AFTERDEATH

General Info

This project is an attempt at creating a unique interactive narrative using fresh Internet technologies that allow for user behavior to dictate the narrative’s general direction/outcome. The effect will hopefully be a more fluid and animated user experience as compared to ‘conventional’ interactive narratives. Hopefully, this project will succeed in avoiding certain conventions.

Conventional Interactive Naratives

Hypertext Narratives

With most Internet interactive narratives, authors use the hypertext links to create an interactive experience for users. For example, the user could use some link like this to jump to another part of the narrative, whether it is congruent to the current text or not is up to the author. The entire effect is to create a user experience that is unique to all other user experience with the same narrative/story. The Advantage: Immense and large amounts of branching narratives. The downfall: the user experience is rather dry, having to transverse stagnant text and images.

Game Narratives

As Internet user bandwidth increases, the ‘video’ game conversely increases accessibility to the Internet. Thus, game narratives (which are inherently interactive due to the fact that a video game is interactive by definition) are also increasing accessibility via the Internet. A few examples:

  1. Any Xbox-Live Game
  2. Lucas Arts’ Star Wars Galaxies (an MMORPG (2))
  3. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (my current “time-poison” of choice)
The Advantage: Highly graphical and creatively active user experiences as well as a diverse and easily accessible database of content. The downfall: Very complex to create and only accessible through purchasing of the product.

Avoiding the Conventional

This project will need to be highly accessible much like the hypertext model, however graphically intuitive like the game model. To accomplish this goal, this project will be combining Macromedia’s Flash 8 to create a graphically pleasing game environment on the front-end with the strength of the open source PHP and mySQL tools/Internet services to provide a dynamic content database back-end.

The Attempt

Hopefully this project can create an interactive narrative that starts in the future and travels backwards in time. All at the same time user interactions and behaviors effect the next scene(s) that exist in the past. The best example of this type of narrative can be found in the movie Memento. (Being that it is a Movie, there is limited interactivity).