Joachim Vlieghe

" I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. " JDS

Find the Future: The Game is a pioneering, interactive experience created especially for NYPL’s Centennial by famed game designer Jane McGonigal, with Natron Baxter and Playmatics.

Through a once-in-a-lifetime, overnight adventure played inside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building,  and an ongoing online game, Find the Future: The Game combines real-world missions with virtual clues and online collaboration — all inspired by 100 works from the amazing collections of The New York Public Library.

“The game is designed to empower young people to find their own futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and objects of people who made an extraordinary difference,” says McGonigal.

Find the Future: The Game kicked off on May 20, 2011 as part of NYPL’s Centennial Festival weekend, with a “Write All Night” event inside the landmark building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

Players (18 and older) explored the building’s 70 miles of stacks, and, using laptops and smartphones, following clues to such treasures as the Library’s copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. After finding each object, each of the 500 players wrote short personal essays inspired by their quest — for example, how would they write the Declaration? Winning the game meant writing a collaborative book based on these personal stories about the future, and this volume will be added to the Library’s collections.

Find the Future: The Game can be played by anyone across the city and the world using your smartphones or computers, or on free computers at any of NYPL’s 90 locations. Start playing now!

A futurist view on watching television.

By David Morris

Outside the games industry, interactivity is often met with fascination and fear, and it’s never long before somebody asks, “Will the reader be able to choose the ending?”

Would you want to? A good story is meant to surprise and delight. If you could bring yourself to pause the action just before Holmes grapples Moriarty, and decide who will go off the ledge, you can’t have been that enthralled. And how would that kind of interactivity enhance your enjoyment anyway? If complete control of the plot is what you’re looking for, the solution is simple: become a writer.

Instead of choosing the ending, then, maybe good interactivity should allow you to influence the ending. There’s something to be said for that. Literary academics are fond of psychoanalysing characters, and it’s a small step from there to giving them advice. “Hamlet, get off your arse, mate.” Of course, characters in a story – just like your friends – don’t have to take your advice. Or how about this: they could misapply your advice and then blame you. Now it’s getting interesting.

The kids’ gamebooks of thirty-odd years ago all followed the obvious model of an omniscient narrator presenting you, in the role of protagonist, with limited information: “Here are three caskets, of lead, silver and gold.” Characterization of the main character is difficult because hearing your avatar talk about things that you as reader know nothing about can really mess with suspension of disbelief. The interactivity inevitably reduces to problem-solving. And I like problem-solving, but it’s not really what’s interesting about fiction.

A more fruitful kind of interactivity is to have a first person narrator with whom the reader can have a dialogue. You’re his Hopkirk, his Harvey, his Tyler Durden. That’s the approach I’ve taken with Frankenstein. In five of the book’s six parts, you are the voice of Victor Frankenstein’s conscience – or ambition, or reason, as you prefer. The effect is very different from a game. It’s like reading the novel. But where, in the original, Victor’s self-pitying introspection can become wearying, here you have the opportunity to challenge him. In striking up a dialogue – a relationship, in fact – you become more invested in his fate. You’re not solving the problems of the plot so much as exploring the crannies of character.

(…)

I don’t think this is the future of books, though. The novel as a form does not require fixing. Never, when reading War and Peace, did I wish I could break out of the story to call up a map of a battlefield or research 19th century Russian etiquette. Sometimes I might grudgingly refer to the notes at the back, resenting the interruption of the narrative flow even as I did. If it’s a good novel, I don’t want it to have pictures or sound effects or 3D. It doesn’t need them. A great story holds you spellbound in the world of your imagination. Or rather, and better, in the fusion of your imagination with the author’s.

Which is, when you think about it, a truly rewarding form of interactivity. And it’s been there all along.

fastcompany:

And The Oscar For Best Short Film Goes To … An iPad App

Here’s the backstory on Morris Lessmore’s creators, Moonbot Studios:

At Moonbot’s Louisiana Studio, Hollywood Vets Dream Up Magical, Interactive Stories

With Moonbot Studios, a children’s animation star remakes the cinematic experience. And that’s just his first trick.

By John Pavlus:

Last night an unexpected masterpiece won the Oscar for best short film (also see: oscar.go.com/nominees). The real milestone: It was an iPad app. Also remarkable: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was the brainchild of Moonbot Studios, a startup out of Shreveport, Louisiana. (…)

E-books are already a fraught subject for many readers, writers, publishers, and designers, but children’s e-books are even more so. Is it rotting their minds? Is it as good as good ol’ paper? Is it too interactive for their own good? Obviously there are no practical answers to such questions, but at least one children’s e-book/app/thingie (what do we call these things, again?) is doing it very, very right. It’s called The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and it’s like a well-written bedtime story and an immersive animated movie at once—without being “too much” of either.

