Writing for Non-Linear and Interactive Media

Part Four

In the 1980’s, before interactive video became a reality, I was involved as a scriptwriter in a project to create a mail-order multimedia course to teach accounting to managers. A prominent business college in the U.K. saw a market for distance learning. It wanted to create a learning package that would enable working professionals to acquire the knowledge of the course without physically attending the classes. We built in some primitive interactivity by using three independent media: print, audiocassette, and videocassette. The videocassette was produced with planned pauses indicated by a subtitle on screen instructing the user to stop the tape and refer to a page in the manual to read in-depth background. Similar cues were recorded on the audiocassettes. The video dramatized a business situation; the text provided facts and figures and exercises; and the audio tape had testimonial from managers.

Today, we would create hyperlinks to audio files or video clips, or hyperlinks from picture to text. This kind of continuing education could now be run through a web site and a listserve or packaged on a CD-ROM. So you can see that interactive multimedia is actually a technical response shaped by the longstanding need to interrelate media and build in user input. Current computer technology enables that need to be filled. Interactivity is now a fundamental component of new media and an increasingly common feature of traditional media. The term “new media” is often used to describe interactive media. The Writers Guild of America considers this kind of writing to include “not only video games, but also content developed for other digital technologies, including the Internet, CD-ROMs, DVDs, interactive TV, wireless devices, and virtual reality.”¹

In the early 1990s, the multimedia computer was a novelty. Now multimedia functions are standard. The idea of interactive multimedia developed in fixed media because all the media components could be assembled on the desktop. Code could be written so that by mouse click and key stroke, the user could navigate around the content. The first exploitation of interactivity on the multimedia computer was informational. Fixed interactive media preceded web sites because the CD-ROM was in circulation before the web had become established. The importance of fixed interactive media was really signaled by the breakout Multimedia Convention that set up separately from the main convention floor of the National Association of Broadcasters in 1994. It occupied a ballroom in the Las Vegas Hilton. By 2001, it had grown so large that it occupied another entire convention center at the Sands. With the expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center, the multimedia trade show moved back under the same roof as the broadcasters, which mimics the convergence of media on the desktop.

While this book was being conceived and written, the audiovisual world was in ferment. It continues to evolve and change. This phenomenon of change is something we have to learn to live with as Alvin Toffler pointed out in his seminal and prophetic work Future Shock.² It is a truism that media technology is evolving at an exponential rate. It is not just the increase in speed and memory and the decrease in the size of computers. It is the new applications and their impact on the skills we need to function in the workplace. Knowledge workers need tools to manage and process information. The speed and efficiency of these systems is the key to the new economy of information technology.³ The convergence of video in digital format and digital computer processing brings about the possibility of universal networked interactive multimedia. Broadcasting becomes netcasting. A screen becomes the display for any and all possible communications media. Since the first edition, we have seen the burgeoning of hand held computers, personal digital assistants, multi-function cell phones, and wireless networking. In our homes, we are going to have to shift from analogue to digital video and TV. We are going to be buying new wide-screen television sets. Producers will have to create program content in the new high-definition standard. Professional cameras are now all digital and switchable between the two aspect ratios of standard TV and HDTV. DVDs offer 9 gigabytes of storage, which is sufficient to encode a full-length feature film plus out-takes, background story information, and eight channels of audio. Distributors can put multiple language versions of a movie on one DVD. Movies are being distributed in interactive versions with the out-takes and alternate angles included such that the viewer can alter the edit by remote control. Information about the production, the actors, and the making of the movie are also commonly included.

All this alters the way producers, writers, and directors have to think about media. It is hard to predict how this might impact television dramas and sitcoms, let alone feature films. Cable providers offer retrievable digital content and embed program and other information in all channels accessible through the remote control. Television programs are linked to web sites which extend the program. WGBH in Boston produces the documentary program Frontline, which puts up subtitles of the URL where further information about the program can be found and where online discussion about the program can continue. When television and internet are delivered over the same pipe and on the same screen, television will become increasingly interactive so that viewers can shop for products that are “placed” in the program. One can imagine that objects will be clickable to take the viewer to a website where a purchase can be made on line.

Even before digital video, video boards in computers allowed us to bring live-action video into the computer and thereby combine live action, graphics, animation, still pictures, sound, and text. Computer games and other types of interactive software that take advantage of this multimedia environment are familiar to most of us. The Internet has given birth to the World Wide Web and a form of interactive communication that exploits the multimedia capabilities of computers. Every computer is now built with integrated video, sound, graphics, and ethernet or modem network connections that make it a multimedia computer. We are now used to user input that modifies the playback or viewing experience by means of hypertext and hyperlinks.

The general conclusion we have to draw is that whatever we know and accept now as visual entertainment will change. Nor is it difficult to foresee ever-increasing instructional and educational use of this kind of interactivity combined with multiple media on CD-ROMs, DVDs and web sites. Corporations and universities use web sites for interactive learning. Production companies whose business was creating videos now have to be able to design and produce CD-ROMs and web sites or go out of business.

The interactive combination of the computer and the World Wide Web with its open architecture reveals new opportunities every day for learning, training, entertainment, and commerce. Think content! Wherever there is content, there is writing. More writers are needed. New media require changes in the conceptualizing and the writing that precedes production. Scriptwriters have to acquire new skills and learn new kinds of visual and structural writing techniques. However, these new writers have to be able to think differently (for Mac users, read “think different”) and write for media that are no longer linear. They are nonlinear.