The Interactive Onion: Layers of User Participation in Digital Narrative Texts
Critical Writing
interface, discoure,
Using the metaphor an onion, Ryan provides a formalist analysis of four different levels of interactivity, plus a fifth meta-level, in digital narratives.
If we regard communiation between intelligent agents as the prototypical form of interactivity, then neither ergodism nor agency will express its fundamentally dialogical nature.
There is a tendency in digital culture to evaluate a work as a feat of programming virtuosity. I call this the anti-WYSIWYG aesthetics, because you have to imagine the code that lies behind the screen to appreciate the text... If we applied this aesthetics of difficulty to print literature, a palindrome story or a novel written without the letter 'e' (such as George Perec's La disparition) would automatically represent a greater artwork than a novel like Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu...
Works referenced
Title |
Author | Year |
|---|---|---|
| afternoon, a story | Michael Joyce | 1990 |
| Cruising | Ingrid Ankerson, Megan Sapnar | 2001 |
| Façade | Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern | 2005 |
| Marginal Effects | Stuart Moulthrop | 2001 |
http://www.elmcip.net/node/3926
