[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article

[Koster]

From: Paul Boyle

> He also seems to fall into the trap of trying to compare the
> stories told in MMOG games too much to TV or novels.  And he does
> so badly.

For what is (so far) a pretty good take on interactive storytelling
and new media that still respects and understands what old media
have to teach, I suggest PAUSE & EFFECT: THE ART OF INTERACTIVE
NARRATIVE by Mark Stephen Meadows, which just came out. Kinda steep
at $45, but hey, I was interviewed for it and got three free
copies. :)

Sample quotes:

    ...it should be considered that the goal of an interactive
    narrative is not to author the narrative, but to provide a
    context and an environment in which the narrative can be
    discovered or built by the readers of that story. In this way,
    designers and authors of interactive narrative are far more like
    architects than they are like writers.  -p. 54

    The remote control and the ever-intruding advertisement
    facilitated a different kind of attention in viewers of
    television. It facilitated a nesting of narrative and a kind of
    attention that was very facile with node-switches,
    context-swapping, and interruptability. This form of entwined
    and entangled attention span of the television viewer fast
    revealed itself in the graphic design of television
    content. Camera cuts, character introduction, music pacing,
    color contrast, volume, and even story structured themselves
    were built to grapple with the viewer's need to flip over to
    something faster and more hypnotic. Watch any music video on VH1
    or MTV; compare WEAKEST LINK to poor old Vanna White; or watch a
    batch of contemporary Saturday morning cartoons and you'll soon
    see that the drum that these shows march to is increasing its
    beat.  The tradition of the interruption that binds together a
    larger narrative has been inherited by digital media. Early
    BBSs--the greenhouse nurseries of MUDs, MOOs, and MUCKs--and
    electronic mail systems were built, from the ground up, to be a
    thing that you could enter, use, be interrupted in the middle
    of, use again, and leave. Unlike a radio-based narrative, the
    participation wasn't dictated by a set amount of time. It was
    left to yo, as when reading ab ook, to decide how long and how
    much. This was already implicit in most electronic media--but
    digital media in particular held nonlinear participation,
    interruption, and resumption as part of its assumed capabilities
    from the start.
                                                     - pp. 56-7

http://pause-effect.com
http://www.newriders.com

Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
by Mark Stephen Meadows
ISBN 0-7357-1171-2

-Raph


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