Tuesday, February 10th: Assignment 1

NowTV Murder Mysteries

This is a collection of Choose-Your-Own adventure style narratives, except that the options are generated dynamically based on where your character has been and what information he/she has picked up.

The biggest problem I had with these stories is that the segmentation is too much. There's maybe a line or two text on each page, such that I end up cliking around too much and spend not enough time reading and taking things in. But it's better than the opposite problem of too much text. In those cases, you might as well be reading a typical static narrative (and personally, my attention span isn't long enough is too keep me reading unless it's good).

The second problem I had with these narratives was that the same options (links to the next page) kept popping up. If you choose to "Look around," then you can immediately "Look around," again and the text doesn't change. I guess this is to be expected, but it gets bad when it happens in conversation. You can ask a person a question again and get the same answer. The person won't think it weird or tell you to stop pestering him/her. The programmer probably chose to leave the options available so that the reader feels a greater sense of agency. If you, the user, forget some vital information, you can ask the question again to be reminded. A more sophisticated program, would not allow you to ask a question immediately after having just asked it and if it does allow the user to reask questions, it should be phrased to indicate that the question is being re-asked: "Sorry, but what's your name again?" And the characters in the story should answer realistically (or consistently for whatever world they are acting in). If the user insists on asking a silly question, he should get a silly answer: "You just asked me that," "Stop pestering me," "No, I won't answer that again! Stop asking!" or the character should give a different response, if appropriate. Obviously the game wanted to go this way, becase there were some casual questions like "Where are you from?" which when asked in the middle of a tense investigation would get the response, "There's no time for that!"

I spoke too soon. I eventually found a place in "The Dead Client" where a character would respond with "We've been over this! Go bother someone else," when asked a question a second time. And I did eventually find places where asking the same question twice to the same person resulted in a different meaningful response, but only after having found out other information from that person.

Each scene in "The Dead Client" was accompanied by a picture. If it was an empty room, the picture would be of the room, and if someone was present in the room, it would be a closeup of that person's face. I was disappointed at how little the pictures changed. In fact, I only encountered two changes: first, when the murder victim dies, his normal closeup is replaces with a closeup of his lifeless slumped head, and second, when a character eventually leaves a room and the closeup of her face is then replaced by a picture of just the room. But it would have been more interesting if the pictures of people represented some more information about the current situation. Probably for reasons of time, money, and programming, all the pictures of a person were the same, even from room to room. The state of the person is communicated in the text, with a string such as "{agitated}" before the words that a person speaks. If the picture were more integrated into the story, it would be used to convey more of this information. Interestingly, the person's name is also given in the text. It would have been great for the program to just say that someone approaches and show the picture and have it be up to the user to ask "What's your name?" in conversation, and then have it be the user's job to remember names and faces. Of course, if the user's role in the story is as a person who has a history that the user isn't aware of, then giving the user this information is reasonable. That is, the user shouldn't ask "What's your name?" when a long-time friend approaches, since that would be out of character for the role being played.

Having the computer, or the story, keep track of this information for me, made playing the game (or reading the story) easier when I didn't want to put too much thought into it. The game became basically moving around the house asking questions of people until I ran out of new questions to ask and then going to another suspect and seeing what new options I now had available thanks to information I gathered from the last suspect. I didn't have to remember what information I was told or reason out why that information would be important. I only really had to know which person I should ask next, but since there were only three or four rooms, I could easily move on to the next suspect if I found I was questioning the wrong one. It would be more important to make sure I knew where to go in a game where moving from one place to another take a long time (either in game time or in real time). And once things started getting interesting in "The Dead Client"--there were a lot of accusations flying--one of the suspects confessed (without much enthusiasm, I might add) and the game was suddenly over. Well, it didn't just end, it had me go to the authorities to report the crime, but there was no recap or anything significant there, just a Lieutenant saying "Good work!" and one link at the bottom with the question "Well?" But no matter how many times I pressed it, the same lexia came up. This was a very unsatisfying ending (if it was an ending at all).

Incidentally, I found a place where the wrong picture came up! And it was the picture of the murder victim! But I knew I was still in conversation with the same person because of the textual clues.

In some cases there were many possible options, but only one real option for the situation (all the others being for going to other rooms or asking standard questions for which I already knew the answers). This made me feel less empowered. I was being led around. However, there was still interest in clicking to find out what would follow. This occurred in conversation, so the link was associated with a question to a suspect and I was interested in finding out what the response would be, even if I no longer had agency. So the links weren't random, they were still structured and I knew where I was going even if I didn't get to choose to go there.

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Crime Scene

Examples of good segmentation:
http://www.crimescene.com/rose/bios.html
http://www.crimescene.com/rose/forenics.html

The segmentation in these stories was excellent. Each letter or memo or newspaper story was a single lexia. And information was structured in a heirarchical way such that there are no long pages. The top level is the case overview with links off to all the various pieces of evidence and information. The evidence is usually a small enough chunk (like letters and articles) to fit on one page. The user can also view graphs and charts, some of which might have been longer than my screen but that was the most logical segmentation: keeping the information on one page homogenous. A long list of alibis on one page is excusable, but if this is lumped together with character information causing the page to grow longer, then that's not good segmentation. The page of readers' comments is very long and requires lots of scrolling, and it's hard to weed out the useful information. But given the unpredictability of reader comments, I'm not sure what a better solution would be. The benefit of putting it all on one page is that it all stays together and skimming the information becomes easier--rather than having to load a new page for each user response.

The fact that there is so much information available makes it hard to get involved in a story. And many of the reports and articles don't seem very long when viewed individually, but they become intimidating when you see how many of them there are to read.

Navigating the site is easy. I didn't feel lost despite the intimidating amounts of information.

The site's use of media is reasonable. There are polaroids of the crime scene and shots of the suspects. And there are video versions of the interviews, but I wasn't able to watch them. Most of the media is used to provide evidence in the form that police officers would normally have them, such as pictures of the crime scene.

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Brian's Spring Break (or My Weekend In Providence)

This was an interesting idea. The lexia is given on the right and the links are made through a picture (always visible) on the left. All the links are available in this picture, but each lexia has suggested links to visit next (in varying levels!). The closer a part of the picture is to the reader's current location, the brighter it will appear in the picture on the left. In this way, the reader can decide where to click next, with guidancee from the author. It was refreshing that there were no hard links in the text; however, the reader has to interpret the picture to figure out why a link is related and still may not know what to expect when clicking on a link. But the story is not large enough for this to be a great problem. Instead, the act of discovery makes the story more fun. It was kind of distrurbing, though, that when I found a new name or an event or something in the text that I wanted to learn more about, I didn't know where to click next to find more information. I could click on all the squares in the picture and eventually get the full story, but it wouldn't be quite so engaging or meaningful because it would just be a random through the story--it wouldn't be my path.

The segmentation is nice. The text on the right occasionally scrolled, but it wasn't long enough to be annoying. And the text was in various formats: play-like dialogue, email, transcipt of an answering machine message, narrative, etc. In some cases the text was replaced by a graphic or music. This kept the story interesting.