From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) (clbullar_at_ingr.com)
Date: 16 June 1998
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:jdd_at_acm.org]
>
> Hi gang,
>
> Found (and enjoyed) these tonight. Have fun.
>
> A _great_ text on implementing nonlinearity:
> http://www.users.interport.net/~mash/nonlin.html
>
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