“Do not attempt to adjust your picture...”
- Introduction to the Outer Limits television show
Perfluxity – that so very modern feeling of dizziness – is not just a question of consumer choice.
It is built in to every thing we touch. Like the remote for example, which is supposed to help us manage the blizzard of options available to us through the TV screen. Nice. Yet my remote has 35 different buttons on it that lead to layers and layers of screens with option lists and menus. I finally felt in control only to the extent that I could effectively manage five of those buttons…on and off, channel, volume, mute, previous.
Somewhere across town, I imagine a young girl watching the prince slip the shoe onto Cinderella’s tiny foot and wildly hitting the remote buttons to bring up a choice menu. This is a generational issue, of course, but also one of temperament. If you are haunted by the hunch that the world has recently shattered into a billion bits of data and that your only glue gun is a tiny cursor skidding around the pixels, then choices probably make you nervous. On the other hand, if you are comfortable onscreen and on remote, you are no doubt already bored to tears by the linear nature of this text.
This difference actually touches on one of the hottest topics of the Gizmos – interactivity – and how much or little we can tolerate.
Interactivity makes some kinds of information much more accessible. Catalog searches, list browsings, library research, referencing. Imagine trying to locate information on the Web without search engines. Is there anyone who would rather grope through the old library card catalogs to find a book? No matter…there is no drawer in the world that could hold all the cards.
Whenever the variety and quantity of information is too overwhelming, interactivity is the only way to manage it. Instead of being a passive mucker, it allows you to manipulate the datastorm, pick and choose only the parts that interest you, swim through hierarchies of material rather than sink into endless selections.
That much is obvious.
The bigger debate about interactivity is not about research but entertainment. The highly touted promise – or threat to the perfluxed – is that not only computer games but TV shows and movies and whatever new formats come along will all be interactive. Do we really want to vote our way through every explosion in the next flick or become a character with a motive in every soap opera we soak up? All the major software, publishing, Web, and movie companies are struggling to find an answer to this. And to an even bigger question…is it even possible to tell a good story interactively?
The linear stores told in novels, plays, and films, tend to be deep and narrow. They focus on a few well-drawn characters and events, carefully developed and deeply textured. This is great for the telling of hero's journeys, for memoirs, short stories, murder mysteries, fairy tales...and essays. You know where you are going and you cannot wait to get there. The last thing anyone wants is 45 alternative endings in a digital Tale of Two Cities. What we love about Dickens, for one thing, was his ability to pick the best ending and give it to us.
Nothing can compete with the seductive power of a tale well told. Novelists want to tell their stories in a precise series of events, of disclosures. They want to guide you through them, word by word. The experience is intimate, private...and manipulative.
In fact, directing your interest and attention is part of the art, part of knowing how to unfold the tale...when to speed up, slow down, pack in details, gloss over. This is precisely the joy of linear stories, this sense of being led. When it works you get Cinderella. Or Dickens. When it fails, you get my Cousin Marty. To be stuck at a dinner hearing him drone on endlessly about some experience is to grasp the painful drawback of the linear narrative.
Interactive stories, on the other hand, are broad and shallow. There is a lot more going on. More information, more details, more possibilities. But none of it is as cohesive. In fact, it is up to you to as viewer or reader to tie it all together. To be an interactive user, you have to pay attention, take action, and make choices for the material to congeal.
This approach is what you might call Frag & Frac.
Frag as in fragmented, coming in pieces that you have to assemble. And Frac as in fractal, like those complex patterns in fractal geometry…the more you look, the more there is to look at. All this makes for a very intense and immediate experience. But for this to work, you must be willing as a user to be playful and exploratory, to let go of the guiding hand. To chart your own course rather than take the ride.
It is not any easy choice and the challenge to designers of the Gizmos is knowing which approach works best when.
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