The codification of audiovisual content allows an author/director to signify meaning within the narrative through the quantification and classification of story elements. The narrative can be structured according to a predetermined arc using codified clips that can be viewed across multiple navigational pathways. Codification of story elements enables the author to create a narrative that is archived as a database of clips. These clips are accessed sequentially via an interactive user interface and their narrative order is influenced by viewer interaction. The codification criteria are story dependent. An interactive horror story will probably quantify story elements according to their level of blood, gore and fright potential. A romantic tale will emphasise more thoughtful criteria such as emotion, level of sacrifice and dialogue. This chapter looks at the classification and archiving of traditional narrative elements and considers their relevance to interactive storytelling. It goes on to explore the database as a repository for story texts and the use of algorithms in narrative construction.

PROPP’S MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLK TALE

Vladimir Propp states that ‘function is understood as an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action’ (Propp, 1968 p. 21). Propp sought to codify the elements of Russian folk tales and create a scientific breakdown of their narrative components. He considered folk tales to be the textual archive of the country’s cultural history and a record of times gone by. He noted that folk tales can be deconstructed to reveal the patterns of life that existed at the time of their writing. At some stage in the evolution of social groups, a religious belief system was constructed which was based upon people’s daily lives. This belief system reflected their everyday life in much the same way that the folk tale does. However, Propp observes that ‘a way of life and religion die out, while their contents turn into tales’ (Propp, 1968 p. 106).

Propp states that the creators of folk tales were writing down what they saw, they did not invent the stories. They observed the world around them and adapted what they saw into folk tales. By deconstructing the tale, we can identify social patterns in the lives of the writers. Propp believed that there were a fixed number of folk tales. All were simply variations of single themes. The structure and incidentals could be changed, but the story remained the same:

The entire store of fairy tales ought to be examined as a chain of variants. Were we able to unfold the picture of transformations, it would be possible that all of the tales given can be morphologically deduced from the tales about kidnapping of a princess by a dragon – from that form we are inclined to consider as basic.

(Propp, 2001 p. 114)

Propp also noted that tales that have been written down for us to study are relatively recent phenomena and this collection of work only began after the stories had begun to break down and fragment. He discovered that there were periods of great creativity and development, and periods of stagnation. Although Propp was convinced of their existence, the texts of the periods of creativity were not recorded or written down and we can only speculate as to their origin and content.

NARRATOLOGY: HOW NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AFFECT OUR PERCEPTION

Mieke Bal states that interpretation of the text is open-ended and that meaning is fully dependent on the relationship between the author and the work. Meaning is derived from the process of writing and reading; ‘once we acknowledge both the necessity and the strategic nature of limits to interpretation, we move from the question of the author back to the question of interpretation’ (Bal, 1985 p. 17). This challenges the notion of the author/director as undisputed controller of interpretation and the meaning of a text. The meaning is derived from the audience’s interpretation. However, Bal goes on to note that this process should become a method of exclusion, where the act of interpretation becomes a privilege only available to the few.

Bal uses formulaic elements to codify the content of the text: she refers to the EN (External Narrator), CN (Character-bound Narrator), CF (Character-bound Focalizor). These elements are used to create formulas that allow analysis of the text, e.g. in a text where an irritating character is speaking, it is the speaker who focalises the event. The conversation can be represented as: EN [CF (character angry) – other character]. The narrator, the focaliser and the actor are each of different identity. The narrator is EN, the focaliser is ‘character angry’ and the actor is ‘other character’.

NARRATOLOGY TERMINOLOGY: SYNECDOCHE, CONTIGUOUS, METONYM

In narratology theory, the term synecdochical is a figure of speech where the name of a part is used when referring to the whole; using the whole for a part, using the general for the special, using the special for the general, calling the thing the name of the material that makes it (using the word ‘steel’ when talking about a ‘sword’). Contiguous refers to touching, neighbouring, adjacent. A metonym is a figure of speech in which a word is substituted for another word that it is closely associated to (using the word ‘Washington’ when talking about ‘the United States’).

Embedded narrative texts are used in the story Arabian Nights, a story about Scheherazade who tells stories to the king to prevent her husband being killed. Embedded narratives run contiguously with the primary narrative. In narratology theory, the fabula is defined as the content of the story, a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. A story can be made up of a primary fabula and several embedded fabulas. The syuzhet is the presentation of those events told through form, the form being camera angles, narration etc.

EMBEDDED NARRATIVES: FABULA AND SYUZHET

Embedded narratives are usually non-narrative embedded texts. They are mostly dialogue, yet they can take any form including discussions, descriptions, and confidences. With this dialogue, it is the actors, not the primary narrator, that utter the language. In ‘dramatic texts’, the whole text is spoken by actors, who together through their interaction, produce meaning. The meta-narrative is an untold story that unifies and totalises the world, and justifies a culture’s power struggles, i.e. what is really going on. In the text it is also known as the framing story.

