[pa's affect]

Testimonial Review Page - Excerpts from Part One

Topic 1.2.1: A Genealogy of Perspective
At the end of the 13th century a painter named Giotto di Bondone would sit with his teacher Giovanni Cimabue, spending their afternoons on street corners in Rome, staring at buildings and stretching strings in the air.
	/--- note: Giotto, born in Tuscany in something like 1267 lived until
	1337 where he died in Milan. Cimabue, his instructor, died very close to
	1300, but his birth date is not known.
When Cimabue and Giotto looked at the buildings across the street - wood and glass boxes made of 90-degree angles - they saw roofs that appeared to be twisted and bent to the side. Despite the appearance, they knew that these buildings were made of right angles. As they held string in the air and followed these angles they began to see relationships and their understandings of spatial relationships sharpened. This invention, or discovery, of perspective had a deep impact on Giotto. He was painting the fables and myths of his time. Meanwhile, he was doing something very new with the discovery (or invention) of vanishing point from both a dimensional and emotional standpoint. He was depicting the physical and geometric location he was standing in, which put the viewer in Giotto's dimensional perspective while he was painting.
Prior to this time paintings of the Western tradition had lacked this sense of location and the visual vocabulary to achieve this relocation of the viewer and the sense of actually being there as a witness to the events. Putting the viewer in a new dimensional perspective also affects the viewer's emotional perspective.
This is something we still see today in most forms of image presentation. Traditional western movies, such as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, or Shootout at the Okay Corral, show characters from knee level. Clint Eastwood towers over the camera, a giant of a man, dust on his boots, six-shooter in his fingers, twitching for battle. But he's seen at these moments from a specific dimensional angle. These camera angles present a character that's meant to be seen as important or dominating when viewed from a lower dimensional perspective. This then gives an emotional perspective of importance or power. Mystery, another kind of emotional perspective is built this way, too. When we cant see around a corner we're left wondering what might be there.

So dimensional perspective affects emotional perspective. This is old news for most film directors, architects, and sculptors.
Chapter 1.3: Narrative
Literature is language charged with meaning.

- Ezra Pound

Surprisingly, both the denizens of the internet and their fearless leaders remain largely clueless about the currency of the internet. Most websites understand the internet as being little more than a globally-distributed brochure. The interactive, social, and narrative capabilities of the web remain untapped so the return on the investment that most companies has made is still simply an investment that's burning fuel on the launchpad. This lack of understanding contributed to the Internet downturn of the late 90's and the majority of the sites that have returned revenues are usually involved in a synthesis of commerce and community.

The internet is fueled by two commodities: Attention and Reputation.
America OnLine, for example, has managed to convince its users to pay for what others are paying to give away. In other words, AOL users pay to upload their writing while other users are paying to download that same content. The users pay to allow AOL to profit from their contributions. Additionally, AOL managed to convince these same users that all of the rest of the content of the web should follow this same commodity model. Their users quite literally bought this story and assumed that AOL, a subset of the Internet, subsumed the internet and was their gateway, or "portal" to it. AOL's approach is an intelligent commodification of the users of the service. In fact, it was an intelligent commodification of the unassuming public and our markets of stock and trade. But AOL could have done much more and, as its currently in league with Time-Warner, is positioned to take advantage of the benefits of interactive narrative in the coming decades.
	/---- img: 1.3aa - AOL -TW logo
Those sites that have featured some form of narrative (occasionally named "Content") relied on traditional modes of impression-based advertising and "click-thrus", assuming that their audiences would tolerate this outdated form of informational pollution called "Advertising." In many cases they've been right; users, specifically American users, have tolerated this. But if the authors of these sites understood the value of narrative in their "Content Offerings" and how interactive narrative works they might have changed their financial models and means of making money.
The model is very much like the BBS, or bulletin board service. As some users build, more users are interested and the service in the middle collects the coins. This is the commodity of attention. Ultima Online and other gaming systems understood the internet well enough to take advantage of these approaches. We'll see this sort of approach become increasingly common. AOL and other "Portals" will begin to integrate large-scale multi-user environments that are narrative based. Users will feel more emotionally connected to what they are uploading and will include their friends and associates in the process. It's a matter of integrating projects like Simnet or Everquest with the cultural models of the Bulletin-Board Service, or BBS (on which AOL still relies). This is the commodity of reputation.
In the small town of Lille, France, in an old factory off of the hightway a change is happening to this traditional BBS model. Team ChMan - the producers of an labyrinthine and very rich narrative named Banja - have done an excellent job of pointing a future direction of these forms of communities that integrate a narrative metaphor. Banja is a story about a character that lives in a world (named "Banja") with a population of other characters. While there is a consistent metaphor, storyline and interface to the entire community, there are a series of services, games, and online community activities that make this a promising competitor for a system like AOL.
	/--- note: Banja won the 2001 Ars Electronica Golden Nica,
	the highest international award for digital art.
	Banja can be found at http://www.banja.com/
Topic 1.3.2: Reading, Writing, and the Blurry Lines In Between
Writing is an interface between the medium and the message, and between the author and the reader. Humans are adept at this basic process of turning symbols into meaning. Text is a very old interface. Therefor authors and illustrators bend it to new uses whenever the opportunity is available. Software designers, also, have relied heavily on this in their work.

