In the “Best of 1995,” year-end issue of Entertainment Weekly, a film titled Mr. Payback received the dubious honor of being rated number one in the magazines “Worst of 1995” multimedia section. Mr. Payback (Interfilm) is an interactive film; what Entertainment Weekly wrongly describes as the “first widely promoted interactive film.” Mr. Payback incorporates joysticks and color-coded buttons on the theater seats, by which the audience is, ideally, supposed to choose various courses within the plot by majority decision. The story is little more than a combination of similar plot options, and what generally ensues is audience members yelling and screaming to the rest of the theater which button they should pick. What Mr. Payback attempted was not that much different from many of the theatrical, movie-house gimmicks of the 1950s, such as Smell-O-Vision, 3D and Cinerama. These novelties were designed as t emporary methods for getting people into the theaters, and had little to do with the aesthetics of the film. For Mr. Payback, the attempt is at novelty, not at interactivity.

Surprisingly, Mr. Payback is what most people consider to be “interactive” entertainment. However, this type of interactivity is entirely primitive when one considers the possibilities that digital technology offers to the world of entertainment. The difference between how interactivity is defined today (Mr. Payback) and the diverse possibilities that interactive entertainment can potentially offer, is likely to be the same as the difference between “magic lanterns” and motion pictures. The “new” technologies of interactive entertainment are at a premature stage, needing inventive experimentation and creative content to remove its status as a forty year-old novelty act. Through imaginative effort in both technology and text, the craft of interactive entertainment can become an entirely new method of story-making. The advent of digital media provides the essential ingredient for this growth, very much like technological developments such as the 19th century Phenatiskiscopes, Kinetiscopes, and Stroboscopes that allowed for motion pictures to be born over one-hundred years ago.

The focus of this paper is to explore how the concept of interactivity is being applied within the realm of digital entertainment. The primary categories that will be investigated are film and video, CD-ROM, and the Internet. These three categories are the main platforms that apply interactive entertainment.

CLARIFYING THE TERMINOLOGY

Practically everything that occurs in daily life is an interaction of some sort. Interactivity, at its essence, involves reciprocal effects between two objects. There can be virtually an infinite combination of things that interact: animals and nature, humans and animals, audience and theater, and so on. In the digital world, the term “interactive” is generally used to describe interaction between a human and a non-organic element, such as television, a video game, or a computer. To clarify “interactive” for this study, some terms need to be defined.

Brenda Laurel composed a list of interactive variables in her seminal book, Computers as Theatre (1991). Among her variables are “frequency,” meaning how often the user interacts, “significance,” referring to the degree of response and how it affects the outcome, and “range,” meaning the number of choices presented to the user. These three principles are of undeniable importance, and must be considered when evaluating any interactive hypermedia.

Laurel’s “interactive continuum” of frequency, range, and significance, will be re- structured for the purposes of this study. In digital entertainment, the word “interactivity” holds some specific values. One of the main values, or criteria, is that of “control.” In the interactive entertainment, the user has some degree of control over the particular system: be it story, action, environment, character, time, and so on. The variable of “range,” presented by Laurel, can be used as a measure of the “control” criteria, considering that “range” denotes the possible number of controllable choices. Another criteria of hers is that of “response.” The user has the ability to alter certain elements of the system, and that system responds in a variety of ways to those actions. Laurel’s variables of “frequency” and “significance” can be placed under my definition of “response ,” since “frequency” and “significance” reflect the amount, and importance of, the interactive response. In general, interactivity is a method of control and response between the user and the system; Brenda Laurel’s terminology helps in defining my criteria of control and response and illustrates the parameters of the “interactive continuum.”

The second term used in this study is the interactive “system.” In the digital vernacular, there are a multitude of terms related to the word “system”—including multimedia, hypermedia, intertainment, infotainment, and edutainment. In general, these terms refer to the same thing. Essentially, a system is an assemblage of a variety of components working together for a specific purpose. These systems can combine (to any degree) elements of video, film, graphics, animation, music, audio, and text. For the purposes of this investigation of interactive structures, the term “hypermedia” is used to describe the “system” of interactive media.

