Michael provides a good summary. These
paragraphs struck me. I note the similarity to the television
commercials where a number of couples in conversation are
captured in a store as the camera changes location of interest
while the people are in motion through the aisles. They
complete a statement or interaction just as the next couple
passes them and the camera switches to follow the new
interaction without a gap in time. A single theme (the fabulousness
of the store, eg WalMart) is presented from multiple viewpoints
but a single continuous moving view. Note that the user has
no interaction.
"The narrative structure of Overseas is uniquely suited to interactive
storytelling. In an interactive version, which could be called the
intersecting stories model, the stories themselves represent the viewer's
navigational space, and the intersecting events constitute the navigable
links. This approaches a pure narrative exploration; in this regard the
intersecting stories model relates naturally to the medium of hypertext, and
should indeed work well as a model for hypertext stories. A different
strategy would be to apply another layer of metaphor to make the narrative
exploration appear to be something more immediate and real. For example, the
intersection points could be defined as physical locations, and moving from
story to story could be accomplished by physically traversing a location.
The biggest difficulty with the intersecting stories model is the problem of
chronology. A few simple rules may be needed; for instance, when the viewer
moves to a new story, he could be automatically positioned at earliest
unseen event in that story. Of course, these rules could vary with the
requirements of the story, and in some cases may be altogether unnecessary.
Much depends on the scope of interaction available to the viewer within the
confines of each story. A clever approach would be to construct the stories
such that their interdependencies are reduced to seemingly unimportant
details (as is often the case in Overseas itself), in which case putting
them off limits may not seem burdensome to the viewer.
Len
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John D. DeCuir [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
> Hi gang,
>
> Found (and enjoyed) these tonight. Have fun.
>
> A _great_ text on implementing nonlinearity:
> http://www.users.interport.net/~mash/nonlin.html
>