Software development is similar to writing in that it is a generation and presentation of symbols for the sake of communicating a more complicated series of relationships. A programmer writes out lines of code, in a language, "authoring" a particular executable. Consider the desktop metaphor. The symbols of the desktop represent relationships between other things. These relationships inform the user of the software's function and their capabilities as a user.
It's no real stretch to say that running an application - specifically applications that include an interface of symbology, such as a GUI (Graphical User Interface)- is a form of reading. With that idea in mind, we will, in this book, refer to all video game, web, and computer users, in general, as "readers." When reading a book or even a sentence, there is a beginning step. A book and a sentence both have a beginning that is formally denoted. There is a middle and, hopefully, there is a solution to a problem that is posed. The reader is recognizing symbols and making associations. The reader controls the pacing, the level of participation, and the dwell-time (that is, how long they spend with the text they are reading). But the part that interests the reader are the symbols and the solution of the problem-set.
Consider Microsoft Excel. Launching an application follows the same steps: a beginning step is followed by the middle, which offers a solution and then the process is closed. The user of the program is recognizing symbols for the sake of solving a problem. The user determines the pacing, the level of participation, and the "dwell-time" or length of time they spend using the application. And, in the end, he or she is most interested in the solution of the problem or set of problems. A user, after launching an application, ends up participating in a form of reading. Simply put, running an application is an interactive form of reading.
Since interface design relies on symbology, signs, metaphors, and codes, an interface designer or a programmer may be considered a writer. This is certainly the verb that is used in some software development circles: "writing code" is a term commonly used. The product of their effort is written lines of text, and the person at the other end of the line is a reader. Steven Johnson, in his book "Interface Culture" rightly points out that the interface sits between the medium and the message. This is as true with a book as it is with a software application.
	/---note: Mr. Johnson is right to point this out,
	just as Brenda Laurel is right to point out that the
	interface is what sits between the user and the computer.
	Any interface worth its function is able to serve multiple
	simultaneous uses.
What is more is that the reader - or user - acts as a kind of writer while they are participating in this form of interactive reading. The reader, in the case of applications that require input (such as Excel), is also adding information and, thereby, meaning. Subsequently they become a writer as well. The role of the reader and writer become indistinct here because both roles (reader and writer) are adding information and meaning to a dataset.
This blurring of roles is one of the inherent characteristics of interactive narrative. This is also what makes it difficult for understand. But, there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of "Plot" in Microsoft's Excel. It's staid, boring, and mathematical. It's missing soul and passion compared to a work by Dostoyevsky or Poe. The interactivity adds nothing of soul or meaning to the process of running an application - be it a form of reading or writing - and so this notion of "reading" Microsoft Excel or "writing" to the spreadsheet is an anemic form of creativity.
Is Plot what's missing? We want, when we read, some form of story, or plot. This makes the material being read relevant to our lives.
The Plot and the Use-Case Scenario