In my own interactive film The Little Extras (see Appendix 1) the audience was given the opportunity at various points in the narrative to change their perspective on the story. This allowed them to choose to focus more on the experience of a particular character. The story itself could not be altered, just the viewer’s perspective. This resulted in varying interpretations of the text. The meta-narrative was presented as a combination of primary narrative and embedded narratives, navigated by the audience via an interactive interface. The interaction and perspective-altering navigation differentiated the experience of viewing. Bal writes that narrative perspective in literature has become increasingly important. It has been the ‘prime means of manipulation’ for over two centuries, ‘the point of view from which the elements of the new fabula are being presented is often of decisive importance for the meaning the reader will assign to the fabula’ (Bal, 1985 p. 79).

A PERSPECTIVAL APPROACH TO NARRATIVE

Narrative perspective positions the audience relative to the text. It creates a uniquely singular observational viewpoint with regard to characters, plot and story. With this approach to storytelling it is possible that the chronology can be represented out of order, enhancing its impact, yet still maintaining narrative coherence. While written linguistic text is linear, in a narrative text it is possible to speak of a ‘double linearity’, that of the text, the series of sentences, and that of the fabula, the series of events. Altering the sequential ordering can focus the reader’s attention on specific story elements, ‘to emphasise, to bring about aesthetic or psychological effects, to show various interpretations of an event, to indicate the subtle difference between expectation and realisation’ (Bal, 1985 p. 82).

The differences between the chronology of the fabula and the arrangement of the story are called chronological deviations or anachronies. The beginning of The Iliad is made up of five units numbered one to five. Chronologically the order is 4, 5, 3, 2 and 1. The anachronies can be presented – A4, B5, C3, D2, E1. Anachronies are separated from the reader’s timeline, ‘an event presented in anachrony is separated by an interval, large or small, from the “present”’. If we compare the time of the fabula to story time, their differences become clear, ‘a truly synchronic scene in which the duration of the fabula coincided completely with that of the presentation in the story, would be unreadable’ (Bal, 1985 p. 106).

SUBJECTIVE RETROVERSION

Retroversion within the text is moving back in time. Bal gives the example sentence ‘Last year I went to Indonesia for a month’ where the span of time is a month yet the distance of the time is one year. With ‘subjective retroversion’, time is slowed and every nuance is described. In Lars Von Trier’s Europa (1991), tense moments are presented from different visual perspectives onscreen at the same time. Shots are repeated spatially, out of sync, allowing the audience to witness an event several times. This enhances the emotional intensity of the scene and allows the audience to recover from the effects of attentional blink.

Repetition, accumulation, relations to other characters and transformations are the four principles which work together to construct the image of a character; ‘When a character appears for the first time we do not yet know very much about it. The qualities that are implied in that first presentation are not all grasped by the reader’ (Bal, 1985 p. 125). When a character is presented by means of their actions we deduce from these actions certain ‘implicit qualifications’. The reader will perceive the character by what they see them do. Yet what they see may be contradictory, a virtuous character may commit a seemingly unvirtuous act. These implicit qualifications are open to reader interpretation and can be used within the text to uncover secrets; the reader has to search for the truth. An explicit qualification is more absolute and less open to interpretation; a character that commits a murder is explicitly qualified as a murderer.

The space defined and created within the text is expanded through references to distant objects, to suggest a world beyond the immediate position of a character. ‘Point-of-view’ and ‘narrative perspective’ do not distinguish between the character vision presenting the elements and the identity of the voice that is verbalising that vision. There is no distinction between those who see and those who speak. In principle, all actants (a villain is both a character and an integral structural element) are represented in each fabula: without actants there are no relations, without relations there is no process, without process there is no fabula. Coincidental events may take place within the narrative across multiple story sequences; ‘the elaboration of parallel strings of one fabula makes it difficult to recognise one single chronological sequence in that fabula. Several events happen at the same time’ (Bal, 1985 p. 273).

