CHAPTER 11
Interactivity and Its Effects

 

Handler Miller Carolyn

How does the use of interactivity radically change the way an audience experiences a narrative?

How does the use of interactivity radically change the narrative material itself?

What are the pros and cons of giving the audience some control over the story?

What techniques can be used to help create cohesion in works of digital storytelling?

© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-240-81343-1.00001-7

WHAT IS INTERACTIVITY?

Without interactivity, digital entertainment would simply be a duplicate of traditional entertainment, except that the medium in which it is presented, such as video or audio, would be in a digital form rather than an analog form. To the audience member or listener, however, the difference would be minimal except perhaps in the quality of the picture or sound. Essentially, the experience of “consuming” the entertainment would be exactly the same.

It is interactivity that makes digital media such a completely different animal from traditional storytelling forms, like movies, television, and novels. All stories, no matter how they are told—whether recited by a shaman, projected onto a movie screen, or played out on a game console—have certain universal qualities: They portray characters caught up in a dramatic situation, depicting events from the inception of the drama to its conclusion. Interactivity, however, profoundly changes the core material, and it profoundly changes the experience of those who are the receivers of it.

We’ve all probably heard and used the word “interactivity” hundreds, even thousands, of times. Because of overuse, the word has lost its fresh edge, somewhat like a kitchen knife that has grown dull because it’s been utilized so often. Let’s take a moment to consider what interactivity means and what it does.

Interactivity is a two-part word. The first part, inter, a prefix, means “between,” implying a two-way exchange, a dialogue. The second part, active, means doing something, being involved or engaged. Thus the word as a whole indicates an active relationship between two entities. When used in the context of narrative content, it indicates a relationship where both entities—the audience and the material—are responsive to each other. You, the audience member, have the ability to manipulate, explore, or influence the content in one of a variety of ways, and the content can respond. Or the content demands something from you, and you respond.

Essentially, interactivity is one of only two possible ways of relating to narrative content; the other way is to relate to it passively. If you are passively enjoying a form of entertainment, you are doing nothing more than watching, listening, or reading. But with interactive content, you actually become a participant. This is radically different from the way narratives have traditionally been experienced.

INTERACTIVITY AS A CONVERSATION

Interactivity can be thought of as a conversation between the user and the content, a concept articulated to me by Greg Roach during a conversation about the subject. Roach is CEO of HyperBole Studios, the company that made such award-winning games as The X-Files Game and Quantum Gate, and as a digital media pioneer, he has given a great deal of thought to the subject of interactivity.

Roach compared the act of designing interactivity to the act of writing a sentence in a language like English, which uses the grammatical structure of a subject, object, and verb. As an example, he used a simple interactive scene in which you give your character a gun. The interactive “sentence” would be: He (the subject) can shoot (the verb) another character (the object). Carrying Roach’s grammatical analogy a step further, the sentences you construct in interactive media use the active voice and are not weighed down by descriptive phrases. (“He watered his horse” rather than “He was seen leading his dusty old horse down to the rocky creek, where he encouraged it to drink.”) These interactive sentences are short and to the point, far more like Hemingway than Faulkner.

Roach is not alone in using grammatical terms to talk about interactivity. Many game designers use the phrase verb set in referring to the actions that can be performed in an interactive work. The verb set of a game consists of all the things players can make their characters do. The most common verbs are walk, run, turn, jump, pick up, and shoot.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE AUDIENCE?

The way one experiences interactive entertainment is so different from the way passive entertainment is experienced that we rarely even use the word “audience” when we are talking about interactive works. More often than not, we talk about such people in the singular rather than in the plural. This is probably because each individual journeys through the interactive environment as a solo traveler, and each route through the material is unique to that person.

Because each user is in control of his or her own path through the material, interactivity can never truly be a mass audience experience. This is the case even when thousands of people are simultaneously participating in an interactive work, as they may be doing with a MMOG or an iTV show. Think how different this is from how an audience partakes of a movie or TV show, watching the same unvarying story unfold simultaneously with hundreds—or even millions—of other viewers. Of course, each member of the audience is running the story through his or her own personal flter and is probably having a somewhat different emotional response to the material. Yet no matter how intensely people might be reacting, there is nothing any member of the audience can do to alter a single beat of the tale.