This is most definitely an interesting development. Apparently ebooks are also becoming competitors in the film-industry. I guess this is an excellent example of media convergence and its effects on ‘older’ media and related institutions (like the Oscars).

Consequently Bob Stein states that a book is a place: a place where readers and sometimes authors congregate. This influences the way authors work: old fashion authors engage in a subject matter for future readers, new school authors engage with readers on particular subjects. Stein explains: ‘Suppose you write a piece, for example a biography of Obama, but instead of publishing it at once, you publish several parts every once in a while. Readers can pay a small amount of money for every post, instead of a larger amount for the complete work. This is more like MySpace or blogging, so it could be more natural for young researchers.’ Sounds like a good idea to me.

Stein continues with his project SocialBook.com. This is an online platform for social reading. With SocialBooks, he wants to build an ecosystem for publishing that assumes that books are places where people gather. Works will appear in the Browser, not in mobile apps or proprietary non browsers based readers. This is made possible with HTML5.

Moreover, he names four flavours of social reading. First, having conversations with people you know in the margin of the book. Second, having access to others’ comments in the book. Users can comment on the text, bring quotes forward that are highlighted, post comments to the group, tweet and Facebook it. They can also make comments to other readers of the same book, and can see a list of all the comments of all the readers of a certain page. In other words, the user can interact with the text. Third, reading and extracting comments and reading other people’s critiques. Social means being able to read an experts gloss on a book. For example, someone can extract their comments and export them. Stein explains: ‘think how important it is going to be when you have a guide through a book. In this case, when you get to a page that is interesting, you are in the book. ’Fourth, engage with authors asynchronously or in in real time “in the book”. There are lots of options of hiring authors or inviting them to your group. You can think of the relation between authors and readers differently. For example, some people would be willing to pay a small amount of money to ask questions to the author via SocialBook, or to have a tutor on math books.

“There’s a new iPad app that’s been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. It’s called The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and it’s not really an app, and more like an interactive book. The story is about people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor. In the app you can control the wind, paint the skies, make books chatter, play a piano, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. It was all created by author/illustrator William Joyce and co-director Brandon Oldenburg, who’ve really done something so original that I think you’ll start seeing more experiences like this. Watch the video above, and if you have an iPad, whether or not you have kids, download this app immediately.”

‘Our choice’ gives a glimpse of the possibilities of eBooks and new ways of reading.

The Next Generation of Digital Books

Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. Our Choice melds the vice president’s narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.

“Interactivity: The Golden Fleece of the Internet” - Barbara Warnick

Central issue: “The purpose (…) is to show how online interactivity plays a role in persuasion by bringing users to identify themselves with the speakers’ interests.” (BW, p.71)
   > Thesis: “(…) online interactivity as a means of activating user response and as a mode of address can influence users and can itself be rhetorical in its effects.” (BW, p.71)

Interactivity
   * features-based approach: “(…) as an attribute of technological functions of the medium.” (BW, p.69)
                > (Stromer-Galley) emphasizes media effects and assumes that users are interacting with the medium ‘without ever directly communicating with another person’.” (Ibid.)
   * user-to-user approach: “(…) as an artifact of message sequencing and reciprocal communication in the context in which communication occurs.” (Ibid.)
                > (Rafaeli) “(…) full interactivity occurs only when messages sustain reciprocal exchanges between communicators.” (Ibid.)
   * user-experience approach : “(…) as an artifact of what users experience and perceive.” (BW, p.70)
                > “(…) users must actively attend and respond to messages in order for there to be interactivity.” (Ibid.)

» All approaches heavily contested.

Taxonomy (McMillan) (BW, p.75): forms of interactivity in internet environments
   - User-to-system
                “(…) ‘computer-controlled interaction [that] assumes that the computer will ‘present’ information to learners who will respond to that information’ (McMillan, 174). In such situations, the user activates a technical capacity of the system, and the system responds.” (BW, p.75)
   - User-to-user
                “(…) communication that occurs between users and is aligned with the computer-mediated communication illustrated in Rafaeli’s treatment of full interactivity.” (Ibid.)
                                > author-to-users
                                > visitor interacting with each other
   - User-to-document
                “(…) occurs when recipients of the message contribute texts and information that change the content of the site text. (…) users become active cocreators of messages when they customize site content, vote in online polls, submit questions to be answered on the site, or post messages and photos that become part of the Web site text.” (Ibid.)