THE PHOTOGRAPH: A MESSAGE WITHOUT A CODE

Photo essays are a good development tool for storytelling. Like the act of paraphrasing, a photographer must select only the most pertinent still images from a period of time to communicate the essence of the story and to move the narrative forward. Roland Barthes examines ‘the special status of the photographic image: it is a message without a code; from which proposition an important corollary must immediately be drawn: the photographic message is a continuous message’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 17). Barthes explains that describing a photograph is an impossible task, as the process of description changes the sense and adds meaning to the photograph. The act of creating the image from composition within the viewfinder, recording a latent image in silver halide crystals, development/enhancement of the grain size to make visible, fixing the ‘exposed’ image and printing the negative using various techniques of dodging and burning all add to the image’s message. The image connotes different meanings at the different stages of production. The description of the image will be different depending on the person describing it, the circumstances surrounding their viewing of the image and their perspective. Each has a number of different possible readings and interpretations built into it; ‘all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a “floating chain” of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 39). Text used with images ‘anchors’ the meaning of the photograph and ‘directs’ the audience towards a particular interpretation. Text is perceived to be more concrete and less plastic in its potential interpretation, text positions the image absolutely in one perspectival orientation. The photographic image is immediately perceived to be a supporter of the meaning as defined by the dominating text. Non-photographic visuals have a different relationship with the text, called relay. In comics the image and text are complementary. In film texts the dialogue gives additional meaning to the image, meaning that could not be conveyed by the image itself. Dialogue enhances the perception of complex relationships between characters and their motivations within the text.

PEREC’S ‘INFRA-ORDINARY’

In Paris, 1969, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec determined to visit two locations each month, to write a description of them onsite, and to then write another when he was somewhere else ‘to evoke all the memories that come to me concerning it’ (Perec, 2008 p. 55). Perec would ask a photographer to capture some images of the places, which he would seal in an envelope with wax, having never looked at them. He included other paraphernalia from the visit including M?tro tickets, bar slips and cinema tickets. The following year, on a different month he would revisit each place and describe it again; ‘what I hope for from it, in effect, is nothing other than the record of a threefold experience of ageing: of the places themselves, of my memories, and of my writing’ (Perec, 2008 p. 55). Perec described his work as an attempt ‘to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs’ (Perec, 2008 p.92). Stephen Shore’s photo book Uncommon Places (1982) features his symmetrically organised photographs of ‘the everyday’. Travelling across America in 1973, he shot on a 10ʺ ? 8ʺ plate camera, all the time documenting in a diary ‘what he ate, how long he drove, what he saw on TV and at the movies, how many photographs he took’ (Shore, 2007 p. 10). Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson walked the streets of Marseille with his Leica camera, ‘to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation’ (Cartier-Bresson, 2004 p. 22). In doing this, he was capturing the ‘decisive moment’, an instant within a given period of time that represents both the immediate past and the future of a temporal event, observed in the ‘search of objective chance’ (Cartier-Bresson, 2004 p. 67).

In his book, The Present (2012), photographer Paul Graham sought ‘the breaking down of the decisive moment, not allowing life to become this single frozen shard, trying to reflect something of the flow of time in the work’ (Graham quoted in Jobey, 2012). Graham photographed each scene twice, a short time apart, and paired the images together for exhibition. His intention was to capture ‘the way life comes at us, unbidden, and without perfect little narratives’ (Graham quoted in Jobey, 2012).

DE QUINCEY’S RECORD OF REGENCY LONDON

In 1821 the writer Thomas De Quincey had imagined himself ‘writing at a distance of twenty – thirty – fifty years ahead of this present moment’ to create the detailed recollection Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey, 1994 p. 168). He believed that in the future, someone would be interested in some aspect of his work, but first it must be written down. De Quincey included a poignant memory of his life in London. At one point, he was almost destitute; unable to afford lodgings he resided temporarily at a vacant house on Greek Street, Soho which he shared with a ‘poor, friendless child, apparently ten years old’. At night, the child ‘crept close to me for warmth, and for security against her ghostly enemies’ (De Quincey, 1994 p. 120). This delicate description of an obscure act of human kindness invites the reader to forensically deconstruct, then reconstruct an experience which, without his archival record, would simply have been lost in time.

THE PHOTOGRAPH: FLAT ANTHROPOLOGICAL FACT

The photograph presents what was actually there, not an illusion (such as drawing). This reduces the level of possible interpretation. Real-time features such as frame rates and the visual perception phenomenon called persistence of vision (where a succession of stills images are perceived as smooth motion) do not inhibit the interpretation of the photograph. The photograph can be read in stillness or within the context of linear time, always moving forward, always changing; ‘the photograph must be related to a pure spectatorial consciousness and not to the more projective, more “magical” fictional consciousness on which film by and large depends’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 45). The level of manipulation required to create any moving image adds meaning and adjusts perspective; the photograph as a fragment of time taken from one perspective can be seen as more absolute in its meaning. Barthes describes photographs as being ‘flat anthropological fact … messages without a code’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 45) containing an ‘obtuse meaning’ that ‘appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 55). Barthes believed that there is emotion in this obtuse meaning.

Barthes examined the meaning of film. He believed the filmic elements in film were those that could not be described, that the filmic begins ‘where language and metalanguage end’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 64). This places film outside the descriptive power of traditional texts, enhanced with a third meaning that cannot be described. This suggests that film is a more emotional experience than the printed text or the photograph. Its active and immersive nature creates a symbiotic relationship whereby attentive film viewing results in emotional satisfaction; and the activity of viewing connotes additional meaning within the narrative. The still image dissociates the ‘technical constraint’ from the ‘indescribable’ meaning and institutes ‘a reading that is at once instantaneous and vertical, [and which] scorns logical time’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 68).

