Straight off the heels of our discussion about the qualities of our chosen non-fiction project, Jess and I discussed what kind of project we would make for the production part of Assignment 2. It was honestly very difficult at first because we had no clue of which direction to head in. We needed a push, a starting idea, something to help us realise or find a good idea.
Luckily, it came to us not long after. Hannah mentioned that we don’t need to think of and execute a highly technical project and that we could just present the fragments of the project onto our blogs. We started thinking about what is non-linear and could be presented in fragments- obviously this is one of the main questions of this studio, but it still helped push us in the right direction. Almost immediately I thought of Choose Your Own Adventure books. Non-linear, interactive storytelling before the internet existed (or before how it existed as we know it now).
I recall such books from my childhood. Sure enough, when I got home I found Cool School: You Make It Happen by John Marsden (the off-brand Choose Your Own Adventure), nestled on the family bookshelf in between Shakespeare and Roald Dahl. First published in 1995, it allowed the reader to make the decisions as if they were the protagonist, enabling them to end up at however many different endings.
So, we have decided to produce a Choose Your Own Adventure book for the internet. It will be non-linear and interactive as two main qualities but in reality, it will cover many of the formal qualities that we have previously discussed. It will be multi-faceted- including both video, pictures and text, and episodic, just to name a few. The user will be taken through a narrative that they choose, by following a string of hyperlinks. They will watch a video and have to make a decision- choosing link A will lead them on one path and link B in an entirely different direction. At this point, the interactive element will be similar to the Docubase projects- the user will get more out of interacting with the project than the project will. Meaning the user will not add anything to the project, but the fact that it is interactive will be the whole reason the user will choose to experience it.
Our next step is to choose whether the project will be fiction or non-fiction. While we are more traversed with non-fiction interactive projects, it seems more simple to do a fiction story as it can be simple and we don’t have to plan too much (despite what I said last time about all the planning involved with fiction). However, we still have a lot of consideration to do. I’m curious as to what counts as interactive non-fiction and non-linear media. Do silly Buzzfeed quizzes about What type of garlic bread you are count? They lie somewhere between non-fiction and fiction, not creating a totally new reality but not really reflecting the one we actually experience.
Upon some simple research (this information specifically came from another academic blog from halfway across the world) into fiction non-linear storytelling, we found that interactive fiction can divide into ‘branching’ and open world’. Branching involves the user choosing from multiple options, leading to more choices and eventually one of several (or many) endings. Open world allows more freedom, allowing users to experience more perspectives of the world in their own order. Obviously, our project falls into the ‘branching’ category.
I am looking forward to experiencing an interactive fiction project to compare it to those I experienced on docu-base, and seeing how it can help us with our own project.