comes from the ancient Greek, eþ?fa??s or "epiphanos" which loosely means "to make manifest." Epiphany is a term that James Joyce coined to express the moment when the reader understands the entire arc of the story as a single thought. It's a telescoping of events into a single menu, of sorts. This is a foreshortening of the story and a compression of information that, according to Joyce, is an act of authorship.

There are strange moments in most reading when we realize that a chunk of time is missing, is repeated, or is looping back on itself. Literature has an arsenal of tools to facilitate this process. "Foreshadowing" and "Epiphany" are two of them.

The act of writing, narrative's corpus primus, has always been--at least on some level--an attempt to escape time.

We don't always notice it but some experiences seem more susceptible to time. Dreams quickly fade in the morning, we keep mementos as physical kinds of memory (hence the word), and inscriptions seem barely solid enough to weather the winds of change. So we make efforts to write in a way that is permanent. The tablet of Isis, a kind of topology of narrative built into stone has lasted for thousands of years. Pioneer 11, launched in 1973 continues to float through cold space as you read, and will probably continue to do so until its either read by extraterrestrial eyes or gets sucked into the nuclear center of some unmapped sun. A plaque on the space probe contains a compact narrative outlining our position in the solar system, who we are, and when Pioneer 11 was launched. The engravings and the stories it holds are intended to outlast the perspectives of the writers and the readers of the story.

Some narrative has only a temporary existence. The ancient Greeks used to have huge tracts of narrative they would repeat in a lyrical voice that would last for many night-times of around-the-fire singing with each epic continuing for many nights. In fact it's assumed that Homer never actually wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey but that he, like most schooled Greeks of the day, simply recited the epic from heart. Homer was just the guy that finally took the time to distill these cultural songs into a format that made it more durable to listeners from a culture of only a few degrees difference from our own. And he did it with a guitar.*

NOTE

Homer, really, didn't use a guitar. The guitar was invented some 1,500 years after Homer's day, following the Moorish invasions of Spain. The guitar is a child of the tar, which, depending on the number of strings and shape might (and sometimes does) be named tar, dotar, ektar, setar, etc. But Homer probably played the lyra or kithara.

Bob Dylan pulled the same stunt in covering the old blues tunes of the American South. The Irish are alleged to have kept their stories, called "finger alphabets," in the tips of their fingers. They memorized them by assigning different syllables or letters to different parts of their fingers.

These forms of narrative are as lost as the breath of the dead that sang them. Like the Oroborus that chews its own tail, these stories that used time were eaten by it, and their death forced a kind of change in the way the stories were told.

The Spectra of Slow and Fast Times
We don't always notice it, but time, like a flock of birds, can move in radical and unpredictable ways. Time flies quickly when you're having fun, it drags an hour before the workday ends, and sleep washes it all away.

Narrative has some sharply honed tools for articulating the elements of time that go slowly or move too quickly for us to consciously map. In most narratives, sleeping isn't generally detailed (though video artist Bill Viola has done a fine job of investigating this strange space of time), nor are the long moments of silent solitude in which our protagonist might be staring off, bored and thoughtless, at the toe of his shoe, waiting for the train that will carry him to the battlefield.

If you've ever noticed how your brain accelerates with a healthy shot of adrenaline it will make some sense as to why narrative increases detail at moments of greatest conflict. Events that require solutions warp the weft of time. Narrative moves slower or faster, depending on the kind of problem being addressed, and the speed at which time appears often has a relationship to the place we are when it happens.

Our subjective experience of time is often dilated at moments of intense choice. When we are on the stage in front of an audience involved in improvisation, performance, reading, or speaking, the "length" of time seems shortened and severely protracted. Suspense, for example, is just that--a suspension between two events that are further apart than you'd anticipated. Expectation and surprise, likewise, rely on the relationships of points in time. Suspense is just one of the aspects of time that is commonly used in narration.

But the use of time in narrative is a complicated thing and when we introduce information display--and specifically interactive information display--nonlinear choices need to be allowed within the context of the linear story.

Narrative has traditionally followed a linear path. Because narration comes from a verbal tradition, linguistic communication was necessarily bound in linear time, making linearity the strongest influence on how we've told stories.

This is changing because more and more stories are told visually. Consider Chris Ware's comics [2.5.5], a glance at a newspaper's photos, or the links that are highlighted on a web page. None of these forms of storytelling are necessarily linear, but they all tell, from a perspective, what happened.

The job of writing has been far easier for historic authors than it has for authors of science fiction or fiction authors like James Joyce who have made the brave choice to toggle back and forth between events at different points in the story. People like Joyce were pioneers in considering how to use time in other than linear fashion and might have unintentionally invented hypertext.

