Interactive Narratives

Narratives can be told in many different ways. There are different medium that can be used to tell a story and bring life to a certain topic. In this technological day and age Interactive Narratives seem to be the best way to depict these messages to the masses. They are interesting, creative, and allow the viewer to be involved with the media. If the viewer is interested and has fun, chances are they will want to visit the site again and tell others about it, as well.

One piece I reviewed from the bornmagazine website was “Like Wings Abandoned from Future Score.” This narrative provided a perfect cove for the video that narrated the poem by Paul Gibbons. The video itself was very interesting and the cinematography was good and the speed of cuts worked well with the message of the piece. I would consider this interactive narrative a success because the video worked hand in hand with site. The technologies used in the site were simple yet got the point across. The site related directly to the video shown because it discusses icicles, so the site has dripping icicles as navigation devices. By relating the media to the interactive narrative there is a link that entices the viewer the continue on with their viewing. I believe I will be able to relate the media of my site to the overall design of my site to make it visually interesting to the viewer. The artistic merit and techniques were not too complex. Black and white was used and a clearly readable font. These are all techniques that I find very workable and use myself. This site is not very complex and uses very little technology. There are not rollovers and navigation is done through clickable water droplets with words to allow easy navigation. I liked the functionality of this site and how the use of a simple idea taken from the media could relate so perfectly.

From the interactivenarratives site I found much more complex interactive narratives that required much more skill and advanced technological knowledge to create. Instead of having the media form do most of the narrating, the complexity of website provided a lot of the storytelling. One particular site that did this was “The Dragon Children.” While very interested and clearly out of my skill range I did not love what the site was doing as an interactive narrative. Navigating was done with a lot of flash work that was slightly confusing and hard to work with. While very modern and fresh, I found it to be a little too much for the topic. The use of bright colors and animation was a fun artistic technique but there was so much going on it was hard to focus on the message of the actual media. I found myself playing around more with the website then actually caring what the website was trying to get across. Blame my short attention span when it comes to bright moving colors. The images used are spectacular however, very crisp and visually stimulating. This narrative would be nothing without them.

Overall I hope to use techniques from both interactive narratives when designing my own. I want to keep things simple yet let the viewer have fun navigating through my site. It is very important to me, however, that the overall message of my narrative does not get lost.