It is an entirely different case when we are talking about interactive entertainment, and we may call upon one of several terms to describe the person who is in the process of experiencing it. If we’re referring to someone playing a videogame, we will use the term “player” or “gamer,” while if a person is surfing the Web, we may use the term “visitor,” and for simulations and immersive environments, we often call the person a “participant.” One term that fits all types of interactive experiences is the word “user,” which is the standard term we are employing in this book.

THE USER, THE AUTHOR, AND INTERACTIVITY

The people who participate in interactive entertainments are given two gifts that are never offered to audiences of passive entertainments: choice and control. They get to choose what to see and do within an interactive work, and the decisions they make have an impact on the story. Less than 50 years ago, such freedom to manipulate a work of entertainment would have been unimaginable.

The user’s ability to control aspects of the narrative is called agency. Essentially, agency gives the user the ability to make choices and to see and enjoy the results of those choices. Agency is one of the unique pleasures of digital storytelling. It is not limited to the kinds of verb sets we discussed earlier (run, jump, shoot, and so on) but also allows the user to navigate through the story space, create an avatar, change points of view, and enjoy many other kinds of interactive experiences that we will discuss later in this chapter.

Agency is something that is built into an interactive work right from the start, as an integral part of the concept, and in fact helps define what kind of work it will be. It is up to the creative team to decide what kind of agency the user will have and how it will be integrated into the work. Experienced interactive designers and producers know that great care must be given to crafting the way the user can interact with the work. Interactivity must be meaningful to be satisfying. In other words, the choices offered must make sense, must have consequences that make sense, and what the user does must have a true impact on the story. Users will quickly become dissatisfied with pointless, empty interactivity.

Many kinds of interactive works, most particularly virtual worlds and MMOGs, have been plagued with run-amuck agency with a handful of players threatening to spoil the fun the designers had intended to offer. These ill-spirited players have had their avatars bully other players, engage in lewd acts, and even rob, steal, and murder.

As the Chevy Tahoe campaign illustrates, agency is a gift to the user but can cause serious trouble for the creative team. Designers invest a significant amount of time in devising ways to prevent the agency they offer from getting out of hand, while not unduly restricting the sense of freedom they want to give to the users. Agency can also thrust writers of interactive works into an unfamiliar and uncomfortable position, particularly if they come from the worlds of more traditional forms of writing like screenplays, novels, or television shows. In those fields, the writer has God-like powers over the narrative. The writer gets to choose who the characters are, what they do, and what they say. And the writer controls what happens to them. But in an interactive work, this kind of God-like control over the material must be shared with those individuals who, in an earlier era, would have been powerless and in your thrall—the members of the audience.

Although agency gives users exciting new powers, not all the benefits go to them, and the creators of interactive narratives benefit, too. While it’s true that those of use who are writers must give up a certain amount of control, we now have the opportunity to work on a far vaster canvas than in previous media and with story tools never before available. We also have the exhilarating chance to create brand new kinds of narratives. And despite the amount of agency given to the user, we still do retain ultimate authorial control. We, along with our fellow design team members, create the project’s narrative world and its possibilities; the kinds of characters who will live there and the kinds of challenges they will face; and the specific actions the users will be able to take there.

IMMERSIVENESS

One of the hallmarks of a successful interactive production is that it envelops the user in a rich, fully involving environment. The user interacts with the virtual world and the characters and objects within it in many ways and on many levels, and the experience might even be multisensory, meaning that it may stimulate multiple senses. In other words, an interactive production is immersive. It catches you up and involves you in ways that passive forms of entertainment can rarely do.

The power of immersiveness was brought home to me by an experience I had during the Christmas season one year in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was my first year of living there, and I’d heard a great deal about the city’s traditional holiday procession called Las Posadas, so I decided to see it for myself.

Las Posadas originated in medieval Spain as a nativity passion play and was brought to New Mexico about 400 years ago by the Spanish missionaries. They felt Las Posadas would be a simple and dramatic way to ignite the religious spirit of the local Pueblo Indians and hopefully turn them into good Catholics.

Las Posadas, which is Spanish for “the inns,” recreates the Biblical story of Mary and Joseph’s search for a place to spend the night and where Mary can give birth. It is performed with different variations in towns all over the Southwest and Mexico, but the basic elements remain the same. In Santa Fe, the procession takes place around the historic town plaza. Mary and Joseph, accompanied by a group of musicians and carolers, go from building to building asking for admittance, but each time the devil appears and denies them entrance, until at last they find a place that will receive them.