Because interaction includes decision-making, and because decision-making is not necessarily linear, we need to learn how to tell stories that facilitate this approach. Like Joyce, we need to invent new modes of thinking about time.

Time, as a tool that a writer uses, can move in strange ways. And digital media, with things like back buttons and the ability to accelerate, decelerate, link, and close, changes how time is used in narration.

Events in narrative generally follow what came before, and can often precede them that same way. If this seems confusing to you, its because emerging forms of literature are encouraging us to think differently about time.

I walk up to a door and push a button. A doorbell sounds inside. I push it again. The door opens and an old man answers the door.

Time does not need to be ordered in a sequential fashion. But that's our perception of it. I push the button, the bell rings, and someone answers the door. We're inclined to say the bell rang because I pushed the button, but we might never know whether I pushed the button because the bell rang. Maybe the bell rang because the man was about to come to the door. The cause doesn't need to precede the effect.

Time does not need to be universal, but we perceive it as such. Please imagine everything has already happened at once. In the preceding fable, an old man answered the door because I pushed the button. Maybe in another time he wasn't there at all. Or maybe he was and didn't feel like answering. Let's consider that there are at least three different tracks of time that exist, we just happen to be experiencing only one of them. Imagine all of the possible tracks of all the possible events running smoothly along simultaneously--you just happen to be riding on one of them.

Time does not need to be ordered in a linear fashion. Assuming the above is plausible, then why wouldn't it be possible for a single cause to split into several effects? Or, vice versa, we can mix in the first two examples with this forked approach in which the old man's cause might become my effect as well as the door's effect--both of which preceded the cause. In other words, maybe I rang the doorbell and someone answered--both because the bell rang. Multiple effects might have a single cause, or multiple causes might have a single effect.

Time might be considered as a volume. Imagine yourself as someone that had no sense of space as a surrounding entity. Your first perception of space is as a camera that's mounted on someone's shoulder. You would see space moving toward you as the person moved, then it might slow down and stop altogether, slide sideways, then suddenly move toward you again. It's possible that we understand time this way--in an apparently linear way, not because it is time's nature to behave this way, but because it is our nature to perceive it like that.

So much for that; there are a lot of different possibilities. Forms of interactivity need to take this into account at least as much as forms of narrative have over the past century. It's an issue of plot as much as an issue of use-case scenario. Our process of considering and deciding impact one another, as does reaction and action, within the framework of cause and effect. These are principles that inform any structure of interactivity, but because narrative and modern literature use time in ways that are not always as we perceive (or even understand) them, sequence and reaction can get unorthodox, let alone incomprehensible.

This is one of the primary arteries of interactivity: it's about understanding new methods of articulating time and human decisions within that framework and how we can relate to them both conceptually and spatially.

1.4.6: Designing Decisions for Interactivity
Let's return to our use-case scenario, still considering it as an interactive kind of plot. This is an expression of events that takes place over a period of time. That period of time is determined not as much by the author as it is by the reader. The reader carries his or her own sense of time into the interaction model. He or she controls the pacing and it's up to the interaction designer to see that they are still conducted to the appropriate step at the appropriate time: when they want.

Figure 1.5 Use Case Scenario example #2.

Notice that time is represented as a spatial arrangement of decisions and that it can be moved back and forth along the line of the main flow. This is surprisingly similar to the Freytag Triangle. But the author of this system has a great deal of influence over how the reader reacts to it.

The Tyranny of Interaction Design
There are differences of opinions among designers of interactive narrative. Some authors I've spoken with rant about the influence that a designer can have over the interaction of a game. In some cases readers have said that they are not playing a game, but rather jumping through the hoops that the game designers have put in their way. This "hoop jumping" is an example of the kind of design that is implicit in many interactive systems. The design of the interaction, and the influences the designer has, can become excessive and force readers to spend time doing things they may not otherwise choose.

Consider the video game that has levels and in order to get to the next level you have to perform some simple function. Or you have to repeat a single function within a prescribed error margin. This might be jumping Donkey Kong or Super Mario from a barrel into a hole, for example.

But it becomes frustrating if, after several tries, the goal hasn't been reached and the player is still there, sweating over the split second that will either allow them to go forward or put them back to where they were five minutes previous.

This is a form of tyranny and poor interaction design. It should be avoided when possible.

In most cases it should be considered that the goal of an interactive narrative is not to author the narrative, but to provide a context and an environment where the narrative can be discovered or built by the readers of that story. In this way designers and authors of interactive narrative are far more like architects than they are like writers. The author considers the interactions and movements of readers of the story and work to accommodate that reading that can happen from many different sides.

