Web Form v. Function

[Greg Stephens]

A List Apart's latest feature, Information v. Experience speaks little about something that has relevance to online comics:

There are also cultural barriers to conveying experience on the web. We've been serializing narratives for millennia now: novels, movies, and television all rely on the user experiencing their narratives sequentially. The buildup of tension, suspense, grief, and other emotions takes time. Novelists and filmmakers have honed their skills in sequential media to a fine art, and users have become sophisticated consumers of sequential narrative.

By contrast, we are only just discovering ways of authoring experience and emotion in situations where the user is no longer passive, but is instead an active director of the experience. On the web, narrative has become a collaboration between the author and the user.

To be fair, live entertainment does already involve low-level collaboration between users and authors. A good storyteller, singer or comedian giving a live performance can be less sequential since he or she has the luxury of being able to evaluate the audience?s reaction and adjust the performance accordingly?something that movies and books cannot do. Feedback mechanisms do exist on the web, but are currently quite primitive in comparison to the interaction between live human performers and their audiences.

The current web also forces decisions?users must interact for the narrative to progress because nothing new arrives until the user clicks another link. It is currently difficult to author web content where the user can sit and experience a sequential flow of experience, only interacting when they choose to.

[Tailsteak]

Before I started writing my comic strip-- before I was even aware that web-based comic strips existed-- I had a sort of creative fantasy in which I could create an entire world, indexed in space and time, through which the user could explore. There would be interlocking stories, and, if the user were following one particular storyline, there would be little highlighted arrows that would show where to go next to uncover more of the plot. Thus, in effect, while the story was unchangeable, the user would be able to change the focus to suit themselves.

I don't know, though... there have to be limits. Any artform in which the audience is given too much control will quickly dissolve into chaos.

[Max Leibman]

Tailsteak wrote:

<i>Any artform in which the audience is given too much control will quickly dissolve into chaos.</i>

Or, they dissolve into another art form. As it happens, there is an artform in which audience control/participation is crucial: Games. Of course, your point still stands, because a game where the audience has too much control quickly loses its excitement, too (or becomes an incomprehensible mess, even).

[Jack Masters]

I agree. Linearity and interactivity, while overlapping, don't really denote the same thing.

Space invaders, while very interactive, has a set configuration of levels. You either progress through them in pre-determined sequence, or die.

A choose-your-own-adventure story, by contrast, has total non-linearity, but only a smidgen of interactivity. You could remove the interactivity entirely by having the computer randomly choose which way the story goes rather then the reader.

And of course, many many things have both or neither.

Linearity mimics real life in that you only travel through it in one long, continious path, rather then bifrucating at each juncture, but interactivity mimics real life in that you have control over your actions.

Of course, if you let someone control something OTHER then "their" actions, you get something sort of different.

Interactivity also makes the reader into an artist, in that they have control over the art.

Well, I've given my two cents.