January 2017 – ◢ ◤

Interactive Narration

Quandary is an online game that challenges students to make important decisions and think critically when there are no clear right or wrong answers.

It has a narrative that comes in comic format. I’d say it’s perfect for lazy people as there is even a voice narrator when you hover over the speech bubbles!

A higher level of interactivity comes to play when users get to exercise their decision making

How it goes

You play the captain aka the judge. The fate of planet Braxos lies in your hands. It starts off by laying out 4 solutions and narrowing down with two, followed by making decisions that are built on the previous ones.

At the last part, your aim is to sort out who will agree and who will disagree. Eventually, the conclusion is told in a brief comic and your score is tallied.

This is a practical game for schools to adopt as part of teaching students to work with ethical skills and decision-making. The storyline is engaging and it actually compels you to think and tests your memory.

I would’ve scored a better grade back in junior school if i played these games instead of Battleon.

Play it at https://www.quandarygame.org/play

Narrative for Interaction: Ideation

Horror-themed Puzzle : Picking up clues to form a narrative

Think Mystery. Enigma. Conundrum. Along with a dark theme. Who wouldn’t love a story plot along the lines of that? Okay maybe not everyone but it’s sure to intrigue some.

Inspiration: Hotel626.com

As the name goes, the interactive horror-thriller online game is only available to ‘guests’ from 6pm to 6am. Between this timing, you can play a game made up of mini heart-thumping tasks as you take a walk through the haunted hotel.

It has heart-racing interactivity as users are picking up clues and solving puzzles along the way.

Examples of interactive gameplay

Scanning across the room in pitch darkness with a camera.
A click will trigger a flash in its pitch darkness and you need to capture an image of the ghost that runs around the room.

Boo.

Another one is to collect clues

You accidentally enter the courts of a decapitated asylum and get greeted with a psycho that happens to look like Amos Yee

You scan around the room to find drawings on the wall – clues you have to remember

Prompted by a random generated question eg. Enter the number of eyes / number of horse legs marked on the wall
You key the right code combination and you make it through to the next round, continuing your narrative

Will you play my game?

Platforms: Website / VR Headset

One medium I’ve always wanted to work with is the VR headset.

It’s a burgeoning technology and the ideas of an interactive narrative on this platform is countless.

I tend to picture my end product before I work on the topics so i’ll just leave this here

Ultimately, I hope to create a work that would hold the audience attention and be ‘addicted’ to it instead of a one-time project / interaction for IM year 2.2

Testing

“Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline” – Eric Zimmerman

Narrative, interactivity, play and games. The author describes the need of discipline for these four concepts to sit well with each other and how they get to their audiences. While the definitions for a ‘narrative’ is generic, what was defined for ‘interactivity’ was more thought provoking.

Eric Zimmerman describes them as four concepts that come together and work nicely instead of seeing them as categories. Indeed, this strikes a strong point as a successful interactive narrative displays a good amalgamation of these points, with no one point overweighing the other. They are namely 1) Cognitive interactivity, or interpretive participation with a text 2) Functional interactivity; or utilitarian participation with a text Mode 3: Explicit interactivity; or participation with designed choices and procedures in a text Mode 4: Meta-interactivity or cultural participation with a text.

I was rather enlightened that an interactive piece could be viewed in such levels which also draws my attention to the reading ‘Medium is the message’. It made me question if a higher level of interactivity would REQUIRE a more complex choice of medium.