As Doug Church, one of the most respected game designers in the United States, puts it:

"Those of us doing 'immersive simulation' strive to make the game the player's, not the designer's. While we, as designers, are clearly creating the environment and rules, we hope to allow the player to act, plan, and decide. Working on a talk several years ago, I was talking to a co-worker (Marc LeBlanc) at Looking Glass about this and defined it as "getting the designer off of the stage, and pulling the player onto it". He described that as 'abdicating authorship', not feeling like we have to be 'in control' of everything. It is important to realize this doesn't mean 'abdicating responsibility,' for creating the rules and procedures of the world is an act of authorship that defines the space. But at the same time, a carefully authored environment can abdicate the specific control to the player, who can then make and fulfill their own plans and decisions. Done well, this leads to more investment from the player, as they realize that the world is about them, and that they matter."

1.4.7: The Emerging Forms of Interactivity in Communication
As we've seen, most entertainment and communication toolsets have adapted quite handily to the digital medium. Video, audio, photographs, text, and most communication technologies that originally relied on the airwaves of the analog have found comfortable homes in the wires of the digital.

Electronic technologies, and specifically the emergence of color television, have brought us closer and closer to the hallucinogens of imagination and storytelling. Television in particular has helped each viewer to participate in that comfortable space of collective awareness and distributed narrative that happens when millions of people are all seeing the same sound, watching the same image, and dreaming the same dream. It's a powerful thing. It was electronic technology, and the fact that this technology could now live with us in our homes, that first introduced us to a new narrative space of technologic interaction.

Before electronic media was distilled into its digital form, television channels and radio stations were some of our first opportunities to choose the evening's entertainment in our own living rooms. My first impressions of Robert Louis Stevenson were through a battery-powered radio in the northern wintertips of Maine. It was 1977 and anachronous, to be sure. We would huddle around the radio and listen to Treasure Island through the tinny, rattling speaker and a massive ethereal cornucopia of words and images would spill deserted beaches of white sand, huge clipper ships with full-thrown sails, sharpened sabres dripping with hot blood, and the occasional mocking parrot spreading its wings in the bright sun into our remote, wintertime cabin.

There was, strictly speaking, some choice: we could listen to Treasure Island or we could hear about the coming snowstorms.

Then, maybe six or seven years later I spent time watching how people watched television. Not having grown up with a television it has always had a severely anesthetic and hypnotic impact on me. Consequently, I've always been a keen observer of viewing behavior. After trying to watch Lee Majors defeat Sasquatch I would become infuriated with Billy Reidel as he would change the channel in the middle of the battle royale. For him, as someone that had grown up with television, the channel switching was part of the program experience. "Surfing" (as web usage has lately, and ineptly, been dubbed) seemed to involve a persistent entering and exiting of the material being watched. The dwell-time and form of attention for traditional network television was very different from radio partly because of the speed with which channels could be accessed.

The remote control had something to do with this. It was the convenience of pressing a single button as opposed to getting off the sofa and twiddling a dial that, at least partly, facilitated this change in concentration and attention. But other things facilitated interruption and mode-shifts. The volume could be turned down, the box was small and could be looked away from, the signal could get interrupted. But even more than the remote control, the presence of broadcast commercials (full-volume mini-narrative advertising interruptions of the larger narrative) at high-tension points in the story, caused us to restructure the way we considered stories and the attention span we brought to them.

The remote control and the ever-intruding advertisement facilitated a different kind of attention in viewers of television. It facilitated a nesting of narrative and a kind of attention that was very facile with mode-switches, context-swapping, and interruptability. This form of intertwined and entangled attention span of the television viewer fast revealed itself in the graphic design of television content. Camera cuts, character introduction, music pacing, color contrast, volume, and even story structures themselves were built to grapple with the viewer's need to flip over to something faster and more hypnotic. Watch any music video on VH1 or MTV; compare "Weakest Link" to poor old Vanna White; or watch a batch of contemporary Saturday morning cartoons and you'll soon see that the drum that these shows march to is increasing its beat.

The tradition of the interruption that binds together a larger narrative has been inherited by digital media. Early BBSs--the greenhouse nurseries of MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs--and electronic mail systems were built, from the ground up, to be a thing that you could enter, use, be interrupted in the middle of, use again, and leave. Unlike a radio-based narrative, the participation wasn't dictated by a set amount of time. It was left to you, as when reading a book, to decide how long and how much. This was already implicit in most electronic media--but digital media in particular held nonlinear participation, interruption and resumption as part of its assumed capabilities from the start.

