places to start researching

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Books

See the elasticspace reading section.

Visually engaging works

• Requiem for a Dream
  Online counterpart to the film – explore two different characters as their lives are disrupted by drugs.
• Jump Tomorrow
  Online counterpart to the film – play the main character in a game linked to the film narrative.
• Center of the World
  A largely conversational interface, using chat bots to lead you through a dark narrative.
• Donnie Darko
  An observant audience researches material related to a sinister plot to gain passwords to higher levels.
• The Business of Strangers
  A site of two sides – day and night. The gameworld takes place in light and darkness, echoing themes from the film.
• The Third Place
  Working on themes of fear and addiction – compelling and evocative imagery goes over the top of a user feedback system which is not so successful.
• Soul Bath
  The opening sequence to this site disrupts your experience of the internet in a wonderfully playful way.
• Once Upon a Forest / Praystation
  Abstract visual experimentation, with some interesting interactive ideas.
• Little Movies
  An experiment in making cinema for the web.

Community works

• The Fray
  Compelling text based narratives inspire a community of story-sharing.
• Metafilter
  A simple multi-user news and comments system. A fine tuned structure guides new and experienced users through the process of making a good community.
• Habbo Hotel
  Compelling and addictive multi-user chat environment. The cartoony rendering of the characters allows imaginations to run wild, while providing a structured space for fun and role-play.
• Ultima Online
  A persistent virtual gameworld with hundreds of thousands of users. Narratives emerge as part of the role-playing process and are not pre-conceived by game authors.

Multi-channel works

• Annotate Space
  A project to develop experiential forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations.
• Flirt
  Investigates the potential of location specific information, not only as an information resource, but also as a medium for social interaction and play.
• Cloudmakers.org
  A detailed walkthrough of the AI marketing game as described by the thousands of people who played it.
• Pokemon
  The viral nature of the trading cards and gameboy games have fuelled sales of films, tv shows, and products in just about every other media.
• LivePlanet
  Each LivePlanet property is built from the start to seamlessly integrate traditional media, new media, and the physical world.
• Majestic
  Intrigue, suspense, phone calls, faxes, email, and instant messages. A multi-channel game from Electronic Arts.

Interaction as a conversation

• Entertaining Agents
  Some agents serve entertaining purposes, rather than strictly utilitarian ones.
• Smarter Child
  An interactive agent that delivers content and services to instant message windows, answering questions as if it were a real person.

Hypertext fiction

• Evening
  As you slowly descend through the atmosphere you repeat your instructions silently to pass the time. Observe the family. Don't interfere. Switch hosts as necessary...
• 253
  A novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash

Writing about narrative and interaction

• Web Dogme
  I challenge everyone to make something according to this manifesto. It is an exersise in creativity as well as learning about how the web was designed to work. Inadvertently elasticspace conforms to this Dogme.
• Creating Core Content in a Post-Convergence World
  'We are not experiencing convergence in the sense of media. We are experiencing a diaspora of displays and devices that will address even finer distinctions in situated context. One thing that doesn't change "post-convergence" is the need to identify and understand the audiences and contexts you are going to be addressing.'
• The Automatist Storytelling System
  Presents a theoretical framework for discussing interactive narrative, provides a critique of "branch-structure" narrative, and establishes a set of five Fundamental Properties of Interactive Narrative.
• Dissimulations
  This discussion speculates on the collision between a dominant cultural form – narrative, and the technology of interaction. Also provides some interesting insights into simulation.
• Rule Space
  A look at the scales of experience systems – provides a framework of ideas with which to think about the web and human behaviour.
• Macro Cinema
  Images showing the pervasiveness of cinematic technologies in everyday life.
• New Developments In Post-Digital Cinema
  Some of the recent developments in 'post-digital cinema' – again looking at the pervasiveness of digital cinematic technologies.
• Scalable Cinema
  What would happen if we apply scalability not just to information displays but also to films and other visible fictions?
• The Language of New Media
  A book full of ways to think about new media, with lots of references to film.
• Hamlet on the Holodeck Resource Page
  Janet H. Murrays resources page that accompanies her book.
• Understanding Comics
  By Scott Mcloud. Provides a very useful insight into narrative, and the interactions that create static, two dimensional, visual narratives.
• enarrative.org
  profiles Peter Merholz - an information architect interested in narrative.
• netvironments
  a blog about net narrative - some interesting links.
• The A-Z of party games
  A comprehensive list of games that people play at parties - some interesting interaction ideas.

© Timo Arnall 11^th February 2002
www.elasticspace.com | email me