Interactivity

It's rather challenging to add interactivity to the story of Little Red Riding Hood without altering the original story. Although we are allowed to alter certain parts of the story, I felt that altering such a famous and well-known fable might not be easily accepted by the already pre-conditioned minds of the audiences. Thus, our group tried to maintain the kernels of the story while trying to add interactivity to it. Now, numerous problems arose in our minds - What kind of interactivity are we going to use? How do we keep the story interesting? How to maintain the coherence and interactivity of the story at the same time?

Chris Crawford defined interactivity as "a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak." Alternatively, it can be defined as involving the process of input, coding, and output between two actors. So, in order to add interactivity, the audiences have to become the participants. We should allow the audience to make choices. But if we were to jumble up the plots of the story and allow the audiences to arrange them according to their own picks, like what one of the groups presented on the powerpoint, then the story will most likely become incoherent.

So, we came up with the idea of a forum theatre, in which audiences were given the opportunity to participate and perform in the play. If they feel that the actors should react in another way, they are allowed to interfere in the midst of the play and comment on it or even take over his/her role. I feel that this method is interesting and appropriate as many knows the story of the Little Red Riding Hood and there won't be much difficulties in explaining the story to the audiences. This methods also allows more interactivity in the sense that it not only allows the audiences to comment on the play, but it also provide the opportunity to the audiences to play a role in the story. Using this method, we can also maintain the kernels of the story as other performers will not allow the others to simply ruin the story. To guard against any purposeful attempt to ruin the storyline, perhaps one performer from the group should always stay in the play. Besides that, a narrator can also serve as a story guide to the audiences.

Other groups also offered some interesting points. There is another group who uses powerpoint and allows choices to be made by audiences on the paths of the stories. However, they restricted much of the choices available. Ultimately, the audiences were being pushed to select the only path available. I felt that maybe they can make the stories more interesting by altering the satelites of the story a little by providing more available paths and yet can still reach back to the same conclusion, similar to the structure of "The Theater Tree: A Combinatory Play." This will be able to engage the audiences as they have to be prepared for the unexpected. I find the method used by Hitomi's group very interesting. They narrated the story from the point of view of the different characters in the story, thus, giving us more insights and understanding into the different character. Perhaps, this story can be made into a narrative computer game in which every player assumes the role of different characters in the story. Perhaps there can be dialog boxes as well for the players to communicate and keep the story going - some sort of theatre forum in the form of computer but with fixed players. Besides that, it can serve as an educational game for the kids as well.

1. Does a potential narrative such as Paul Fournel’s “The Tree Theatre: A Combinatory Play” or Raymond Queneau's "A Story as You Like it" satisfy Crawford’s definition of interactivity? Could it be considered an example of interactive media? Why/why not?

Chris Crawford defined interactivity as "a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak," analogous to the process of input, coding, and output. I would consider the "The Theatre Tree: A Combinatory Play" and Raymond Queneau's "A Story as You Like it" satisfied Crawford's definition of interactivity and is an example of interactive media as the processes of input, coding, and output are involved between the story and the reader. The reader were given the choices to choose the progress of the story. The story inputs to the reader when the reader is reading it. At the junction of two choices, the reader have to think and make his choice and output to the story. The story then received the selected choice and output to the reader to go to the next section where the choice leads to. So, in this way, the reader is also a participant to the determination of the storyline.