On the evening of Santa Fe’s Las Posadas, my husband and I waited in the crowd with the other spectators, all of us clutching candles and shivering in the icy night air, waiting for the event to begin. Finally the first members of the procession appeared, holding torches to light the way. Mary and Joseph followed, with a group of carolers around them. The group paused in front of a building not far from us, and all proceeded to sing the traditional song, which pleads for lodging. The devil popped up from a hiding place on the roof and scornfully sang his song of refusal. It was very colorful, very different from anything I’d seen before back in California, and I was glad we had come.

But then I noticed that a number of people were breaking away from the throng of bystanders and joining in the procession. Spontaneously, I pulled my startled husband into the street after them. In a fash, we went from being observers to being participants, and we began to experience Las Posadas in an entirely different way. Marching with the procession, we became part of the drama, too, and were fully immersed in it.

For the hour or so that it lasted, I became someone else. No longer was I a twenty-first century Jewish writer. I became a pious Catholic pilgrim transported back to a wintry medieval Spanish village. Some of this I experienced on a personal and physical level: I had to watch my step, taking care not to slip on a patch of ice or trip on a curb or get ahead of the holy family. I was aware of the scent of burning candles all around me and the press of the crowd. Much of the experience was emotional and communal: My husband and I would do our best to sing along with the carolers and holy family when it came time to ask for a room at the inn. Whenever the devil would appear on a rooftop or balcony, we would join in the hearty boos and derisive shouts of the processioners.

The best moment came when Mary and Joseph stopped in front of the heavy gates of the historic Palace of the Governors, the former seat of New Mexico’s colonial government. Once again we all sang the imploring song, but this time the gates swung open! A joyous cheer went up from the processioners, our voices among them, and we all surged into the courtyard. Welcoming bonfires and cups of hot cocoa awaited us.

Becoming part of Las Posadas instead of merely observing it transformed the experience for me. It was like the difference between watching a movie and suddenly becoming a character in it. To me, it vividly demonstrated the power of immersiveness—one of the most compelling and magical aspects of interactive media.

TYPES OF INTERACTIVITY

Users can interact with digital content in a variety of ways, and different types of interactive media lend themselves to different types of interactivity. For instance, the Internet is particularly good at providing opportunities to communicate with other users; smart toys excel at offering one-on-one play experiences; wireless devices do well at engaging users in short bursts of text or visuals. Each of the interactive media has its limitations, as well. In an immersive environment, a participant’s ability to control objects may be limited. Game consoles, unless connected to the Internet, are restricted to just a few players at a time. Interactive TV (iTV), at least for now, does not lend itself to interactions with fictional characters or with participating in a narrative story. When it comes to the types of interactivity offered by the various digital media, no one size fits all.

That said, however, six basic types of interactivity can be found in almost every form of digital storytelling. They are like the basic foodstuffs a good cook always keeps in the pantry that can be used to make a wide variety of dishes. The basic types of interactivity are as follows:

1. Stimulus and response. The stimulus might be something as simple as a highlighted image that the user clicks on and is rewarded by a little animated sequence or hearing a funny sound, or it might involve having to solve a puzzle, after which the user is rewarded by the occurrence of some sought-after event: The door to the safe swings open or a character reveals a secret. Generally speaking, the stimulus comes from the program and the response from the user, although there are exceptions. For instance, smart toys recognize and respond to actions taken by their child owners. The stimulus-response exchange is a universal component of all interactive programming.
2. The ability to navigate and move. Users can move through the program in a free-form manner; in other words, they can simply choose what to do. Navigation may offer a vast 3-D world to explore, as in a videogame or MMOG. Or it may be more limited, restricted to choosing options from a menu offered on a DVD or icons on a Web site. Navigation, like the stimulus-response exchange, is a universal component of every form of interactive programming.
3. Control of virtual objects. This includes such things as shooting guns, opening drawers, and moving items from one place to another. While a fairly common form of interactivity, this one is not universal.
4. Communication. The user can communicate with other characters, including those controlled by the computer and other human players. Communication can be done via text that the user types in or via choosing from a dialogue menu, by voice, or by actions (such as squeezing a smart doll’s hand). Generally, communication goes both ways—characters or other players can communicate with the user, too. As with #3, it is a common, but not universal form of interactivity.
5. The sending of information. The type of information that can be sent can range from comments to online forums to videos to YouTube, and it can also include the creation of objects for virtual worlds. This form of interactivity is generally found in devices that have a connection to the Internet or to an iTV service.
6. Receiving or acquiring items. The nature of the material that can be received can range from virtual to concrete, and the methods of acquiring it can range greatly as well. Users can collect information (such as news bulletins or medical facts); purchase physical objects (books or clothing); and receive video on demand. They can also collect virtual objects or assets in a game (a magic sword; the ability to fly). This type of interactivity is common in any medium that involves the Internet, wireless services, or iTV, as well as almost all videogames.

