http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax
©2007 by Z. Tomaszewski.
Computers have an incredible potential to change our experience of narrative. Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray are two of the earliest authors explore this potential in detail, describing their visions of how computers and narrative might intersect. Their work has had a significant impact on later interactive narrative work.
Brenda Laurel (1991) suggests using narrative as a model for designing human-computer interaction (HCI). She characterizes normal software design as providing an interface metaphor to an application's underlying functionality. However, such interface metaphors often fall short in that they provide a quick initial view of the application that can then fail to explain or accurately characterize all of the application's functionality.
Laurel instead argues that designers should conceptualize applications as providing a virtual theater-like space. This space is occupied by both agents of the application and the manipulatable objects of the application. These objects should afford direct manipulation by the user. That is, an object's representation within the application should be continuously available. It should support physical actions instead of requiring an arcane command syntax, and those actions should be reversible. Finally, the object should provide immediate feedback about its current state. Application designers can then focus on crafting the "action" that occurs in this virtual application space, with special consideration for the will of the user as an actor.
While this narrative-based approach may not have gained much sway in the broader HCI field, Laurel's described architecture is extremely relevant to an interactive narrative application that actually intends to provide a narrative experience to an interacting user.
One of the most useful insights that I took from Laurel is abandoning the idea of an audience or a passive user. Instead, in an interactive narrative, the audience is up on the stage, interacting with the actors. Furthermore, the audience is not doing this in their street-clothes (figuratively speaking); instead, they are seeking to immerse themselves the story, to garb themselves as characters in that story.
If the players become actors, then we must also abandon the idea of providing a pre-constructed story for them to interact with. Instead, the author provides a setting, rules of interaction, and creative agent-actors around the player-actor, and then starts the action. Thus, the player-as-actor becomes as instrumental in constructing the finished story as any other agent controlled by the system. This means we need to focus on computational approaches to generating the narrative at run-time. Also, since the player-as-actor is unlikely to be skilled at acting, the other agent-actors will need to compensate, much as improv actors might act around an audience member called up to participate in their skit. The pioneers in interactive drama--Joseph Bates (1992) and the Oz Project--began exactly this way with live performance experiments.
Laurel goes on to describe the structure of narrative, building upon Aristotle's Poetics, which I will explore further in Chapter II. She also explores the nature of interactivity, describing it as a continuum along three axes: frequency (how often does the player get to interact?), range (how many choices are available?), and significance (do the player's choices matter? Do they really affect the outcome?). In short, as she characterizes it later, the goal of true interactivity is to make the player feel like she is an active participant when using the system.
Six years later, Janet Murray (1997) explored the effect of interactivity and computation on narrative experience. Murray's focus is less on design and more on the resulting user experience. Her central question is whether technology will extend and heighten narrative--as Star Trek's imaginary holodeck extends the literary worlds of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, and Hamlet--or whether it will produce an addictive mind-numbing virtual reality--as portrayed by such as authors as Plato, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson.
Murray argues that digital environments possess four essential properties. They are procedural in that they are generated and governed by algorithms and rules. They are participatory in that they are intended for a human interactor. They are spatial both in that they provide a virtual space to explore and that they are usually presented using representations of at least two dimensions. Finally, they are encyclopedic in that they possess great capacity for information, especially when the digital environment supports expansion by users.
Murray then explores some of the new narrative experiences made possible by technology so far. Stories are more likely to be multiform. That is, if the narrative changes due to the user's participation, there is not only one authoritative version of a tale anymore. This can be foreign to us nowadays, but multiform stories are reminiscent of the story variations of the oral bardic tradition. Technology has allowed for more immersive narrative experience, from the simply visual IMAX and 3D movies to ride-the-movies amusement rides in which the audience physically explores a familiar narrative world in a different context. Online, fans participate in stories through the extra encyclopedic information available through some TV show websites. The potential is there for fan participation in online narrative games related to a running TV show to then indirectly affect the plot of show. Computer games are often narrative-based, although they are still exploring and establishing their own unique media conventions. Work continues on believable autonomous characters and conversational agents such as Eliza.
Informed by some of these different developments, Murray describes three aesthetics of an interactive narrative medium. The first is immersion, which is the feeling of being transported to an elaborately simulated place and surrounded by another reality. This feeling of presence in the world of the narrative dominates our attention such that we forget our mundane reality for a while. Agency is the ability to affect real change in the narrative. This goes beyond mere interactivity, such as typing a command or twitching a joystick. The last aesthetic is transformation, both of the system and of the player. The underlying narrative may change in response to the user. Multiple viewpoints may be possible of the same underlying events, changing the experience of those events. Users may assume different roles within the narrative. The resulting experience may have a significant effect on the player.
Together, Laurel and Murray provide a vision of the positive potential that both technology and interactivity can have on narrative. In essence, through the active participation of the end user, it is possible to fundamentally change the experience of narrative. Although interactive and multiform narratives have existed in the past, new technologies can provide new forms of narrative experience as artifacts to be experienced separately from their original human author.
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Argax Project : Dissertation :
A Rough Draft Node http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax |
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Last Edited: 10 Apr 2011 ©2007 by Z. Tomaszewski. |