BRECHT’S THEORY OF DISTANCIATION

The actor too must function primarily as an element of the narrative, and not be held back by ‘reality’, to become a sovereign power within the text, able to move freely to convey the meaning of the text, as in Brecht’s theory of ‘distanciation’. Distanciation is the term used to describe the effect of distancing the spectator through the use of non-traditional form/techniques or textual content. Barthes describes narrative progression as a three-dimensional construct that needs to be ‘read’ in both horizontal and vertical axes:

To understand a narrative is not merely to follow the unfolding of the story, it is also to recognise its construction in ‘storeys’, to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative ‘thread’ onto an implicitly vertical axis; to read (to listen to) a narrative is not merely to move from one word to the next, it is also to move from one level to the next.

(Barthes, 1978 p. 87)

The text is understood by both reading the words and by comparing and connecting elements within the narrative. Character relationships and plot developments take time to create. The reader’s access to the intellectual property created by complex narrative elements, does not relate to the narrative in a linear way. Rather, narrative progression results in ‘bursts’ of narrative constructs that become clear to the reader when their description is complete.

The description of these constructs is broken down into narrative indices and informants. Indices refer to character identity, feelings, atmosphere; informants locate the story in place and time. Informants ‘are pure data with immediate signification. Indices involve an activity of deciphering, the reader is to learn to know a character or an atmosphere; informants bring ready-made knowledge’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 96). Informants reference the prior knowledge of the reader. This knowledge brings with it a range of related text that broadens the character of the text being read. As the narrative unfolds, each character takes a perspective on the sequence of actions they are involved in. A charlatan may charm the young woman. From his perspective she is na?ve and foolish to believe him, yet from her perspective she is trusting and virtuously innocent.

PRIMACY OF LEXIS OVER PLOT

Barthes suggests that the narrator can be described as the person who is writing the story; an omnipresent consciousness with a superior perspectival position; or a person relaying the story using only what the characters can know. He argues that modern texts are no longer concerned with conveying inner thoughts, accessing the mind of the character, but instead create a present that focuses on its own delivery. This suggests that the creation of the virtual worlds in interactive texts is part of a trend of the primacy of world (lexis) over plot (logos). Interactive narratives are known for their attention to detail in creating a world outside reality, not for their ability to verbalise complex reasoning and emotive experiences.

In relation to the narrative, experience equips the audience with the necessary faculties to access the text. Audiences seek out explanations and enlightenment from the author of the text, the person who is seen to be the ultimate authority on its meaning and interpretation. Yet the meaning of the text is derived from the work of the author and the work (interpretation) of the reader. The meaning of the text would not exist without either. Therefore, traditional texts already offer an interactive environment, inviting the reader to create meaning through interpretation. Barthes points out that ‘classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature’ (Barthes, 1978 p. 148).

The modern narrative is doing something to inject new life into the lethargic approach to textual consumption, an approach which has resulted in increasingly bored audiences, unable or unwilling to open the text’s meaning. Revitalising the audience’s perspective on the narrative will generate new audiences, creating a new, shared experience.

Certain constraints still exist within contemporary narratives. In the quest for new narrative forms and approaches, the text cannot be allowed to become so obtuse that it creates a barrier to its interpretation. In virtual worlds, the complexity of the technology, the conceptuality of interactivity can create this barrier. Yet whichever approach is used, speech cannot be retracted, except by saying that one is retracting it. Once the word has been uttered in the text, it becomes part of the story lexia (constitutive elements or unique units of meaning within the text). The tacit contract that is established between people to regulate relations is often not respected. This also applies to the contract between author and reader. If modes of authorship, textual representation and analysis are established and then contravened, the relationship itself breaks down, and the text cannot be accessed.

VISUALISATION OF LARGE DATA SETS

Lev Manovich’s team at the Software Studies Initiative and Cultural Analytics Lab visualise quantified data in order to research and exhibit visual culture; ‘media visualizations methods give us new ways to understand the history of photography, to compare content and aesthetics of millions of photographs being created today’ (Sutton, 2011 p. 19). Manovich considers the process of digital image creation and storage, and the skill set and knowledge that is required to work with digital data:

if we want to think about photography today, we should consider its new condition as data organized in data structures and databases, and the interfaces and the logic of popular software used to access, edit, and distribute this data.

(Sutton, 2011 p. 19)

His team create these visual artefacts using a process they call mediavis to ‘democratise data mining’ where specialist knowledge of statistics is not required to visually represent the patterns that are found within large data sets. This computational analysis of media data allows us to consider cultural memory. Vast stores of information, generated for both local and global consumption, framed and reframed by social and economic context, a manipulation of the historical record.

