interactivity

The advent of the computer and digital media is most definitely not the beginning of interactive stories. In fact, I believe that there is always a level of interactivity with every medium, it just differs in terms of intensity required from the audience. A reader interacts with a book, and a "reader" interacts with a hypertextual story online, and we all interact with mediums in between. But prior to the computer, there have been a variety of overt attempts in various mediums to get the audience to interact with a story.

In fact, books have had some overt interactivity. Dickens published his works serially and constantly responded to audience desires in between chapters. And there have been many post-modern books that encourage readers to do as they will with the text. Then there are the "choose-your-own-adventure" books. These are books with branching narratives that allow the reader to choose which branch(es) they would like to follow as they read their way through the story.

Traditional oral storytelling often encourages the audience's participation. We have the classic call-and-response of gospel and blues music. And performance art is full of interactive stories, ranging from performances like Yoko Ono's piece, in which audience members came up and cut off her clothing, to plays, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where the audience votes on the endings. Comedic improv is another venue that gets immediate audience input and puts it into play. And we had the Happenings of the Sixties where the performance required interactive audience participation.

Films and television have also garnered audience interactions. Some small experimental films have had the audience vote its way through the story. There is the present day practice of focus group testing on films before they are released. So, these small audiences often effect how a film is re-edited before it is released to the public at large. And TV is always responding to ratings, so the most watched shows continue to tell their stories. The TV show, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (where 3 characters sat in front of a B-movie and threw out entertaining commentary on the films) has spawned live versions, like the Mr. Sinus Theater 3000, where 3 people with mikes get up and comment on movies in the theatre itself and encourage the audience to chime in as well. And then there is the Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon. Here, audiences show up in costumes fitting in with the movie's characters and often get up on stage and perform along with the movie as a group. And with digital technology, people are actually re-editing, and distributing, new adaptations of movies. Case in point, there is a "Phantom Edit" of the Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, that cuts out several scenes, and some say, improves on the original.

And games have always built on the premise that the user is interactively doing something with the story. This goes back to classic games like go and chess, where you are enacting an abstraction of war. It then begins to get more overt with role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, in which the players become characters and go on adventures together. There are even some games where the point is to tell a story. Once Upon a Time is a card game in which you win by telling a coherent and entertaining story. Arcade games moved even further and began to give players computational interactivity within a story. And new, cutting edge, virtual reality theme rides are immersing us in wildly interactive environments and experiences.

The preceding examples show some of the attempts at interactive narratives. The computer, and the internet of interconnected computers, lean more heavily on the past interactive explorations of games and film, as opposed to performance. Even so, computational mediums have opened up new levels of digital interactivity. Levels in which the "reader" is always already the interactive protagonist and participatory co-author of the unfolding story. In the digital world, where a copy is exactly the same as the original and there is no there, there, we are truly only limited by the author's and reader's technical and conceptual imaginations. The stories come out of the interactive collaboration between authors and readers. The authors set up the dynamic and interactive foundations and the readers then take these stories to where no narratives have gone before.