This idea of interrupt-and-resume is deeply embedded in the command line. Konrad Zuse*, a German researcher and engineer, was 31 when he completed a prototypical programmable calculator he named Z1. It was automatic, it was mechanical, and it was digital. But it was the first binary machine based on Boolean algebra, which was an important step. The command-line input used something we might recognize as a keyboard and the output was displayed on electric lamps that hung overhead.

NOTE

Konrad Zuse also developed of a basic programming system known as "Plankalkül" with which he designed a chess playing program. A copy of his first digital binary computer is on display in the Museum für Verkehr und Technik in Berlin.

By this time IBM (then awkwardly named "Computing - Tabulating - Recording Company") had manufactured almost 1,500 punch card machines. Seeing what Zuse had done, they were quick to adopt this interface innovation. By 1940 Bell labs had teletypes running with multiple, remote input keyboards chained to a single machine. Only one could be used at a time and when it was the output was displayed at the same location. Only nine months later at a mathematics conference a teletype keyboard in Hanover, New Hampshire was connected to that same machine in New York. Conference goers were able to use the machines remotely.

These innovations in interaction happened because the computer, unlike the television, is always waiting for you to tell it what to do. Its time is determined by your presence (at least for now).

The interactive capabilities of the command line is massive because it was developed as a means of providing users with remote-controlled actions such as "Run," "Print," and "Copy." The command line is far from dead and its implications are still being explored today. Mode-switching is implied with a command line. At a primitive level, the computer presented the idea of switching channels of concentration--of switching modes--with the command line. But there were other ideas in there as well.

The integration of the graphical frontend with the computational backend has been a recent development in interactivity that's introduced a realm of possibilities that we see in contemporary interfaces such as the Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Xerox-PARC and several other research institutes were working on a graphical pointing system during the 1980s and the invention caught on as soon as the cognitive leap from "Data" to "Image" was made. The idea of graphical computing didn't initially include a mouse, but was later added because the authors sensed a need for a new way to interact with the space other than keyboard (which hardly considers space at all). It wasn't until Apple integrated this new interface convention--this hardware based form of interaction named The Mouse--that it really discovered any commercial success. But the leap from command line to image is not a difficult jump for us to make as we look back, but certainly something that was a little hard to see if you were there as it was happening.

Command lines are fascinating because, like tropes, they require cognitive participation. The graphical interface is probably an improvement to human-computer interaction because we don't need to remember as much to get the same task done, but I wonder if this shift from command-line to graphical-user interface is a bit like the shift from radio to television. The radio was a trickle of static interspersed with words. The task of listening to the radio was more focused, demanded more of the listener, and its smaller flow of information forced listeners to pay more attention over a longer time. It was an inside-the-skull interaction mode. The command line is like this. There are always help systems to remind you of what's there, but you only begin to work with those systems of interaction once you've remembered them. And the act of remembering can be difficult.

The graphical user interface, or GUI, came along and we could see where on the screen a particular thing--be it an action or an object, a verb or a noun--lived. When using a GUI, you might remember that, in the menu at the top of the screen, one slot over and two slots down is the copy command. Or, as your command-line capabilities increased, you might remember that a combination of two buttons is the copy command. The web, the graphical version of the Internet, simply took this basic idea and extended the metaphor out of the command of the individual computer to the command of multiple computers.

Web publishing and chat rooms have largely defined our understanding of interactivity. Chronologically and commercially the Internet followed the Internet-prototypes known as CD-ROMs. And CD-ROMs were the commercial leveraging of data storage devices such as the hard-drive or floppy disk. But the transition from data storage to CD-ROM to Internet has been one that has allowed access to more data in a faster and more convenient way. The curve is simple, really--it's entirely quantitative at this point. And, as I sit at my desk and wait for data to arrive onscreen, it's easy to see that this trend will continue. Now that the Internet has gone through the same suspiciously similar curve of high-acceleration accompanied by tremendous collapse that the CD-ROM publishing industry went through in the early '90s we may begin to understand that this is part of the cycle of these technologies. We can anticipate mobile technologies and, later, ubiquitous computing, to follow the same path.

Enhanced Television, too, has followed this trend of relying on data storage to increase its commercial heft. The trend, again, will be predictable in the coming decade: more is better. It's the whole idea behind video on demand. Store more data so customers have more choices. The only real challenge most enhanced television manufacturers face is how to make that data accessible to the customer when they want it.