METADATA: TAGGING ARCHIVED CONTENT

Software interfaces use a common architecture. This ensures users can adapt quickly to new functionality that is embedded within a recognisable display. Digital images are tagged with metadata that describes and classifies them; ‘all media now share the condition of “searchability”. The degree of searchability depends on the type and amount of metadata stored with the objects’ (Sutton, 2011 p. 19). The person tagging the data is making informed choices on the relevance of their selections, personalising the process and leaving their archival mark for future researchers. Digital images have a high degree of ‘remixability’. Elements can be isolated and combined with other media. Even traditional photographs, shot on film, are digitised for curation and exhibition so that they eventually become digital artefacts which can be incorporated into mediavis. Manovich questions the definition of photography that includes both the traditional and new media:

it is hard for me to accept that Daguerreotypes and contemporary photography belong to the same medium. Perhaps there was never such a thing as photography. It was just a series of different media lumped together.

(Sutton, 2011 p. 20)

The metatagging of traditional photographic images is different to the capturing of digital images where metadata is attached at the moment of creation.

THE PHOTO ARCHIVE

The Magnum photo agency was founded in 1947 and has since created a significant image archive of contemporary culture, important events, news stories and celebrities. Both the archival database of images and new photographs are metatagged with descriptive data to allow future researchers to discover and digitally mine their content. However, the creator of the metatags will exert great influence over this research as it is their perspective of the image object that the tags ‘describe’. Therefore, ‘the resulting narrative is a construct, created by a storyteller to suit contemporary political and commercial needs’ (McErlean, 2014).

In 1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes ‘envisioned libraries of images – images of everything, a record of every architectural detail, where the original object is no longer needed’ (McErlean, 2014). He proposed that the knowledge detail of important objects could be made available in multiple centres around the world. The photographs, drawings, descriptions and measurements of the works would provide an alternative experience to the original, one that is not unique, but that was certainly more accessible. ‘Authentic recreations’ of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus and replicas of treasures taken from his tomb recently toured Europe, offering the ‘experience’ of closely viewing this archaeological discovery. The Metropolitan Museum in New York exhibits a late sixteenth-century carved oak panelled room from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, England which was taken apart and shipped to the US in the early 1900s. The display allows one to walk around and touch the original wood walls, yet the sense of ‘presence’ is diminished due to the fact that the room is no longer in-situ. You are inside it, but it is not in its original geographical location. The experience of visiting the room creates an approximation of Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’ which described art’s ‘unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (Benjamin, 1999 p. 214). In 1998 I stood in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin and listened to a street-based sound installation which played audio recordings dating back to the 1930s – live recordings of political speeches, public gatherings and incidents which had taken place on or near that spot. It was the sense of presence that made the recordings so profound. I was listening to an aural perspective of an historical event that had taken place in that same spatial location.

PHOTOGRAMMETRY: CYBER-ARCHAEOLOGY

Information held on databases can be exploited to create new digital versions of any object. In the Universidad de Murcia (Murcia, Spain), Project Mosul is collecting crowd-sourced images of rare artefacts which have been lost to violence and natural disasters. These ‘cyber-archaeologists’ use a technique called photogrammetry ‘to turn multiple 2D photographs of a single object into 3D images’ (Webb, 2015) in order to create a digital facsimile. The researchers have requested that members of the public submit their travel holiday images of specific (recently destroyed) sites. The images are collated, then used to construct a photo-realistic digital version of the artefact, one that could even be used in the future to build a physical copy of the original.

TREND-IDENTIFYING ALGORITHMS

The storytelling app Wattpad allows writers to upload and share stories with a global online community (Laporte, 2016). The app enables users to receive highly responsive and detailed feedback from readers. It is used as a marketing tool. 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios have promoted films on Wattpad, asking contributors to create stories that are related to their latest release. Wattpad authors with significant levels of readership have had stories optioned by film companies to go into full-scale production. The site uses ‘trend-identifying algorithms to try and tap new writers and ideas’, then partner them with studios and distribution networks. Data analytics produce a ‘nuanced data supply’ that shows which scenes, chapters and paragraphs resonated most with audiences, and which didn’t. Data also includes reader demographics, location, time spent on specific sections, and can be used to spot a career trajectory on the rise. The site’s global reach means that they can have ‘local writers writing for local audiences’. As the Wattpad community socialises in and around serialised texts, the writers develop a direct relationship with their fans, communicating with them regularly for feedback and comment.

