MitterNachtSpiel is another CD-ROM based multimedia experience, but unlike Myst, Riven and Ultima Online, it is a sensuous, free-associative work of multimedic art. It is a wondrous adventure that beckons you to explore the sights and sounds and play at midnight with the moon and a cast of bizarre characters created by Kveta Pacovksa in a children's book of the same name. But she takes from the book and makes an interactive work of art. The story is given a framework on the packaging (there are no words spoken or written throughout the multimedia experience): "The theater at night is dark and quiet. The actors are all sound asleep until midnight, when the moon rises above the theater. As if to say, 'Is anyone down there?' the moon looks down at the theater. As moonlight beams upon the stage, one by one, the actors awake to perform all kinds of fun music, movements and tricks." As J.C. Herz notes, "As in a ballet, namely "The Nutcracker," the story [of MitterNachtSpiel] is merely a premise for the visual and musical delight that follow" (Herz, "Making Art...").
Essentially, MitterNachtSpiel is a performative interactive piece. Nothing happens without your playing with the piece. Once you do you dance through sights and sounds and romp with characters through and in a variety of interconnected and recursive scenes. Herz believes it illustrates the qualities of drawing and painting. She notes one scene where you pull colors across the screen and:
because of the split-second delay, and the way the color overlays itself with a subtle shadow, it's more like drawing with oil pastels than with a computer paint program. The color doesn't feel as though it's made of pure light. It feels as though it's made of something soft, unctuous, thick and blendable. On this digital canvas, there is a pleasure in the gesture of painting, in the illusion of texture, that makes the experience into an abstract expressionist exercise whose fluid quality is enhanced by a trance-inducing drum-and-woodwind soundtrack ("Making Art...").
The tactile experience builds as you click into other scenes. There is one where you shuffle through torn pieces of paper and hear the ruffle of paper as you slowly uncover a bell-ringing clown. Often you can change scenes from within a scene itself, as you expand or contract into the images and into another scene. And "as you move among these images, their relationships deepen" (Herz, "Making Art..."). You find out that you've just had a playful moment on the leg of a clown, who there in turn turns into a world full of round colorful balls that melt into the body of a dragon. Throughout, thematic music connects with each character, so you come to recognize where (or who) you are by the music playing. In fact, there is one squiggly scene that plays all the music for you and you find yourself recalling all the connected images in the lines. There are several connecting scenes that take you to several places. One with six colored squares gives us more texture again. Each square has the "sound of a different art medium (charcoal, chalk or squeaky markers, paper being crumpled) and leads to another full-screen composition" ("Making Art...").
The recursive imagery and sounds are stitched together by the subtle transitions between scenes. You get to see the scenes become the leg of a clown. "By illustrating the links between paintings, they knit the work together into a visual riddle -- a fractal jigsaw where the pieces fit together in multiple ways, adjacent to one another but also inside one another. One painting suggests a path through several others" (Herz, "Making Art..."). So, once you've begun to see the connections, the next time you return to a familiar scene, it's virtually impossible not to view it anew because of the connections made. And as you begin to understand the connections, you get to play more knowledgeable within the scenes, taking paths you've been down before or looking for something anew. "And the links are so multidimensional and nonlinear that understanding them becomes a delight in itself. Taken as a whole, the work is an exercise in nonsense logic worthy of Lewis Carroll" ("Making Art...").
As Herz notes, MitterNachtSpiel, "speaks to the possibilities of digital media" ("Making Art..."). These interwoven sounds and images unwind into diverse links and connections, rendering us an interactive universe in which to play and make a story as we go. And the sounds and images are connected in ways words cannot easily be. "Verbal stories dissipate as they branch because they are progressive - the only way to learn more is to go forward. Visual stories deepen as they branch because they are recursive - you can understand something new by going back" and looking anew ("Making Art..."). The world created is one that spins around with you as you return through it and spin your own midnight play.