These trends of quantitative increase show us which features of interactivity are inherently digital. Issues of access, mass storage, and transport, are not the inherent issues of interaction. The interactive is not contained within the digital--it's the other way around. We're just learning how to make the digital medium more interactive.

But trying to provide access while viewers are switching modes, stopping, starting, speeding up, slowing down, leaving, entering, getting bored, excited, confused, and progressively poorer with each tap on the button; these are interaction design problems of a different sort that will continue to evolve far past the coming decade.

1.5: Interactive Narrative
There is nothing wrong with games which decide to place the designer center stage, and task the player with "discovering" the will of the author. However, I believe that if we learn to effectively involve the player we can create more satisfying experiences, unlike anything offered by other media. A work in which the player must figure out how to turn the prewritten pages can be fun, but one which the player writes the pages seems far more likely to be transformative.

--Doug Church

1.5.1: The Generation of Additional Understanding
Interactive Narrative generates a set of multiple perspectives.

The episodic structure changed the face of narrative forever. In the 1970s and 1980s Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke would entertain us every Wednesday night at their appointed hour.

But the story was a capsule framed by some element of context that we, as viewers, already knew. We didn't have to re-learn every week that Ricky and Lucy lived in the same building as Fred and Ethel. It was an interface we were familiar with. But as television stories grew more complex that framework was extended and by the 1990s the emphasis on narrative in episodic structure was far different. Television shows like "The X-Files", "The Sopranos", or "Dark Angel", continually push the boundaries closer to being a movie interspersed with weeks rather than a television show interspersed with ads.

In the United States the advertising is even designed to match the show. The designers of the advertisements are aware of the preferences and interests of their viewers and regulate the content and pacing for that audience.

Episodic narrative is often thought of as a lower form of narrative because it doesn't develop story arc to the same depth or breadth that something with more space and time might.* The argument goes, "Tolstoy has more time with the reader than does Stan Lee, therefore the quality of the story is better."

NOTE

This author does not, by the way, endorse these views. Neither the quantity of authorship nor readership time determines the quality of the story.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to notice how many episodic stories were framed with some other larger context that helped to lend them a level of realism and solidity in the real world. The story of Spiderman, for example, originally appeared as an episodic installation in not only Marvel's comic books, but in newspapers and a full-length book of written, text-only narrative as well. These days, as a movie is being developed, video games are made available, and a host of other media have sprung from these humble episodic beginnings.

Episodic forms of narrative might be more powerful than originally thought. Episodic television changed narrative forever. By now we're accustomed to interruption in the tale. Perhaps, like a denouement, we're coming to expect it. This is interesting to consider in light of the rather abrupt endings that many video games chose to deliver. While I hesitate to mention it, I hope we don't begin to see commercial breaks happen at this point in the story.

1.5.2: Interactive Narrative Defined
An interactive narrative is a time-based representation of character and action in which a reader can affect, choose, or change the plot. The first, second, or third person characters may actually be the reader. Opinion and perspective are inherent. Image is not necessary, but likely.*

NOTE

Thanks to Brenda Laurel for her assistance with this definition.

Interactive narrative is, in many ways, about the process of narration and its implied perspectives, but as we noticed before, interactivity fractures the perspectives of the individual author, places new perspectives in the hands of the readers, and accommodates a relationship between reading and writing. In developing interactive narrative the plot has to accommodate a more flexible structure that allows for multiple perspectives into multiple viewpoints, each of which work together to assemble an overall and cohesive worldview, or opinion.

Interactive narratives will vary in shape, size, and fur color, but there are means that we can use to determine their quality and form. These may include:

Interactive narrative is a form of reading that contains representations of character and or opinion. This representation of character is generally something that follows a schedule of development that takes place over a period of time that can be determined either by the reader or author. In this way interactive narrative is very similar to traditional forms of narrative.

Because interactive narrative contains a character (generated by the author) and a reader it is an intersection of multiple perspectives. These perspectives might be the author and the reader, simultaneous readers, or simultaneous authors. In this way interactive narrative differs greatly from traditional narrative and it is in this space that we find the greatest potential for interactive depth and form.

Interactive narrative will generally follow our steps of interaction:

· Observe

· Explore

· Modify

· Change

Interactive narrative will generally follow our principles of interaction:

Inside / Outside

Input / Output

Closed / Open

Some forms of interactive narrative will more closely follow these criteria than others. The more of these criteria are followed, the higher the level of interaction and the deeper the degree of narrative.

Interactive plot structure is more of a system of connections than it is a curve or arc. What follows are three models that are intended to be general approaches. The visualization of plot structure can be more useful for interactive nonlinear narrative than for traditional linear narrative. Plot structures are, however, an analysis tool and don't have much to do with emotional punch or aesthetic interest.

