Blog | The latest goings on in the world of me, including stuff about my work and any odds and ends I feel like talking about.
Ok, getting somewhere
Wednesday, 2nd April 2008, 4:43pm (BST)
Wednesday, 2nd April 2008, 4:43pm (BST)
Last post I was having difficulties settling on a new idea for my negotiated project. I've since been able to round off an idea that I think I'll be happy with.
It takes the principle of creating an interactive narrative in the form of a blog, but applies an entirely different medium to it - in this case, mobile devices and GPS applications.
I plan to explore the possibilities of allowing the user the opportunity to construct their own narrative, based on pieces of information or "clues" supplied to them by the application. The order of finding and selection of these clues will lead them to build up their own version of the story, according to the evidence that they find - there is no set, linear ending to the story as such, it ends whenever the user is satisfied that the story they have pieced together is the "truth".
The idea I have to illustrate this at the moment is the user takes the role of a character suffering from amnesia, waking to find himself beaten up. Using a mobile device, the user can explore the area (in this case, Plymouth city center), and find objects (pop-up explanations within the application when the user enters a particular region) that would offer a small clue as to what may have happened to the character. In truth, there are several different possibilities, or main conclusions that could be drawn, and some clues will lead towards one conclusion, others to another one. For example, one conclusion may be that he was left for dead by government agents because he knows a secret, or maybe another one was that he was attacked by aliens. If the user has found quite a lot of clues towards a certain conclusion, the character may actually miss clues to others because they become convinced of this one particular storyline. Keeping an open mind by collecting many varied clues makes for a more complex explanation.
The idea is that the user pieces the clues together themself to draw their own conclusion about what happened to the character, as they attempt to offer a universal explanation that covers all the clues they've found. If they can't come up with one, they keep going, to try and find more.
It's a response to traditional linear narrative that has a definite beginning, middle and end. In the case of a murder mystery story or drama serials like Lost or Heroes, for example, the clues are presented in a specific order one after the other, there's only one, true conclusion at the very end that you have to reach, and until then, you can only guess the outcome. Here, those guesses become the story, and it progresses at your own pace, only finishing when you are satisfied with your explanation. You control where the character goes and what clues he finds, leading to a very individual, multi-layered narrative.
I realised it's a similar principle to dadaism in this way, in the anarchic desire to remove meaning and structure. I saw Dadaism as a starting point today, and built up my idea having been influenced by the following observations. Reference 3 below explains how Dadaist poems would be made up of words from a paragraph in a newspaper or other source, cut up and arranged in a random order to form a new poem. That's pretty much what I'm allowing the user to do here, by giving them different parts of the story, in an order that they unwittingly define.
Reference 1 also points out that dadaism forces the reader to think; "It was using coarse harsh words (including swear words) to conceive a random notion that makes the reader have to think while reading it to get across the excessive ramblings." Parallels with my idea to force the user to think about how the story fits together. The difference is that while dadaism attempts to disrupt traditional concepts of art and any kind of coherent structure, the theme of my project so far has really been all about allowing the user some level of significant control over the events of a narrative, yet still maintaining that coherence of a well organised sequence.
More references to things and story ideas soon.
Dada references..
(1) http://www.geocities.com/allon_art/dadapoetry.html
(2) TzaraDADAmanifesto.pdf - from the IDAT203 Reading/Revision section of the UOP student portal.
(3) OTHER WAYS OF MAKING POEMS.doc - from the IDAT203 Reading/Revision section of the UOP student portal.
It takes the principle of creating an interactive narrative in the form of a blog, but applies an entirely different medium to it - in this case, mobile devices and GPS applications.
I plan to explore the possibilities of allowing the user the opportunity to construct their own narrative, based on pieces of information or "clues" supplied to them by the application. The order of finding and selection of these clues will lead them to build up their own version of the story, according to the evidence that they find - there is no set, linear ending to the story as such, it ends whenever the user is satisfied that the story they have pieced together is the "truth".
The idea I have to illustrate this at the moment is the user takes the role of a character suffering from amnesia, waking to find himself beaten up. Using a mobile device, the user can explore the area (in this case, Plymouth city center), and find objects (pop-up explanations within the application when the user enters a particular region) that would offer a small clue as to what may have happened to the character. In truth, there are several different possibilities, or main conclusions that could be drawn, and some clues will lead towards one conclusion, others to another one. For example, one conclusion may be that he was left for dead by government agents because he knows a secret, or maybe another one was that he was attacked by aliens. If the user has found quite a lot of clues towards a certain conclusion, the character may actually miss clues to others because they become convinced of this one particular storyline. Keeping an open mind by collecting many varied clues makes for a more complex explanation.
The idea is that the user pieces the clues together themself to draw their own conclusion about what happened to the character, as they attempt to offer a universal explanation that covers all the clues they've found. If they can't come up with one, they keep going, to try and find more.
It's a response to traditional linear narrative that has a definite beginning, middle and end. In the case of a murder mystery story or drama serials like Lost or Heroes, for example, the clues are presented in a specific order one after the other, there's only one, true conclusion at the very end that you have to reach, and until then, you can only guess the outcome. Here, those guesses become the story, and it progresses at your own pace, only finishing when you are satisfied with your explanation. You control where the character goes and what clues he finds, leading to a very individual, multi-layered narrative.
I realised it's a similar principle to dadaism in this way, in the anarchic desire to remove meaning and structure. I saw Dadaism as a starting point today, and built up my idea having been influenced by the following observations. Reference 3 below explains how Dadaist poems would be made up of words from a paragraph in a newspaper or other source, cut up and arranged in a random order to form a new poem. That's pretty much what I'm allowing the user to do here, by giving them different parts of the story, in an order that they unwittingly define.
Reference 1 also points out that dadaism forces the reader to think; "It was using coarse harsh words (including swear words) to conceive a random notion that makes the reader have to think while reading it to get across the excessive ramblings." Parallels with my idea to force the user to think about how the story fits together. The difference is that while dadaism attempts to disrupt traditional concepts of art and any kind of coherent structure, the theme of my project so far has really been all about allowing the user some level of significant control over the events of a narrative, yet still maintaining that coherence of a well organised sequence.
More references to things and story ideas soon.
Dada references..
(1) http://www.geocities.com/allon_art/dadapoetry.html
(2) TzaraDADAmanifesto.pdf - from the IDAT203 Reading/Revision section of the UOP student portal.
(3) OTHER WAYS OF MAKING POEMS.doc - from the IDAT203 Reading/Revision section of the UOP student portal.
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