So far, so fascinating

The date is 15th October 2008. We've just got the blog up and running, and I'm learning how to use Blogger-style facilities. Tom Gooday is helping me (a lot).

This is a brief update of where we are so far.

The project was conceived back in the summer, and after some fascinating discussions with Prof Stephen Heppell, and a lot of backup from Jon (Wardle) I worked out what I wanted to do: CEMP needed a project within its Pedagogic Innovation Fund which would add to pedagogic understandings and techniques, and I wanted to continue to develop my research and creative exploration of interactive narrative.

I didn't want to re-run the Portland project (see 'Gallery' for details and examples of the work done there), but I did want to use the experience we'd gained during that project.

What had I learned from Portland? Two major things stand out -

1. Interactive fiction (hypertext narrative/digi-lit -call it what you will, seeing as no one has hit on THE term for it yet) does work. The school kids created really fun stories, with narrative structure and meaningful interaction, in interfaces that were easy for end-users to learn and use. So, in future, if we got the balance between absorption and interaction right, we could make more sophisticated narratives that really grabbed the reader (see my Convergence piece for some reasons why a lot of interactive fiction fails in this regard: http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/12/4/447

2. The concept of a template into which an interactive narrative could be 'poured' worked really well. I'm aware of the dangers of restricting the creative flow: a template could be too constraining, but for 14-year-old not-highly-technical students it was fine. But, from that, I realised that if we could design a template that was as easy to use, but which could be flexible enough for older writers to work within, we might be able to 'launch' interactive writing into a wider population of creative writers. There are plenty of writers 'doing'' interactive fiction, but the platforms are tricky to use: e.g. I've tried Eastgate Systems' pioneering Storysace software, and it's fun, but limited and its interface is not very 'now'.

Talking with Prof Heppell, it became clear that an intuitive, easy to use (for writer and reader) digital platform could also offer learners the chance to tell the stories of their learning 'journeys'. And of course, then my explanation to the Portland kids of interactive fiction being like a journey with loads of paths and side-roads and digressions seemed highly appropriate (clever me!)

So, I crystallised the project into its current form: research into devising and designing a flexible digital platform for writing and reading interactive stories, and of course, the teaching of both. We probably won't use Flash, even though that worked brilliantly in Portland, because it's quite hard to learn as a writer, and we want to be able to give our platform away, to schools and colleges perhaps, and to be able to use it with our own students who might not be skilled multi-media types.

If/when we get a usable platform, we'll beta test it.

Then I'll write about it and do a conference maybe... and then we'll refine it and make interactive narrative as mainstream as narrative in film or books... so far, so very fascinating...