1.5.3: Three Different Structures of Interactive Narrative
In some ways the plot structure of interactive narrative can be thought of as music notation. An author may write the basic structure, but it's the participation and interpretation of that structure that makes it come alive. Music scores give rough guidelines (Con Brio, Fortissimo, etc.), but are intended as a forum for active participation in which the control of the author is second to the participation of the musicians.*

NOTE

It is worth mentioning that the interaction that musicians share when producing their work is also very similar to the roles that readers share when participating in many forms of multi-user interactive narrative. A "Wizard" or "Host" conducts the orchestra.

Plot is a function of time. It is the plan of the action. The plot is the series of events. In interactive narrative plot continues to be a function of time, but here is its one main difference from traditional plot: the timing of the events in a plot are determined by both the author and reader. In many cases where the interaction is of a high quality, it is determined more by the reader than the author.

In most stories authors introduce skips, folds, or omissions in time. A phrase such as "The next day" might be used to point out that a night has passed and anything that has happened since the last activity of the story was uneventful. We're comfortable with these forms of compression and foreshortening in literature, but what is new for people in our era is the idea that this can be determined by the reader of the story.

Raph Koster, the lead designer of Ultima Online, the first pervasive multiplayer game that had a true graphical front-end claims that there are two primary forms of interactive narrative: Impositional and Expressive [3.5.5].

Though other people use different words to express it, this seems to be a common form of thinking among most developers of interactive narrative. The thinking runs like so:

An author or designer has some control over the story. The story, however, because its interactive, needs to provide control to the reader as well. A heavily designed story, such as one of the 1980's "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, conceived and invented by Ray Montgomery, were heavily impositional. They guided you with strict sets of individual rules that only allowed the reader a narrow margin of decisions. Another example is Liquid Stage [2.5.3] in which the viewer of the show has only particular moments of interaction available and the rest of the show is a dictate and sequential story.

Expressive, in contrast to this, relies less on the series of events and behaves more like architecture: The visitor is allowed to roam freely, explore, investigate, and make changes in the environment. The specifics of a narrative plot are far less defined and, as a result, the breadth of interaction is much wider. Examples of this generally show up in 3-dimensional interfaces and narratives such as Ultima Online.

The challenge, of course, is finding the appropriate balance between the two.

Plot structures for interactive narrative will continue to evolve and will most likely become increasingly simple and homogenized as history allows us to normalize our bellcurve of examples. However, now, at this early stage of the art, we will look at three different types of plot that represent both Impositional and Expressive plot structures. We will start with the most Impositional and move toward the most Expressive.

In the following diagrams the black line is the progression of events or time (as dictated by the reader). The red lines are the different points at which the story will end--generally this follows an event of interaction. The diamonds are interactive moments.

Figure 1.6 Nodal Plot Structures.

Nodal plots are a series of noninteractive events, interrupted by points of interactivity. This plot structure, which provides the most potential support for the classic dramatic arc, has been referred to as a "string of pearls." Games such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Deus Ex follow this pattern though fail to capitalize on its dramatic potential because the switch between modes of active and passive participation lack integration and smooth transition. Michael Bovee's "Liquid Stage" roughly matches this type of plot, deviating in the fact that his story has a very specific ending.

The benefits of this form of plot allow strong backstory, clear character development, and deep environment, but it subsequently runs the risk of limiting the breadth and form of the interaction. This is more "designer-focused" as Doug Church might put it. One solution to this problem is to make sure that the interactive components of the plot are there as a means of exploring elements of the main plot and, if possible, generating additional backstory.

Nodal plots have a single beginning and usually at least two endings. Its important to note that while the event of the ending will be the same it does not need to happen at the same time in the story. In some cases there is a goal at the end of the story. This is generally the case with games.

Again, take IonStorm's game DeusEx as an example. There are two possible endings, one of which is seldom seen by the reader. The most likely ending is that the character dies. This ending happens to everyone, but it happens at different times. The other ending most readers will never know. And, oddly enough, its in the interest of the authors that this conclusion remain unattainable.

Modulated plots are plots that still support the dramatic arc, this time to a lesser degree, but do not necessarily dictate the order of events that are being followed. Transitions may be made to an earlier point in the story and time can often be looped back on itself. This is the a challenging plot to develop because it represents a middle ground and compromise between two trends in design.

