"Short Essay on Interactivity"

Richard Morrissette

MDIA 1020

            In today’s state of technology, the need for interactive experiences has increased dramatically. The audience desires a higher level of creativity, and enjoying content has turned from how much content can be enjoyed to how much it can be enjoyed before the user will turn and create content of their own (this is exponentially easier to do than even five or ten years ago). The debate of whether interactivity can be achieved through means other than the most common form, video games, goes on. However, interactivity should not be limited to just video games, and can be achieved through other media, in fact this may be already happening.

           

As was stated in the readings, the question is how much control should be given to a player. Putting too little control is not making any innovations at all while putting too much can be disconcerting for certain users. A healthy mix of interpretation should be added to control in order to move this interactive experience forward. Large RPG games have a very large amount of control that goes with them, and often have well written out stories to compliment the choices a character makes. The key is to leave things for the player to interpret, to make them question the story and choices that they have created and thus give every user a different outlook of a set of decisions (this could be the equivalent of a book club all reading the same book and having different thoughts on the meaning).

           

I think this not only is a viable option for future projects on interactivity but also is already happening. For example, the recent book entitled “Ship of Theseus”, or just “S” on its box, by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams is a book that gives the reader the ability to create their own meaning of an in depth story. The book features a story that can stand-alone as a book but also features handwritten notes of two people analyzing the book in order to solve a mystery; The book features carefully crafted notes, articles, clippings and even a sophisticated code reader that can be removed from the book and examined on their own. Since its release, readers have analyzed the book differently, posted theories, and even directions for how the book should be read. Books like this can truly be a future for interactive, non-videogame, storytelling.