Using these six basic “ingredients,” digital creators can cook up a great diversity of playing games. There is an almost infinite variety of games that users can play (trivia experiences for people to participate in). They include:

1. Games, adventure games, shooters, mysteries, ball games, role-playing games, and so on.
2. Participating in a fictional narrative.
3. Exploring a virtual environment.
4. Controlling a simulated vehicle or device: a fighter jet, a submarine, a space ship, or a machine gun.
5. Creating an avatar, including its physical appearance, personality traits, and skills.
6. Manipulating virtual objects: changing the color, shape, or size of an object; changing the notes in a piece of music; changing the physical appearance of a room.
7. Constructing virtual objects such as houses, clothing, tools, towns, machines, and vehicles.
8. Taking part in polls, surveys, voting, tests, and contests.
9. Interacting with smart physical objects: dolls, robotic pets, wireless devices, animatronic characters.
10. Learning about something. Interactive learning experiences include edutainment games for children, training programs for employees, and online courses for students.
11. Taking part in a simulation, either for educational purposes or for entertainment.
12. Setting a virtual clock or calendar to change, compress, or expand time.
13. Socializing with others and participating in a virtual community.
14. Searching for various types of information or for clues in a game.
15. Sending or receiving items, for free or for money, including physical objects, virtual objects, VOD, and information.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, though it does illustrate the great variety of experiences that interactivity can offer and the uses to which it can be put.

HOW INTERACTIVITY IMPACTS CONTENT

These various forms of interacting inevitably affect your content. Users expect to be offered a selection of choices, but by offering them, you give up your ability to tell a strictly determined linear story or to provide information in a fixed order.

To see how this works, let’s compare a linear and interactive version of a familiar story, the Garden of Eden episode from the Bible. The Garden of Eden episode is one of the best-known creation stories in the Western world, and thus seems an appropriate choice to illustrate the creative possibilities of changing a linear story into an interactive one.

As it is handed down in Genesis, the story involves three mortal characters: Adam, Eve, and the serpent. Each of them behaves in exactly the same way no matter how often one reads about them in the Old Testament. And the alluring tree that is the centerpiece of the story is always the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God has warned Adam and Eve not to eat its fruit, though they are free to enjoy anything else in the garden. The serpent, however, convinces Eve to sample the forbidden fruit, which she does. She gets Adam to try it, too, at which point they lose their innocence and are expelled from the Garden.

Now let’s construct an interactive version of the same story. We’ll use the same three characters and the same tree but offer the player an array of choices. Let’s say the tree now offers five kinds of fruit, each with the potential for a different outcome. If Eve picks the pomegranate, for instance, she might immediately become pregnant; if she eats too many cherries, she might get fat; only if she eats the forbidden fruit would the narrative progress toward the results depicted in the Bible.

As for the serpent, let’s allow the user to decide what this character should be: malevolent or kindly, wise or silly. We’ll let the user decide how Eve responds to him, too. She might ignore him, or tell him to get lost, or try to turn him into a docile house pet, or she might actually listen to him, as she does in the Bible. We’ll give the user a chance to determine the nature of Adam and Eve’s exchange, too. Adam might reject Eve’s suggestion to try the fruit, or he might come up with several suggestions of his own (open up a fruit stand or make jam out of the tree’s cherries). Or they may hotly disagree with each other, resulting in the Bible’s first marital spat. Suddenly we have a vast multitude of permutations springing out of a simple story.

Note that all of this complexity comes from merely allowing the player one of several options at various nodes in the story. But what if you gave the players other types of interactive tools? You might allow them the opportunity to explore the entire Garden of Eden and interact with anything in it. They could investigate its rocky grottos, follow paths through the dense foliage, or even snoop around Adam and Eve’s private glade. Or what if you turned this into a simulation and let users design their own Garden of Eden? Or how would it be if you turned this into a role-playing game and let the user play as Adam, as Eve, or even as the serpent? Or what if you designed this as a community experience and gave users the chance to vote on whether Eve should be blamed for committing the original sin?