NETFLIX QUANTUM THEORY

‘Netflix Quantum Theory’ uses tagged film elements to data-mine viewing figures. Algorithms process the data and the statistics are cross-referenced with audience demographics to offer personalised recommendations to individual customers. ‘Netflix has created a database of 76,897 micro-genres that offer a peek into the American psyche’ (Angelica, 2014). The information is also used to identify a particular demand for audiovisual content that can be commissioned or purchased from local and international production companies.

Contextual operating systems will data-mine so much information about your online habits and preferences that they will pre-empt user choices and make decisions on your behalf to search the web, launch apps, even before you make the decision yourself. In other words, your operating system will know you intimately.

AUTHORING MULTIPLE NARRATIVE TRAJECTORIES

A database of audiovisual clips can be presented in any order using both linear and nonlinear access. Clips can be ‘navigated’ by the user via screen-based, tactile or gesture-controlled interfaces. Navigating the narrative enables different viewers to gain different perspectives on a single story. These perspectives are what make interactive film fundamentally different from linear film. The word ‘interactive’ has many different meanings in new media discourse. What is often referred to as interactive is seldom anything more than user choice, i.e. the user can decide to pick a navigation route marked ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’. While this choice affects the resulting navigation of the story it is difficult to argue that the viewer has actually interacted with the narrative. The narrative already exists as written by the author. The narrative options may be varied but the user interaction is not ‘creating’ narrative pathways. Instead, interaction allows the user to navigate various pre-existing options.

Lev Manovich refers to these pathways as ‘multiple trajectories’. He notes that allowing the user the option to select one of these multiple trajectories does not constitute the development of an interactive narrative: ‘the author also has to control the semantics of the elements and the logic of their connection so that the resulting object will meet the criteria of narrative’ (Manovich, 2002 p. 228).

THE DATABASE

The database holds the ‘content’ that the reader will observe as they navigate the story. Deleuze and Guattari call the database either a striated place to travel through or a smooth place to be explored for pleasure and discovery (Ryan, 2001 p. 47). Manovich calls a database a ‘structured collection of data’. Different types of database have been developed by the IT sector including hierarchical, network, relational and object-oriented. These are selected according to the system being developed, e.g. library lending system, traffic flow, aviation, and command and control systems. Complex database models can cross-reference information in order to present new data that has been developed ‘on-the-fly’. In most new-media projects the database is a simple one that calls single database elements according to the user’s selections. The Internet is a simple database model which presents images, text and downloadable files according to an HTML document. This document provides layout information that indicates the relative size and position of each element: ‘a web page is a sequential list of separate elements’ (Manovich, 2002 p. 220). HTML is a universal protocol that all web browsers can work with. This ensures that web pages written in HTML will be presented as intended, no matter what part of the world they are being viewed in.

Many new-media objects work as databases; ‘they appear as collections of items on which the user can perform various operations’ (Manovich, 2002 p. 219). Web pages are continually updated, so this presents new problems in narrative terms. A new approach to narrative structures must be employed if a website is to be seen as a story and not simply a collection of data elements. This highlights ‘the anti-narrative logic of the web’ where ‘the result is a collection, not a story’ (Manovich, 2002 p. 221). Manovich identifies several examples of database narratives including Chris Marker’s IMMEMORY (1997) and George Legrady’s Tracing (1997) and Slippery Traces (1996). ‘As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)’ (Manovich, 2002 p. 225).

HYPERNARRATIVE

Manovich defines hypernarrative (interactive narrative) as ‘the sum of multiple trajectories through a database’ (Manovich, 2002 p. 227). He gives an example of this in the online narrative My Boyfriend came Back from the War (1996) by Olia Lialina. This story offers multiple non-linear narrative threads through the conversation between a boyfriend and girlfriend when they meet after some time apart. Here, basic use is made of web technologies to offer an interactive narrative.

Manovich states that the author has to control the trajectories in terms of semantics and logic. Randomly chosen elements may not form a narrative. The author must identify narrative pathways and write around them. In this way, the author will have travelled every route that the potential audience may travel. Some narrative pathways may be redundant in that they do not progress the story. The author will probably remove these, as they would result in the reader losing interest. The database of narrative nodes, or pre-scripted chapters which the audience can navigate between, has been written in advance. The navigation of the individual reader is in flux, yet the database elements are static; ‘the narrative is virtual while the database exists materially’ (Manovich, 2002 p. 231).

Spatialised narrative was once the dominant form of European visual culture. It ended up only in comics and technical illustrations. New media presents information on the screen simultaneously. When physical interaction is built into an interface it takes the form of interaction between the user and the computer at the expense of psychological interaction. Icons are presented on screen to represent elements of data that can be retrieved in full by clicking on the link. Data is retrieved in its original form without any user-initiated change to its structure. A more sophisticated interaction would allow the user’s selections to alter the physical construct of the data being presented. Therefore, the composition of the data (film clip, photograph, sound clip) would depend on the user’s input.

