Due Dates

• Proposal for Project 1 due September 13, submit to Moodle

• Slice of your Project 1 due September 20, submit to Moodle and bring to class on September 22

• Draft of Project 1 with the Statement of Goals and Choices due September 27, submit to Moodle, or host on your website and add a link to Moodle

• Your final Project 1 will be included in your Final Portfolio, due December 18
   

Why Interactivity and Choice?

We tend to think of audiences as static readers, who each interact with the text in a similar way. However, even when just considering linguistic, print-based texts (like term papers or academic journal articles), audiences have a wide variety of ways of interacting with the text. My goal in setting interactivity as your constraint for this first project is to help you think of new ways to account for the independence and creativity of your audience, branching beyond a single mode of engagement. My hope is that this helps you think about ways to combine the modes of communication in interesting ways. Creativity does not begin and end with you, but continues as your work is circulated in the world. Consider how you can disrupt your usual creation process in productive ways by accounting for an interactive audience.
 

 

"The fact that a video game is necessarily interactive means that if we play a game we must make choices. Sure we make a choice to see a film or read a book and each of these are moral choices that say something about us. The difference with a game is that we make choices within the game itself - these choices are the game."

-Ren Reynolds
 

 

“Interactive media” is the rough term I’m using to describe types of media that blur the line between audience and creator. When applied broadly, this term applies to most of our media today, from websites to phone apps, but for this assignment I’m encouraging you to experiment and push the line as far as possible. Consider how you can make the experience of interacting with your creation different for every user, and how you can draw on the creativity of your audience to help shape your work. In other words, go beyond “mere interactivity” and think about how audiences can impact and change a work through their engagement.

 

Some brief history…

 

We can see the shift to interactivity when we look at the changes in user’s experience on the Internet. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Internet was sharply divided into creators and users, where most people fell into the category of “user” or “consumer,” because you needed access to coding knowledge in order to add content to the Internet. As we shifted to what became known as “Web 2.0” in the early 2000s, more people could become creators. We moved from static webpages to dynamic HTML, and to platforms that were designed around, and in fact depended on, user input.

 

Fast-forward to today, and the pool of creators has expanded even wider. While in the 90s and 00s most users browsed pre-created webpages, gaining access to a limited amount of information structured more like an encyclopedia, today we can capture content and post it to social media in a matter of seconds. Entire websites hinge on user input. What is the content of Facebook? Well, it’s us, it’s our lives. Zuckerboy just provides a template—it’s up to us to determine what appears on the site. (Well, and he harvests our data, but we’ll get to that later on.) We started with an Internet that was very informed by the books and manuscripts of print culture, and ended up with more of a blank canvas. Not a neutral canvas, but a space that depends on our own creativity as users nonetheless.

 

On to your creations…

 

For your own projects, consider how you can sketch out a canvas for your audience, leaving spaces for their own input, choices, and ideas. Reflect on how you might balance your own argument or plan with what your audience may want to create, do, or say. Peer feedback will be a key part of this process, as it will give you the best sense of how people will interact with your work, and what options they’ll expect.

 

You might craft a narrative with branching paths that your audience must select, choose-your-own-adventure style. Or you might design an experience like an escape room, or an interactive exhibit for a virtual museum. You could also construct an argument, while leaving space for your audience to respond. For instance, in theater, Augusto Boal pioneered a new form called Theater of the Oppressed, which was designed to reveal inequalities through plays, while also giving the audience members chances to intervene by proposing new actions for the characters to take. The actors would perform a scene that would touch on social issues from workplace conflicts to housing issues, and then open up discussion to the audience who would make suggestions about how things could go differently if the characters had made different choices, opening up new possibilities.

 

As gaming and play are inherently interactive, you could also take your project in that direction, crafting a choices-matter videogame, Twine experience, or board game. If you decide to go in this direction, I encourage you to stretch the boundaries of your game world and interrogate the problems that game designers run into when giving their players choices. For instance, how will you approach the “illusion of choice” problem, where players appear to have a choice, but that choice ends up not having a consequence on the gameplay or game outcome? Is your game more about giving your players a chance to determine their ending, or more about providing a unique path for each player that ends up at a similar outcome? Consider too how the choices we provide in games are limited by our expectations about society. Have you ever been frustrated by the assumptions of the game Life, for instance, which only allows you to choose one career over the course of your life, doesn’t allow you to attend college later in life, and forces you to have children based on the role of a die? That last question is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it reveals the mismatch that can occur between the choices we give players in games and the choices we would want for ourselves. Consider how you can treat your audience as smart, agentive, and creative players while also using your own creativity to give them a direction of play.

 

This last point can be summed up through the lens of Dungeons and Dragons, which I’ve recently gotten into during the long quarantine. If you’re not familiar, the Dungeon Master, or DM, is responsible for coming up with the story structure, monster encounters, and environment, while the player creates their own character and is responsible for figuring out what their character should do in the situations the DM sets up. One way to be a bad DM structures too much, giving the player limited choices or no choices at all in service of the grand plan they’ve established. That’ll lead to a frustrated player, who feels like they have no choices or freedom to roleplay—the whole appeal of D&D. But another way to be a bad DM is to give the player too little structure, to the point that the possibilities of what the player could do are overwhelming, and their actions feel random and purposeless, and lack a coherent narrative or way forward. In many ways, my approach to teaching is much like my approach to DMing—sketch out a supportive structure while also leaving students room to play, experiment, and add their own spin on our class story.

 

So whatever media and formats you choose, whether artwork, Twine narratives, comics, museum exhibits, board games, or (yes) a D&D adventure, consider how you can be a good DM for your audience.

 

Expectations

My expectation for this first major project is that you create a text--or series of texts--that clearly explores the challenge of interactivity. Your text should have a clear purpose, or in other words, it should address a need in the world. If you are telling a story, then you should think about why you are telling that story. If you are constructing an argument, then you should think about how you are building on the conversation surrounding that issue.

 

Recommendations for the Statement of Goals and Choices

For your SOGC for this project, consider how you accounted for or leaned into the illusion of choice. Did you decide to make it clear to the reader that they don’t have complete control of the story? Or did you work on ways to give more control to the reader, or at least make them feel as if they are holding the narrative reins? Why or why not? Consider how you can articulate the shape of your project, and explain how audiences might interact with your work, and why those modes of interactivity are important. Are there a set number of ways of interacting with the text, or nearly an infinite number, and why did you choose that approach? Overall, consider how you can support your particular approach to audience choice, and explain how you drew on the different modes, as well as why you settled on your particular medium and format.