Interactive Narrative's

Hello all, weve been learning about the weird and wonderful world of interactive narratives. This is an interesting module for me because at the core of it is web programming, mostly in the form of Javascript and HTML. I have prior experience of this and enjoy it very much but am very rusty with scripting as its been a few years since. I was encouraged by how much i remembered though so hopefully i'll be churning out websites left right and centre before we know it.

The other part of interactive narratives i find interesting but i also have a few reservations about it. Let me show you what i mean.....http://www.abc.net.au/arts/strange/workshop/flash.htm

Look at the flash animation on this page. Its very well done, nice animation and you can move the characters around by clicking on them but i feel this typifys the pointlessness ive come across so far when looking at interactive narrative based projects. It seems to be interactive for the sake of it, there doesnt seem to be any purpose to that flash animation than to give the user the chance to make a little man move from one box to the other. What i would really like to see is something that was interactive but still carried with it a clear sense of story and narrative and felt like that it had a purpose and significance to it. I beleive this would still be possible to do without conforming to a linear structure. I will search for something like this and if i dont find it maybe i'll try to create it myself.

Thanks to my fellow student Rumante Kupaityte who brought that animation to my attention via her blog http://rioreflectivejournal.blogspot.com/

Weve been set a task to create an interactive narrative about a place in nottingham using digital photography and javascript. I think this is a really intriuging project and its one i cant wait to get to grips with. Ive had a few ideas as to how i will go about this but i will save that for a later post as i'm really trying to keep this short and sweet.

Thats it for another few days, i'm off back home to Watford to celebrate turning 21 on Friday! Woooooo any readers who want to send me presents or indeed just wishes of goodwill are more than welcome!

Farewell and have a nice day

David Walker