The Interactive Fallacy...By way of Hypertext Kitchen (an indispensable news site for all things related to hypertext fiction, digital literature etc), I found my way to a page advertising BBC's "first interactive drama" - The Wheel of Fortune. I tried the sneak preview and it turns out that the "interactivity" consists of letting me choose between listening to 3 different characters when and only when a speaker announces "Bet now!". This reminds me of those who calls forking path narratives "interactive fictions", when all the interaction actually consists of a choice between a few options, leading you down various "pre-recorded" paths. A much more fitting description would be "Multiple choice narratives", but somehow that doesn't ring as well when you're trying to sell your product;). "Interactive" or "interaction" is such an ideologically loaded word that it rarely makes sense to use just as is; and I have found that theoretical writers dealing with it (myself included), always end up having to qualify the interaction by the use of adjectives that can distinguish types of interaction from each other, like "highly interactive" or "true interaction" etc, adjectives which again is often grounded in a "highly" normative view of what interaction is and should be. OK, so here is my normative description of what something "truly interactive" is: it is a piece of work (art, programme etc) which makes possible a continous feedback loop. If you as a reader/user gives a certain input, the object/programme will adjust what follows according to your individual choice and that which follows will again allow you to choose and your choice makes the programme adjust its output again etc ad infinitum. I guess the ideal version of this is actually a real-life dialogue between 2 speakers of a natural language, and of course, once a machine is involved you cannot get the perfectly individually fitted "text" out of the interaction. However, you should be able to get a text that is "yours" only and configured in a way no other reader will experience. That is interactivity for me and according to this normative definition, BBC is Not putting on an interactive drama and never will be as long as they are working with prerecorded material and allowing their listeners nothing else but choosing a, b or c...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:55