Week 13 – Cara & Liz
This week’s talks: Cara & Liz
Session #7
Jami Sieber
Unspoken:The Music of Only Breath
Week 12 – Tamiah & Jacinta
This week’s talk will be by: Tamiah & Jacinta
We listened to
Session #6
“IBM 1401 A User’s Manual”
by Johann Johannsson
(parts 1 -3)
Week 11 – Janek, Rowan, Tegan
15 minute talk to be given by: Rowen, Janek
I will still be bringing in music (up to 20 minutes worth) each class for us all to write by (including myself). That way, you’ll get at least 20 minutes writing in every week for the next 4 weeks. 
We listened to:
Session #5
“Kling Klang”
by Kraftwerk
from the album Kraftwerk II
Week 6 – Interactive TV
12 minute Speed Writing Session #1
“Zyklop” by Thomas Koner (Greenland)
http://www.myspace.com/thomaskoner
This particular tune is off his recent album “Zyklop” and is more of an aural soundscape than an actual piece of music. I like this stuff. But I’m also a fan of microphone bumps and wind noise.
Speed Writing Rules:
- write as fast as you can
- don’t stop
- don’t even think
Fahrenheit 451
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PERvsYtQ9TM
Directed by Truffaut 1966
Written by Ray Bradbury in 1953
History
A Short History of iTV
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2001/apr/05/onlinesupplement5
(The Guardian, UK 2001)
Microsoft man says TV has three years to adapt
http://informitv.com/articles/2009/08/29/microsoftmansays/
Hindrances to Progress: Infrastructure?
The film “Who Killed the Electric Car?” played out like “Murder on the Orient Express” Everyone played a part in murdering the victim and so we have petrol. Bowser infrastructure, the roads, facilities and supply chain – is all built around oil.
Interactive TV in Australia
At the mention of interactive TV, Kerry Packer & Rupert Murdoch (2005) baulked. We have a tiny marrket compared to our Western brethren. These guys wanted to keep the status quo and saw the fracturing of the TV market in to many channels (and interactive backchannels) as a threat to lucrative TV advertising. So we got 7, 9 and 10 and ABC TV in high quality (HD is already looking like low-quality when you consider computer monitor resolution).
In Europe, the trade-off in quality was used for adding more interactive channels.
Lately, interactive TV (in Australia at least) mostly refers to SMS / phone polling during free-to-air shows. Big Brother was perfect for our free-to-air system as money could be made by getting people to call Legion Interactive (now the enigmatic Belong Group). And now we have the US franchise “Australian Idol”.
Originally meant to stream to and from the TV transmitter / receiver, interactivity in Australia now mainly happens through the internet (now almost ready for streaming video) and the telcos.
InformITV
http://informitv.com/news/
Interactive TV Today
http://itvt.com/
Broadband Bananas
http://www.broadbandbananas.com
iTV Examples
Twitter Enhanced TV
http://itvt.com/story/5527/fox-air-twitter-enhanced-re-runs-fringe-and-glee
BBC Red Button TV
The red button is basically for extra content button
http://itvt.com/story/5531/bbc-unveils-its-red-button-interactive-tv-schedule-coming-weeks
Content, content, content!
Needless to say – “content” has always been the cornerstone for any interctive endeavour. The focus in the last few years seemed to be on marketing to the consumer. But more recently, marketers have realised that consumers are a greedy bunch who want everything for FREE. They’re not just going to click on pop-up ads. And so in the last year or two there seems to be a shift back towards the consumer.
Podcast – Marissa Cooke
“Extending Narrative : The Emmerdale Experience”
Marissa talks through her experiences of extending stories into online and other platforms looking specifically at her work on the enigmatic cross-media service created by Hoodlum for Emmerdale. She talks about call-to-actions, multiple entry points, point-of-view, story worlds, gameplay and trail heads as part of this experience creation for the audience.
TV Loop
http://mashable.com/2008/12/09/tvloop/
Where TV meets Social Networking?
Ambient Devices
Chumby
http://www.chumby.com/
What to do in class / for next week?
- Speed writing (12 mins using pencil and paper). No particular subject.
- Re-write your pencil and paper piece as a BLOG entry.
- Choose 3 articles from any of the links above and BLOG about them.
- What is your overview of the recent movements in Interactive TV.
- Make sure you have booked a time for your talk. Week 14 has 2 places left, but there is also week 9 if someone is keen to get going.
Week 3 – Interactive Storytelling
What is Interactive Storytelling?
“Chris Crawford, a game design pioneer turned interactive storytelling researcher, uses the term “Interactive Storytelling” to refer to a type of entertainment experience that is much more than a video game with narrative thrown on top. True interactivity, according to Crawford, means a story that is literally created out of the decisions made by a player, moment to moment, scene to scene.”
From a review of the book Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling
- Another definition and discussion on Gamasutra
Interactive Fiction (IF)
“software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment” (Wikipedia)
Popular in the 80s but no longer viable. Uses text.
Interactive Storytelling
Dramatically rich environments.
Multi-player “stories”
usually a survival story – equivalent to film thriller structure (running from an assailant/s with the sole aim to survive*) consists of killing monsters, fighting battles, finding weapons and ammo, or amassing huge armies and advancing through the ages of technological progress in order to nuke your opponent. Always ends in death and / or with some kind of resurrection (eg. 3 lives).
Single player “story”
Problem-solving, element of feeling lost like in the highly successful game Myst
User has control over a few or many (like Myst) story elements.
NPCs : Non-playing characters
Defined by good (or bad) Artificial Intelligence.
Archetypes
Stereotypes
Real People
“Character” is where we’re at. Communicating with computers through chat is where we are fixed at this time. The keyboard is still our limit even after years of voice-activated automatons (eg. Telstra help).
ELIZA
ELIZA was a computer program and an early example (by modern standards) of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users’ responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. In this mode, ELIZA mostly rephrased the user’s statements as questions and posed those to the ‘patient.’ ELIZA was written by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 to 1966.
(Wikipedia)
The beginnings of Artificial Intelligence
Children and robots
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12879-giggling-robot-becomes-one-of-the-kids-.html
Giggling robot becomes one of the kids
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.400-emotional-robots-will-we-love-them-or-hate-them.html?full=true
Emotional robots
Facade
A Truly Interactive Game?
Stern and Mateas (the creators of Facade) are really funny and onto this interactive thing.
Long but interesting article:
Agitating for Dramatic Change
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2789/agitating_for_dramatic_change.php?page=3
*Ref: Ken Dancyger “Alternative Scriptwriting”
For next week:
Readings (choose 3)
from this page on Gamedev.net
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=123
Discuss any or all of these articles
in your BLOG and we’ll also chat in class.
Download and play Facade
You get it from http://www.interactivestory.net/
Addendum: Group Buys
Where many many people can get together to buy a product or bunch of products at a fraction of the normal price. Not really relevant to storytelling per se – unless any of you guys want to write a fictional story about a “Robot Group Buy”.
www.esoundz.com
http://www.esoundz.com/details.php?ProductID=3823