EN: Research in Interactive Narratives

Its not easy to find much outside of expensive books that deal with nonlinear stories. You would think in this time and age there is tons written about games and interactivity and CD-Roms and such - but all that can be found seems to be weak and whimsy and a lool at instead a look through. One website that stands out is Research in Interactive Narratives. Not because its about the worst designed website on the whole intanet. but because it actually shows pretty clearly what needs to go into an interactive story. A little too much focused on the programming part it still has this parts where it reveals thoughts about how to go about interactive story writing. The Publications Section is full of PDFs that explain their thinking about designing a fully Interactive Story. I think a lot of that thinking can be adapted to a Live Cinema Story. I especially like the Hierarchical Task Network. Basically a graph that shows how goals and subgoals of the characters are connected to each other and how the interrelate and that the causus creates a story (not so a plot) and how when if a connection breaks because a certain goal can not be achieved another string of goals kicks in (no it has nothing to do with soccer).

EN: R. Raskins Five Parameters for Story Design in Short Fiction Film

Not much that I could say that would shorten the content of this fine piece of information. Its name implies that its only a rule of thumb for Short Films but I would say that the findings in that paper - explaining cause and effect, image and sound, simplicity and depth and so on can be applied to a multitude of story based visual genres - like games and live cinema for example. I highly recommend that for a short crash course on what to look out for when telling a (audio)visual story.

Five Parameters for Story Designin the Short Fiction Film