If you find this comforting, you’re either older than 40 or suffering from perfluxity–or both. Perfluxity is the feeling that you’re drowning in a flux of information. It’s the hunch that the world has recently shattered into a billion bits of data and your only glue gun is a tiny cursor skidding around in cyberspace. On the other hand, if you’re under 40 or otherwise cozy on the Infobahn, you’re probably already bored to tears by the linear nature of this essay.
Interactivity–structuring information so that users can adapt it to their own needs–is getting a huge amount of hype. CD-ROMs and other forms of multimedia can present data in audio and visual formats at the same time. The variety itself can be overwhelming. Interactivity is a way to harness the flux. Instead of being a passive viewer, you manipulate the data-storm, picking and choosing only the parts that interest you.
There’s no doubt that multimedia presentations make some kinds of information more accessible. catalog searches, list browsings, library research and reference work. Is there anyone who would rather grope through card catalogs in the library to find a book? Sure, the paper felt good to the touch, but who has the time anymore?
But the big debate surrounding interactivity right now doesn’t concern research. It’s about entertainment. It is the highly touted promise (or threat, to the perfluxed) that not only computer games but TV and movies, too, are all going to be interactive. Do we really want to vote our way through every explosion in the next action/adventure flick?
As a multimedia designer as well as a mystery novelist, I’m struggling–along with all the major software, publishing and movie companies–to find the answer to this and an even bigger question: is it even possible to tell a good story interactively?
The linear stores told in novels, plays and films tend to be deep and narrow. They focus on a few well-drawn characters and events, carefully developed and deeply textured. This approach is great for the telling of heroes’ journeys, for memoirs, short stories, murder mysteries, fairy tales and essays. You know where you’re going and you can’t wait to get there. The last thing anyone wants is 45 alternative endings in a digital “Tale of Two Cities.” What we love about Dickens, for one thing, is his ability to pick the best ending.
Nothing can compete with the seductive power of a tale well told. As a novelist, I want to tell my story in a precise series of events, of disclosures. I want to guide you through it, word by word. The experience is intimate, private and manipulative, like a whispered fairy tale. In fact, directing your interest and attention is part of the art, part of knowing how to unfold the tale–when to speed up, slow down, pack in details, gloss over.
The sense of being led is precisely the joy of linear stories. When it works you get “Cinderella” or “Oliver Twist.” When it fails, you get my cousin Marty, the master of the world’s dullest yarn. To be stuck at dinner hearing him drone on endlessly is to experience the drawback of linear narrative.
Interactive stories, on the other hand, are broad and shallow. There’s a lot more going on. More information, more details, more possibilities. But none of it is as cohesive. It’s up to you as viewer or reader to tie it all together. To be an interactive user, you have to pay attention, take action and make choices.
It’s what you might call Frag & Frac. Frag as in fragmented. It comes in pieces that you have to assemble. And Frac as in fractal. Just like those complex patterns in fractal geometry, the more you look, the more there is to look at. All this makes for a very intense and immediate experience, more like barkers at a carnival than whispers. For it to work, you must be willing as a user to be playful and exploratory, to let go of the guiding hand.
Today’s multimedia titles show the strengths and weaknesses of this form. There are a number of excellent CD-ROM encyclopedias, art-museum tours and medical references. In these, you get to pick your own pathway, investigate at your own pace, go deeper into some areas while ignoring others. It’s perfect for customizing information.
But narrative, the telling of a story, is another matter. You can play some of the latest computer games for 80 hours, meet scores of characters, make hundreds of decisions and end up completely untouched in any way by the material. The story, which both unifies these elements and gives them emotional impact, easily dissolves into the vastness of the details.
My current multimedia project is a black-and-white mystery movie on CD-ROM. It involves a desert town you can explore at will, filled with scheming people you can talk to. There’s one overall story about a stolen statue, but it doesn’t unfold by the numbers. Instead, you have to discover the plot as you wander about, getting a piece here, finding another part there, looking and listening. And, unique to this form, there are also a number of secondary plots you can pursue if they interest you.
It’s a perfluxing multiplicity of choices. If I can pull it off, you’ll still have the sense of a plot moving toward a conclusion as your choices continually narrow toward the end.
But I’m also hedging my bets. I’ve written a complete, linear mystery novel and put it inside the movie. It’s in your hotel room, on the night table next to your bed. Use your mouse to click on the hotel, then on the door to your room, then on the book. To escape from the perfluxity elsewhere in the movie, you can just read the novel by clicking on the pages on your screen, one by one by one.