Figure 1.7 Modulated Plot Structures

Marc Lafia's "Memex Engine" (see 2.5.8) is a plot that allows a reader to follow different events in the narrative but which still maintains a dramatic arc: the diva is lost, a mystery is afoot, and the reader needs to face specific challenges to solve a specific riddle (this story is not played as a game, but it is interesting to note that as we move toward the more expressive forms of plot the gaming sensibilities emerge).

The interaction of a modulated structure is more plot-based than in a nodal structure. Modulated plots will, ideally, provide a reader with the option to bore straight through and avoid interaction, or to take a more leisurely route and increase the interaction and participation.

Open plots can resemble a roadmap. There are points of decision that then carry a reader along to another point of decision. Open plot structures are the most expressive for the reader, far less so for the author. Often the dramatic arc is completely abandoned for the interests of exploration, modification, and investment. This form of narrative has no specific starting point in the sense that there is an event that begins the story. The story is usually one that is based on the development of character (such as Ultima Online or Everquest) or the development of environment (such as the Sims or Age of Empires). There is, of course overlap and development of character and environment.

Figure 1.8 Open Plot Structures.

Let's return to considering an open plot structure as a series of intersections in a city. If you are driving, your individual decisions are what allow you to get where you are going. This process of getting there is what is valued in this plot structure. The journey is, itself, the goal and so it's up to the author to see that the ride is a smooth one for the reader. Because there are so many opportunities for interaction the frequency, scale, and form of interaction is usually found at its most developed here, making this form of narrative a complicated and expensive production process.

1.6: Summary
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

--Marshall McLuhan

Interactive narrative is an emerging art form that borrows from multiple disciplines. Most emerging art forms grow like this; they're fruity. Emerging art forms will often take methods and approaches that were developed by previous forms, copy them, alter them, and drop from the vine before taking the role of seeding a newer art form that follows.

The practice areas of experience, visual, and communication design are being integrated so that we understand what makes, finally, someone change television channels. It's a reflex to an altered state of attention span. It's a curiosity that is induced by a desire for a change for change's sake. Like the video game player's interest in seeing returns, any executive that's responsible for a firm that is doing this kind of development wants returns on the company's investment. The video game development world is ferociously competitive, the pace of work is crippling, and the demands on the software are unknown. Consequently, the resulting products are, like the fractured and harried world of the television commercial, wound up and dumbed down. But these harried developers stand on the shoulders of existing art forms to build new rules, new roles, and new ways of thinking.

1.6.1: The Crossed Lines of Design
The internal world of the reader and the external world of the viewer continue to weld themselves together, and we're still learning how to draw these two personalities closer. There continues to be a distance between the movie-goer and the programmer, between the remote and the joystick. The executives of firms involved in some form of digital design recognize, at least on an intuitive level, that these media share narrative as a common thread and this recognition pushes those firms to innovate. Some of them begin prodding the soft body of the public for that nerve cluster that, when pinched, induces relaxation, catalepsy, hallucination, and a greasing of the desire to buy (to make little mention of a dilation of the wallet).

The external world of entertainment and video is slowly splicing itself onto the internal world of coding. It's is at this splice point that interactive narrative is coalescing into its contemporary form. The arc of development in digital design tends toward increased interaction, increased stimulus, increased response, faster feedback, richer narrative, deeper throughput, and far-flung networks that follow us, sheep-like, wherever we may go. It's a trend that is easy to anticipate if we look back over the last 30 years.

As any arc, the change in the rate of change is the characteristic to watch. Because at a certain point it's no longer us that is driving the change, but, instead, the relationship changes at the epicenter of the arc, and suddenly the roles are reversed; the change is driving us. I'm not referring to an issue of control that developers, readers, viewers and users of digital media have, but rather an issue of their investment of attention.

What is it about interaction that makes it so addictive? What was it about the high-latency interactivity--and specifically digital interactivity--that causes, for example, gaming trends to give so many parents so many wrinkles in so little time?

It is the change in the rate of change. This is the source of the addiction of video games (to speak both culturally and individually) and the interest of attention. Narrative will play an important role in the Internet's development in the coming years. This is important to consider in light of the fact that the two commodities of the Internet are attention and reputation.

Play a good video game for a few minutes and you'll experience this rate-of-change arc on a tiny, momentary level; after you've contributed a small amount of yourself to something that is really interactive, after you've spent just a few minutes with your head in that box, you find you've lost more time than you had intended. Your initial investment saw returns, but not of the sort you had imagined. The change of your attention span is the intoxicant--far more than the content or design of the product.

