Christine Pillsbury, MFA ’04
thesis abstract
Name: Christine Pillsbury, MFA ’04
Thesis cover
Narratives are not merely written – they are visualized and performed, and have a long history of being so. They are an essential part of the human condition for both the author and the reader; both create subjective interpretations of a story. It is this subjective point of view that makes a narrative unique and immersive.
Every narrative, in any medium, is already interactive in the implicit sense. It is the reader’s act of decoding the codified subject from the author. But, the promise of Interactive Narrative is that the user is able to influence the narrative in such a way that the discourse would otherwise not exist without that user’s unique and explicit interaction. Although, this is not to say that the only viable forms of Interactive Narrative require the user to be the author of the text. Interactive narration is but one possible path that this medium can take.
Between the points of Barthes’s Writerly Text and Janet Murray’s Holodeck is a spectrum of possibilities. The age of hyperlinks and non-linearity has reached its apex. It is now time to think about the possibilities of the procedural structure, presentation, and visual language of future narratives. To do so, one must again revisit the definitions of authorship, narrative, interactivity, and participation. Authorship and participation are not necessarily analogous. To interact, one must have something to interact with. And, between the overly simplified and exorbitantly theoretical definitions of narrative a practical definition exists.
Narrative (n.)
A sequence of events occurring in a specific place and time, experienced, caused, and or recounted by one or more agents, representing a continuant subject and constitute a whole, communicated by one or more narrators to one or more narratees. This structure will serve as the backbone of future Interactive n.arrative systems. Thereby, enabling subjective authorship and meaningful non-authorial participation within highly mutable systems.
My greatest hope is to awaken a field that has been prematurely defined. Ultimately, my intention is to provide the foundations for a new approach in the creation and experience of Interactive n.arratives.