Author: Christy

A collection of 22 articles, brought out by sagas writing interactive fiction and sagasnet, looks like an excellent resource for researchers, practitioners, lecturers and commissioners of interactive content. Developing Interactive Narrative Content covers a range of arts types & concerns.

[T]he reader explores the expanding field of interactive media itself by covering iTV, interactive film, games, mobile applications, installations, etc. and by gathering interactive theory essays, descriptions of experimental applications, articles on legal issues or teaching methods for interactive film.

Contents include:

# Ernest Adams: Design Considerations for Interactive Storytellers

# Richard Adams: Behaviour, Intelligence and Invisibility and its Effect on Narrative

# Frank Boyd: The Perfect Pitch

# Matt Costello: The Big Question& about all those horrible, terrible videogames

# Noah Falstein: Natural Funativity

# Steve Dixon, Magnus Helander and Lars Erik Holmquist: Objective Memory: An Experiment in Tangible Narrative

# Christopher Hales: Interactive Filmmaking: An Educational Experience

# Michael Joyce: Interactive Planes: Toward Post-Hypertextual New Media

# Sibylle Kurz: The Art of Pitching

# Craig A. Lindley: Story and Narrative Structures in Computer Games

# Michael Nitsche: Film Live: An Excursion into Machinima

# Teijo Pellinen: Akvaario: you are not alone at night

# Bas Raijmakers and Yanna Vogiazou: CitiTag: Designing for the Emergence of Spontaneous Social Play in a Mixed Reality Game

# Greg Roach: Granularity, Verbs and Media Types in Interactive Narratives and Narrative Games

# Volker Reimann: Authoring Mobile Mixed Reality Applications

# Vincent Scheurer: Adapting Existing Works for Use in Games

# Jochen Schmidt: Behind the Scenes Before the Screens Interactive Audience Participation in Digital Cinemas

# Tom Șderlund: Proximity Gaming РNew Forms of Wireless Network Gaming

# Stale Stenslie: Symbiotic Interactivity in Multisensory Environments

# Maureen Thomas: Playing with Chance and Choice Orality, Narrativity and Cinematic Media: Vala s Runecast

# Christian Ziegler: 66 movingimages – Interaction in Filmic Space

# Eric Zimmerman: Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games: Four naughty concepts in need of discipline

Incidently, Monique has just come back from attending a sagas future TV workshop…I look forward finding out how it went.

UITV.INFO is a hub (sort of) of interactive TV research resources. The site provides details on
PhD theses; journals; conference proceedings; papers, books; research projects; newsletter. There isn’t every bit of information about these areas, in fact, the papers section looks the most comprehensive (though not updated for a while).

Now everyone knows what a cliff-hanger is, yet many cross-media creators usually end each story or game element in one medium with no motivation to move to another. I just came across a hellofa motivation to employ the cliff-hanger technique, and once again, it is thousands of years old:

In the 1001 Nights, a King is so upset over his wife’s infidelity that he orders her killed. He then requests a wife every night (sometimes every 3 nights?!) and then, because all women are untrustworthy, he has them killed at dawn every morning. Along comes Queen Scheherazade. She tells the King stories every night, and ends with a cliff-hanger every morning so he delays the mortal decree another day. This continues for years until the King finally trusts his Queen.

I’m not saying that audiences will behead you if you don’t supply a cliff-hanger, just that an audience member’s committment to a cross-media work involves trust, and cliff-hangers!

FYI:
* To Be DIScontinued! – The Hall of Unresolved TV Cliffhangers