Some neighbors of mine recently bought a computer and they bought with it Microsoft's Age of Empires. The husband spent several days playing it while the wife complained that he was spending too much time killing Carthaginians and building Wonders. For whatever reason he stopped long enough to give her a chance to play and, as you can imagine, the rest of the story is that two weeks later, they got rid of both the video game and the computer.

In short, it has to do with the return on investment of attention that the person at the end of the line feels. And that investment is entirely based on the interaction of the material they're engaged with, what the narrative is, and how it appeals to their individual interests.

"How Could the Butler Have Done It?"
There's something else, however, that's worth noticing. Interactivity allows a reader to bring his own sense of time to what he is reading. This is the nature of interaction. This is also a progression in literature that has been happening for ages--probably before Poe made such bold contributions to the genres of mystery and the short story. As with mystery novels, the reader of an interactive narrative takes on a role that is more closely aligned with that of an investigator, or perhaps of someone engaged in a conversation. In many computer games the reader takes on a role of debugging, as it were, the underlying structure of the story. The reader becomes the investigator, vested with that perspective, making efforts, meanwhile, to understand the perspective of the author. It's a process of reverse engineering. But different people will solve the same problem at different speeds so when problem-solving accompanies narrative, the amount of time the narrative takes to read changes.

This consideration is a key factor in narrative and game design because it lies at the intersection of intention and interpretation.

NOTE

In multiprocessing, there is one CPU acting as a executor of sequential machine code instructions. Forking allows for several threads of nonlinear narrative to be active within the context of the GUI and its background processes, but then the CPU--as reader--only needs to pay attention to one thread/perspective at a time. Yet another indicator of what might be coming in the futures of narrative.

The similarities between this form of reading and the basic form of algorithmic logic--the semantic, and tautological properties of computer programs--are suspiciously similar.* Both are a sequential interpretation of a series of events that were already there. This is the point where a use-case scenario and a plot converge.

Consequently we can think of writing a narrative as interface design. It's a telescoping and a presentation of a series of events. Some events are important, some not. Some events are engaging, some not. The author's job is to decide which are which. And how to make this clear.

Consider Victor Marie Hugo's work about Notre Dame and the hunchback. Hugo had to choose a perspective to tell the story from. However, that story could have also been told from the single perspective of one of the characters, resting only in the first person, and been, under the guiding hand of a skilled author, an interesting perspective on the same story. Consider the different perspectives of Esmeralda, Frollo, Quasimodo, and Phoebus. Hugo combines them, in many ways, and in doing so has chosen a single path through a complicated field of interwoven possibilities and overlapping worldviews.

Figure 1.9

From this perspective of authorship, narrative's shift to interaction seems natural. Any traditional, noninteractive story might be thought of as a piece of a larger interactive narrative. The story that is told is one of a number of possible ways to interpret and present the data of that world-view. The role of the author, in traditional narrative, is to generate both the world-view and the particular perspective that looks into it. They have to pick the path through a garden of infinitely forking paths to discover which path is the most beautiful. The role of the painter is the same. The role of the interface designer as well.

The author of interactive narrative has to present all the forking paths by telescoping information and offering perspective. So the art of interactive narrative lies in the author's ability to simultaneously imagine (and illustrate) each of these views and make all of them accessible for the reader. It's a difficult task of schizophrenic design.

Interactive narrative's potential future and its current success lies exactly here: It's the point at which these different forms of design--writing, imagery, and interface--cross and spark a new kind of attention in an emerging art form.

©New Riders, 2002. All rights reserved.

"Mark Stephen Meadows has fine-tuned the art of the interactive narrative. Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative gives an introspective look at the roles of readers and authors as they become one through the magic of media and technology.
Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative covers the essentials of interactive storytelling and its application to various types of media. It has the layout of a hyper-visual science text book, made for the twenty-first century reader. This book is intended for all areas of specialization in computer art, and applies to anyone who is willing to explore the foundations of storytelling.
As a computer artist, I found this to be an excellent resource for my work. I'm sure that most writers would agree. Future storytellers of the world, this book should be in your resource library."

--Jake Richtsmeier, Macintosh User Group of Oneonta, NY (MUG ONE)

New Riders Web Site, January, 2003

Interactive narrative is the cornerstone for many forms of digital media: web sites, interface design, gaming environments, and even artificial intelligence. In Pause & Effect, Mark Stephen Meadows examines the intersection of storytelling, visual art, and interactivity. He takes the key principles from these areas and applies them to the design, architecture, and development of successful interactive narrative. This provocative book will appeal to designers with its edgy aesthetic and artistic sensibility. Striking graphic and typographic imagery complement unique design features that encourage interactivity through varying levels of information, different navigational possibilities, and even flip-book animations.