Our simple story is now fragmenting into dozens of pieces. What once progressed in an orderly manner, with a straightforward beginning, middle, and end, and had a clear and simple plot, has now fallen into total anarchy. If adding interactivity to a simple story like the Garden of Eden can create such chaos, what does it do to a more complex work?

USING GAMING TECHNIQUES TO SUPPLY THE MISSING COHESION

Because interactivity can break up the cohesiveness of a narrative, it becomes necessary to look for other ways to tie the various elements together and to supply the momentum that, in traditional storytelling, would be supplied by the plot. Many professionals in digital media believe that the best solution is to use a gaming model as the core of an interactive work and build narrative elements around it. Games provide an attractive solution because they involve competition, contain obstacles and a goal, and achieving the goal is usually a game’s driving force. While stories in traditional media use these same elements, they are less obvious, and great attention is placed on other things, such as character development, motivation, the relationship between characters, and so on.

Designer Greg Roach, introduced earlier in this chapter, is one of those professionals who is inclined to turn to games to help knit the various pieces of an interactive work together. “When you discard all aspects of gaming, how do you motivate people to move through the narrative?” he asks rhetorically. “The fundamental mechanisms of games are valuable because they provide the basic tool sets.”

Roach sees stories and games as two very different types of artifacts—artifacts being objects created by human beings. Roach says, “A story is an artifact you experience as a dynamic process while a game is a process you enter into that creates an artifact when it ends.” Roach feels that interactive works have, as he puts it, “immense granularity.” Granularity is a term Roach and others in interactive media use to mean the quality of being composed of many extremely small pieces.

Roach describes films and other types of linear narratives as “monoliths, like a block of salt,” and for interactivity to be possible, he says the monoliths must be broken up into fine pieces. “These granules of information can be character, atmosphere, or action. But if a work is too granular, if the user is inputting constantly, there are no opportunities for story.” Roach stresses that in order to have an interactive story, “You must find a balance between granularity and solidity. You need to find the ”˜sweet spot’—the best path through the narrative, the one with the optimum number of variables.”

Despite the differences between stories and games, Roach believes a middle ground can be found, a place to facilitate story and character development in an interactive environment.

One of the challenges Roach sees in constructing a nongaming interactive story is the task of providing the player with motivation, an incentive to spend time working through the narrative. But he suggests an answer as well. Roach believes that people like to solve problems, the tougher the better, and he feels that a major distinction between games and stories is the types of problems they present plus the tools you can use to solve them. In a game, he suggested, the problem might be getting past the monster on the bridge. In a story, the problem might be getting your son off drugs and into rehabilitation.

GAMES AS ABSTRACT STORIES

Janet H. Murray, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of one of the best-known books on interactive narrative, Hamlet on the Holodeck, takes things a step further than Roach. In her book, she asserts that games and drama are actually quite closely aligned and that games are really a form of “abstract storytelling.”

To underscore the close connection between stories and games, Murray points out that one of our oldest, most pervasive, and popular types of games—the battle between opposing contestants or forces—is also one of the first and most basic forms of drama. The Greeks called this opposition agon, for conflict or contest. Murray reminds us that opposition, or the struggle between opposites, is one of the fundamental concepts that we use to interpret the world around us (big-little; boy-girl; good-evil).

Although Murray does not say so explicitly, every writer of screenplays is keenly aware of the importance of opposition and realizes that unless the hero of the drama is faced with an imposing challenge or opponent, a script will lack energy and interest. For an interactive narrative to work, it too must pit opposing forces against each other. Thus, games and dramas utilize the same key dynamic: opposition. This concept of opposition is so key to drama that it defines how we think of our heroes and villains.

Opposition is not the only way that games and drama are alike, Murray believes. She suggests, in fact, that games “can be experienced as symbolic drama.” She holds that games refect events that we have lived through or have had to deal with, though in a compressed form. When we play a game, she says, we become the protagonist of a symbolic action. Some of the life-based plot lines she feels can be found in games include:

• Being faced with an emergency and surviving it.
• Taking a risk and being rewarded for acting courageously.
• Finding a world that has fallen into ruin and managing to restore it.
• Being confronted with an imposing antagonist or difficult test of skill and achieving a successful outcome.

