Interactive Narrative: Web Stories and Segmentation
e-mail me: bzotto@mit.edu


(cgi based so you need to start at the top-- Natasha's Mystery is the second one, after "The Dead Client")

This is a text-only "branching" mystery story that begins in the hard-boiled genre with an unidentified woman walking into your [a PI's] office. It consists of very short lexias followed by a set of choices for actions. In this way it resembles a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. One moves through the story by reading the text, then making a choice.

This is a singularly poor example of almost all characteristics of interactive fiction. The lexia are far, far, too limited, usually consisting of a single bland sentence. This results in a completely unengaging story; a triumph of form over content. Additionally, the interface is unintuitive (the positions of certain basic options keep changing), and the repetition of certain actions, applying to different places, is confusing. This requires too much attention to allow the (superficial) plot to become at all involving.

Despite the fact that your are apparently given a choice in your path, it seems that there are very few actual branches-- most divergences simply lead back into the main story line. This is purpose-defeating and ultimately unsatisfying: why, if I bother to make choices, should the choices be irrelevant? (Why should the story be segmented at all?)

The lack of depth in the story leaves me with little more to say about the experience. Given the shallow text and inane user choices, the format was poorly chosen. A simple work of prose would have been more engaging. This essentially functions as a cross-referenced archive of psychiatry session transcripts and doctor's notes of a fictional psychiatrist, Charles Balis. An interactor can jump in at any point and begin to understand the characters in the story, who are all employees of a single company. Hence their lives intersect outside of the doctor's office and we can begin to form a picture of the environment the characters live together in by exploring the transcripts.

The lexias in this "story" (evolving drama?) which is open to public participation in the form of new characters, are long. Each transcript/set of notes occupies several pages of text. Fortunately, this text is usually engaging enough to motivate some exploring. And this can be done by selecting dates or characters. I particularly like the cross-links between patient transcripts which have factual intersections (for example, this bit where you can scroll up a bit and see where character "Katherine Lippard"'s discussion is connected to a transcript of "Alex Rozzi" ). Different points of view were expressed in the doctor's notes (his private ones) and the patient's words in the session. This provides an interesting and cleverly neutral way of discovering a story presumably occurring outside the doctor's office entirely.

Most transcripts have forward/backwards arrows at the bottom to go to the next and previous session, but I was pleasantly surprised at the occasional "up and out" arrow which was shown going up through a ring, indicating a move out of that storyline. Although some may complain that this hindered immersion, I liked the plainness of the gesture, and it paradoxically confirmed for me that I was inside a a story. (My apologies, I lost track of the lexia which I saw it on, so I can't link to one...)

Initially, the size of the lexia was overwhelming, and eventually I think this is why I moved on to something else. But while giving it time, I found some rather interesting psychiatric thoughts... If nothing else, it seems to provide a view of that profession, and some human psychology besides.

The format is successful for this endeavor. The segmentation is reasonable if not transparent. Organizing it in a linear fashion would have been simply tedious, and although in the end it is still a bit repetitive, this format at least allows some playful exploration of its contents.

This is a well known and now-defunct (but still accessible) "cyber soap" or ("episodic website" as the creators prefer it be called). Rather than being one single work of fiction, it is a serial presentation of daily fictional diary updates from the characters of the story. The interactor can browse the current and past entries, and by always having the option of flipping between charcters, the intertwining lives of the people are explained and draw the reader into the tale.

I was struck at how appropriate the term "cybersoap" is. The staggered, alternating format of the entries mirrors the format of a television soap opera. The type of conflicts and characters is also similar. You can see this on this page, which also illustrates my other points (following).

The interactivity in this case lies with the ability to email to the characters and thus interact with the story yourself. This adds a whole new dimension to the soap opera, thus taking advantage of digital communication capabilities (making The Spot successful by utilising one of the innate qualities of the computer and internet).

The format of the story works for what it is. No lexia is overly long, and although it was easy to get a bit lost in the story, a short time investment allowed me to see multiple viewpoints and grasp the basic pattern of events. The "pull" to explore other parts was only mediocre, but perhaps that was due to the nature of my interest in the story line (I wasn't very interested). The options for doing so were clear enough and easily accessible in the form of buttons at the bottom of the page).

Overall, I would consider The Spot to be a reasonably successful episodic website. As a serial work of fiction, it took advantage of communications technology to provide interaction, and was segmented in such as way as to make it navigable. It was perhaps not as engrossing as some other types of interactive fiction, but the trade-off here is fan involvement.

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10 February 1998