Introduction/Griffin+Sabine

[Wally <wally@sub-zero.mit.edu>]

Hello hello.

My name's Wally Holland, a senior in the Comparative Media Studies program
at MIT (and a Computer Science expatriate of sorts, having switched majors
recently). I found out about this list from Kenneth Lu (toastyken) -- we
had taken a class on interactive narrative together here at MIT.

As for background: I worked for some months with the Synthetic Characters
group at the MIT Media Lab (www.media.mit.edu), where we designed,
essentially, digital characters in different interactive settings. My area
was music, working with a grad student on systems for interactive
composition/arrangement of scores for our digital worlds. It was, in
short, Cool Shit, though I lean toward the conceptual end, and the Media
Lab is very product- and code-driven (hence "I worked" instead of "I
work". :)

Anyhow, I wanted to mention an "interactive" storytelling experience I had
recently, since a post in the archives reminded me of it. For a class on
hypertext and literature last year, I read the Griffing+Sabine books, and
read (watched? played with?) the CD-ROM based on them, "Ceremony of
Innocence". It's essentially the same story, only the envelopes in which
the postcards come are essentially toys (beautifully-designed
applets). [For those of you who don't know, Griffin+Sabine is a story told
in letters and postcards, a correspondence between to people who've never
met, who may never meet, and who may not in fact exist at all. The books
are gorgeous and creepy, as is the CD-ROM.]

Anyhow: the "interactive" part of the experience was limited to
play-with-this-to-start-the-next-chapter, with a couple of rudimentary
puzzles but mostly a collection of randomly-pushed widgets onscreen. While
beautiful, the interactive portions are only a kind of window-dressing on
the story. Nevertheless, they are so closely tied to the writing from an
aesthetic standpoint that they gain meaning from the text, and add to it
(the text is read aloud by three excellent voice-actors, one of whom is
Isabella Rossellini). The association between image and text needn't be a
one-to-one correspondence, or even a continuous narrative flow; rather,
the words and images pass by each other, creating a mood. I'm thinking of
MTV at this point, to be honest: impressions of meaning which grow in the
viewer's (user's, reader's) mind, rather than a strict narrative
flow. (And now I'm thinking of bloody Thomas Pynchon...)

Not certain what the relevance of all this is, but it occurs to me that
existing cinematic techniques have a lot to add to existing literary
structures, and that before we get locked in hand-to-hand combat with
combinatorics over paragraph branching-trees and the like, we might
consider the interim media whose potential remains untapped.

Looking forward to hearing more from this list, the archives are
fascinating...

Cheers,
Wally