In many ways, Murray’s view of games is much like Joseph Campbell’s view of ritual ceremonies—activities that provide us with a way to give meaning to important life experiences and to provide us with emotional release. In its most powerful form, this emotional release is experienced as a catharsis.

STORIES THAT ARE NOT GAMES

In examining the relationship between stories and games, let us not forget what designer Greg Roach asserted: that it is possible to create interactive stories that are not based on game models. We can find examples of game-free narratives in many genres of digital storytelling. One small enclave of such narratives is called, fittingly enough, interactive fiction (IF). Works of IF can be found on the Internet, and they are also available on CD-ROMs. Though the creators and fans of IF are a fairly small group, often found within academic circles, they are dedicated to advancing this particular form of storytelling.

True works of IF are entirely text based (although the term is sometimes used for adventure games and other works that are animated or are done on video).

To see/read/play a work of IF, you need to be sitting in front of a computer, inputting your commands with a keyboard. The story advances and reveals itself as the user types in commands (“open the door” or “look under the bed” or “ask about the diamond”). Unlike hypertext, you must do more than click on a link; you must devise phrases that will give you the most meaningful and useful reply.

IF stories can be about almost any topic, and they can be written in just about any fictional genre, although they work best when the plots call for you to be active, to explore, and to make things happen. They need not be plot driven, however. Galatea, written by Emily Short, is an intriguing character sketch that is constructed as a dialogue between the user and a nonplayer character (NPC)—a character that is controlled by the computer. The story is based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who carves a beautiful statue, Galatea. The statue comes to life after he falls in love with her. It is the same myth that inspired the Broadway musical My Fair Lady.

In this interactive version of the myth, you visit the art gallery where Galatea is displayed and discover that you are able to talk with her. As you converse with her, you gain insights into her history and troubled emotional state. Her responses to your questions vary, as does her attitude toward you, depending on how you treat her.

IF stories resemble text-based adventure games as well as online MUDs and MOOs (MUD object oriented). Unlike MUDs and MOOs, however, they are played by a single individual rather than with a group. Furthermore, they do not have the win/lose outcomes that are so much a part of adventure games, though they do often include puzzles that must be solved in order to progress. These narratives cannot be as tightly plotted as linear fiction, but they do generally have overarching storylines.

Conceivably, the IF genre could be used as a model for interactive stories that are not merely text based but are told in moving images as well. Throughout this book, we will be examining other works of digital storytelling that contain no overt elements of gaming. These stories demonstrate that even though games are extremely useful vehicles for holding interactive narratives together, works of digital storytelling do not need to depend on game models in order to succeed.

CONCLUSION

Interactivity, as we have seen, profoundly changes the way we experience a work of entertainment. We go from being a passive member of the audience to becoming a participant with an active and meaningful role, wielding a new power called agency.

Interactivity, however, changes the role of the storyteller. Instead of being the sole creator of the story, this role must now be shared with the user. And interactivity makes the telling of a fixed, sequential, linear story impossible.

To knit the story together and make it compelling, storytellers must find new models to use. Many rely on game techniques to achieve narrative cohesion, although some digital storytellers are finding other ways to construct satisfying interactive narratives.

While interactivity creates new challenges for storytellers, it also gives them new powers. Thanks to interactivity, it is possible to tell stories that are deeply immersive and intensely absorbing, that take place on a much vaster canvas, and that can be experienced from more than one point of view. The challenge for storytellers is to find ways to use interactivity effectively so that users can enjoy both agency and a meaningful narrative experience.

IDEA-GENERATING EXERCISES

1. Describe an event or occasion where you went from being a passive observer to an active participant. How did this shift affect the way you experienced the event? Your example could be something as simple as going from being a passenger in a car to actually driving the vehicle, or it could involve a more complex situation, like the Las Posadas procession described in this chapter.
2. If you are working on a project for a specific interactive medium or platform, make a list of the types of interactivity the medium or platform lends itself to most strongly and the types of interactivity it does not support well or at all. Is your project making good use of the platform’s strengths and avoiding its weaknesses?
3. Take a very simple, familiar story and work out different ways it would be changed by injecting interactivity into it, as with the Garden of Eden example. Your examples might be a story from the Bible, a child’s nursery rhyme, or a recent news item.
4. Using a simple story like one chosen for the exercise above, redesign it as two different interactive experiences: one that is very story-like and the other that is very game-like.