The word "Plot" comes from the early days of French and means, as it's still used in English and French, "a portion of land." Why would the idea of a plot be used to represent a story? Is a story a kind of topology?
As we've pointed out, a plot is the author's planned organization of the events of the story. Plot, in determining What and How, is a topology, but it's a planned topology that has an implied opinion and perspective. A story's organization is essentially the author guiding the reader through the solution of the problem that the narrative presents.
Let's assume that there are three parts to any plot (as per Aristotle and Freytag, et al) 1) the "Desis" (beginning) or the introduction of the problem, 2) the "Peripeteia" (middle) or the problem itself and 3) the "Denouement" (end) or process of solving the problem. Mixed in here we have all of the symbology that makes the plot interesting and allows the reader the ability to understand what's happening.
In software development and the documentation of software requirements there's a concept called "Use Case Scenarios." These charts are interesting because they diagram the function, flow, time, and interaction between a user and a particular piece of software. An example of a simple use-case scenario might look like this:

If that process of solving the problem is the plot, then the equivalent in software design might be the use-case scenario.
Just because all use-case scenarios don't follow the Freytag or Aristotelian structure doesn't mean they aren't a story structure any more than ending a piece of music without a tonic note indicates that it's not music. Calling a use-case scenario a plot is an over-simplification, but the basic function of tying events together as a function of time is the same. A use-case scenario and a plot are similar, however. They're both read, both present a problem to be solved, both work by using symbologies that are used to generate larger meaning, and are both authored environments that are meant to be read by another party.

Old rules change for new art forms.

"How could the butler have done it?" (from Topic 1.6.1: The Crossed Lines of Design)

There's something else, however, that's worth noticing. Interactivity allows a reader to bring their own sense of time to what they are reading because it is a more flexible structure. This is a progression in literature that has been happening for ages - probably before Poe made such bold contributions to the genres of mystery and the short story. As with mystery novels, the reader of an interactive narrative takes on a role that is more closely aligned with that of an investigator, or perhaps of someone engaged in a conversation. In many computer games the reader takes on a role of debugging, as it were, the underlying structure of the story. The reader becomes the investigator, vested with that perspective, making efforts, meanwhile, to understand the perspective of the author. It's a process of reverse engineering. But different people will solve the same problem at different speeds so when problem-solving accompanies narrative, the amount of time the narrative takes to read changes.
This consideration is a key factor in narrative and game design because it lies at the intersection of intention and interpretation.

The similarities between this form of reading and the basic form of algorithmic logic - the semantic, and tautological properties of computer programs - are suspiciously similar. Both are a sequential interpretation of a series of events that were already there. This is the point where a use-case scenario and a plot converge.
Consequently we can think of writing a narrative as interface design. It's a telescoping and a presentation of a series of events. Some events are important, some not. Some events are engaging, some not. The author's job is to decide which are which.
	/--- note: In multiprocessing, there is one CPU
	acting as a executor of sequential machine code
	instructions. Forking allows for several threads
	of non-linear narrative to be active within the
	context of the GUI and its background processes,
	but then the CPU  as reader  only needs to pay
	attention to one thread/perspective at a time.
	Yet another indicator of what might be coming
	in the futures of narrative.
Consider Victor Marie Hugo's work about Notre Dame and the hunchback. Hugo had to choose a perspective to tell the story from. However, that story could have also been told from single perspective of one of the characters, resting only in the first person, and been, under the guiding hand of a skilled artist, an interesting perspective on the same story. Consider the different perspectives of Esmeralda, Frollo, Quasimodo, and Phoebus. Hugo combines them, in many ways, and in doing so has chosen a single path through a complicated field of interwoven possibilities and overlapping worldviews.
From this perspective of authorship, narrative's shift to interaction seems natural. Any traditional, non-interactive story might be thought of as a piece of interactive narrative. The story that is told is one of a number of possible ways to interpret and present the data of that world-view. The role of the author, in traditional narrative, is to generate both the world-view and the particular perspective that looks into it. They have to pick the path through a garden of infinitely forking paths to discover which path is the most beautiful. The role of the painter is the same. The role of the interface designer as well. The author of interactive narrative has to present all of the forking paths through the garden they have grown. So the art of interactive narrative lies in the author's ability to simultaneously imagine (and illustrate) each of these views and make all of them accessible for the reader. It's a difficult task of schizophrenic design.

Interactive narrative's potential future and its current success lies exactly here: it's the point at which these different forms of design - writing, imagery, and interface - cross and spark a new kind of attention in an emerging art form.

Mark Stephen Meadows // pighed