Cinema and books are traditionally seen as linear presentations of pre-written texts. New-media content is considered non-linear due to the navigation structure that employs hyperlinks to data elements. However, traditional books can also be accessed in a non-linear mode and still make coherent sense. Readers often revisit chapters and paragraphs for clarification or enjoyment before continuing on with the general thrust of the story. Films in digital format allow non-sequential access to their content that enables viewers to skip back and forward through ‘chapters’. Pages in websites that use a ‘branch-based-navigation structure often have to be read sequentially before the user can be sure where specific content actually is. After reading everything the site has to offer, the user goes back to the home page to begin a ‘nonlinear navigation’.

EXTRACTIVE HYPERTEXT AND IMMERSIVE 3D

Interface navigation is interaction with the text; this cannot be passive, as it requires work on the part of the audience in the form of decisions. Peter Lunenfeld’s research into immersive navigation noted two interaction paradigms within the application of database technologies: ‘extractive’ hypertext and ‘immersive’ 3D worlds (Lister et al, 2003 p. 21). The database has been created by the author and effectively contains many narrative perspectives and outcomes. The experience is controlled through interaction, which can be dynamic or passive. Interactive texts offer many navigational pathways through the narrative. This makes comparisons of texts difficult. Different readers will have different perspectives on the story depending on their navigational choices, making conceptual and critical comparisons of interactive texts difficult. For many, the only way to discuss such a text is to talk about the metanarrative or world text that encompasses the general story. Specific analyses of character relationships and plot interactions are difficult as readers may or may not have experienced them despite interacting with the text fully. A successful interactive text will leave the reader feeling satisfied, despite having navigated the text through just one perspectival route. If the reader feels the need to continue reading until all database elements have been read, then the interactive text is a glorified linear narrative. The traditional method of comparing notes on the text will be superseded by the experience of ‘sharing’ textual elements that may have been missed or explored through to navigational decisions. The text has been ‘read’ but not all the database elements have been visited. Readers will therefore continue to learn more about the story following the reading experience when they talk to other readers who have followed different perspectival routes. This is not so different from the subjective analysis of linear texts. It is common for readers to share their thoughts on significant text elements that may not have been noticed by other readers.

ASSOCIATIVE LINKAGE

The method of accessing the database elements may follow an associative linkage structure. Associative linkage, like hypertext, is how the mind works. Memories are connected by related elements; story elements in an interactive narrative are related by content. Protohypertexts are texts that challenge the linearity of texts – examples are I Ching, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Joyce’s Ulysses, various stories by Borges, Calvino and Robert Coover; in cinema films by Vertov, Eisenstein and Kurosawa. The traditional model is being usurped in the quest to find a new model of storytelling, one that adds to the experience for the reader to make the story come alive, be more memorable and perhaps challenge the passive receptivity of modern audiences. Post-structural literary criticism argues that texts have an ‘intertextual character’, texts relate to other texts and the reader as much as the author creates meaning. Texts that have been read more than once have an expanded meaning to the reader as relationships between text elements begin to form. These may be the result of more in-depth analysis, or external factors that are now impacting on the reader’s interpretation. Books can be navigated more freely, whereas hypertext links must be checked to avoid downloading the same information. In interactive texts, accessing the same content over and over is often seen as a mistake and leads to less satisfaction in the reader who was expecting fresh content leading to new experiences.

GENRE CLASSIFICATION

Data can be categorised according to genre. This has been used to develop virtual radio broadcasters that transmit a series of musical pieces which are connected through history, tempo, artists, format etc. A database of music contains several thousand tracks. Each track is placed in categories and subcategories. An algorithm builds a playlist made up of a musical medley of ‘connected’ tracks. This is like a physical library where related texts are placed on the same shelf. With the music database, the tracks are selected to gradually change the mood of the music being played to keep the audience interested.

THE CINEMATIC METAPHOR

Interacting with content emphasises the production process. Without interaction, scenes tail off waiting for user input. If a scene reaches the end of its timeline it must repeat, or go to a ‘waiting point’. This suspends narrative progress indefinitely while the story engine waits for input. Traditional interactive stories cannot proceed without input, and so the user becomes fundamental to the story (Manovich, 2002 p. 298).

The database is a fundamental component of interactive works. The interactive developer creates a database of story elements, to be accessed non-sequentially via a navigational interface. Adding story elements to the database increases the potential complexity of the narrative, and gives greater choice to the reader. However, the increase in complexity may lead to a directly proportional breakdown in narrative cohesion. Navigation pathways through the database elements should make sense to the reader and follow the rules of semantics and logic.

The database can hold information and simply retrieve it when called; or it can create data spontaneously in response to user interactions. Websites record user navigation and make changes to subsequent pages depending on user input. This dynamic build creates a unique experience for the user that is different from all others. The large volumes of data being made available by national broadcasters is leading to new navigational interfaces being developed to access this content in a logical and informed way. An intelligent interface tracks users’ navigational pathways. The database of content will grow exponentially and will reduce the shared experience of televisual and cinematic audiences. The database will allow content to be viewed at the user’s discretion, an individualistic approach that is unlike traditional broadcasting. However, current websites that offer video content for download feature ratings systems that are just like the audience monitoring systems employed by traditional broadcasters. Popular files receive the most requests for download in a relatively narrow time frame, which creates a shared viewing experience much like traditional broadcasting. Even the most popular files eventually fade into obscurity, having already been viewed by anyone who was interested. After this, the videos may be watched occasionally, but the elevated interest following their initial ‘release’ has passed. The Little Extras interactive film model created the potential for a database of film clips or scenes to be accessed via a graphic user interface. The organisation of scenes using a database allowed the footage to be accessed in a nonlinear manner. Eventually these clips will be codified and filed according to their content. Viewers will be presented with clips according to database rules and in response to user interaction.

NON-TRADITIONAL FILM: GORDON’S ‘TEMPORAL DECELERATION’

Mark B.N. Hansen offers several arguments against many of Manovich’s theories on cinematic metaphor and presents several examples of contemporary reworking of traditional films. Hansen opposes many of Manovich’s theories and is particularly scathing on ‘cinematic metaphor’ as applied to new media (Hansen, 2006 p. 1). Hansen rejects Manovich’s use of cinematic terms of reference to predict the future of interactive film. He believes that new media, with their computer-based architecture, requires a fundamentally different theoretical approach. Hansen focuses on alternative and non-traditional film works by independent film-makers. 24hr Psycho (1993) is the original Hitchcock version of the film slowed down to two frames per second so that it takes twenty-four hours to play. Director Douglas Gordon is working with ‘temporal deceleration’ to focus the audience on the micro details of individual frames. The amount of time available allows greater deconstruction of the frame elements. Gordon also created a 47-day projection of The Searchers (1956) called 5 Year Drive-By (1995) (Media Kunst Netz, 1999).

EMERGENT NARRATIVES

Emergent narratives allow users to configure their own experience within a story world; ‘true emergent properties involve a series of interacting, interlocking systems, out of which arise novel solutions that the designer hasn’t planned’ (Biswas, 2016). With traditional texts, readers engage with a logically structured narrative, discovering and interpreting plot elements. An emergent narrative allows discovery in a ‘world pre-seeded with possibility’. Warner Brothers’ Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis system tracks the hierarchical relationships of characters and their ‘procedurally chosen personalities’; individual characters remember your interactions with them and react accordingly on subsequent encounters. Sharang Biswas believes that emergent narratives are simply a ‘different species’ to the more rigidly structured traditional stories. He notes Mark Brown’s question on how narrative devices such as foreshadowing and pacing could possibly be replicated in such ‘systemic narratives’. Yet, in both story forms the reader ‘unpacks’ the story, piecing it together to make sense of it and to interpret the author’s intention.

TRIANGULATING CONTENT

New distribution channels allow greater monitoring of user access. They offer audiences non-scheduled content targeted towards specific market segments. Twentieth-century mass media standardised ‘content, distribution and production’ to control and regulate media output and to set ‘very clear distinctions between consumers and producers’ (Lister et al, 2003 p.31). New distribution outlets enable authors to publish niche content, where the audience can access a range of related materials and triangulate their opinions, drawing on their own experiences and their reading of the text. While these outlets may give voice to many opinions, the boundaries between credible, trustworthy sources and unreliable ones is less clear.

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This chapter has dealt with various methods of codifying texts and has explored the text as an archive. It has also considered the work of storytellers who have organised their work into a searchable database. An interactive narrative will need to codify the content of story elements (video, stills, text, graphics, audio) to coordinate their presentation depending on engagement with the interactive interface. The method of codification and codification criteria may refer to story content; colour analysis of frames; descriptors of atmosphere, mood, tone. ‘Describing’ the content allows it to be organised within a defined database structure. The creation of a story algorithm will arrange the codified content according to interactivity to build a unique and customised presentation.

The codification of content creates a significant level of work for the author/director. The interface of an interactive text is designed to work autonomously, independent of its creator whose influence ends when the story product is delivered to the reader. Faults in the interface will become features of the narrative; this is already a feature in online games where advanced players exploit bugs in the system. The test for an interactive film text is to create an immersive world that is also challenging and emotive. Where codified content is presented to the audience via an interface, the interface becomes part of the story structure. The interface takes the part of the narrator of traditional texts. Therefore, the interface must have a distinctive ‘voice’ that is recognisable to the audience as the authority on the story. The level of interface complexity and distinction should not become so distracting that it impedes viewer interaction with the text.