In the late 1960s, computer philosopher Ted Nelson examined the evolution of the cinema in order to understand how this new media, which he later dubbed “hypermedia,” would develop. The convergence of diverse media, such as photography and theatre, into the development of motion pictures led Nelson to consider the intertextual relationships between media forms and content. Nelson reasoned that the computer represented the connective element between modern media. His concept of hypermedia focused on the use of computers to “link” various media together so that they may be retrieved, stored and displayed in different ways. Currently, the media incorporated within hypermedia include film and video, CD-ROMs, and the Internet. The structure, format and application of these forms of hypermedia will be examined throughout this paper.

CINEMATIC TRADITION AND THE CYCLE OF REINVENTION

There is a complex, yet definite relationship between hypermedia and the cinema. Although it is often thought that cinematic practice provided the impetus for the development of hypermedia, the history and craft of hypermedia can be examined as a entity separate from film.

For over fifty years, hypermedia has been in a process of continued genesis. In his 1945 article, “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush details the earliest concepts of integrated sound, image and text, complete with ideas of “associational links” between the various types of information. In the late 1960s, after reading Bush’s articles, Douglas Engelbart developed his “Augmentation” project which involves ideas such as the mouse and windows, teleconferencing and electronic mail. Engelbart’s development of “intellectual augmentation” formed the foundation for the personal computer, hypertext, and hypermedia. Ted Nelson entered the scene around the same time, and named these developments “hypermedia.” Nelson and Engelbart materialized the concepts originally proposed by Bush, and collaboratively developed the first ideas of digital hypermedia.

Following the efforts of individuals such as Engelbart and Nelson, the boom of the computer industry during the late 1970s and early 1980s contributed significantly to the evolution of hypermedia. From the development of the Cray 1 Supercomputer in 1976, to the IBM personal computer (PC) in 1981, to the Macintosh in 1984, the computer industry left the strict domain of scientists and engineers and entered the homes of middle America. This move from workplace to home is a critical element, but the development of Hypercard (by Bill Atkinson of Apple Computers) in 1987 signaled the move from hypermedia as concept into hypermedia as practical application. By using “copying” and “pasting” tools, Hypercard was designed to be used as a “construction kit” by anyone wanting to create hypermedia applications. Hypercard was the first hypermedia “authoring” program, and its large success in the home computer market reflected the desire, from bot h the professional and novice, for the tools to create hypermedia.

By the late 1980s both personal computers and the equipment to create hypermedia were readily available to the consumer at relatively affordable costs. Market-wide availability and economical prices, combined with a burgeoning cottage industry of hypermedia producers, began to draw the interest from the general public. The digital dissemination between 1980 and the early 1990s would provide the building blocks for structuring interactive entertainment.

Although the technical developments involved in creating hypermedia were essential to its success, the methodology of hypermedia, and how hypermedia communicates, evolved from the conventions of the cinema. The history of hypermedia is similar to the maturation of film. For comparison, consider the issues of quality-control, distribution, equipment size (both display and recording), talent, and subject matter. On virtually every front, digital entertainment has encountered the same challenges as motion pictures. For example, the development of film stock grew from the paper-strip processes of the silents to the seventy-five millimeter color stock of some film productions today. This is similar to the technical challenges faced in data storage of hypermedia, which moved from large format magnetic reels to floppy disks to CD-ROMs. As technology evolved, the quality and creative range of each of these mediums grew correspondingly.

Similarly comparable is the development of recording devices, such as the cumbersome cameras of the early cinema to the modern hand-held camcorders. This is equivalent with the transition between the supercomputers of the 1960s and 70s, which were literally the size of a small house, to the laptops of the 1990s, which are the size of a small notebook. In measuring the dynamics of filmmaking or computing, the aesthetic issues of quality and artistic potential are controlled, to some degree, by the size and functions of the basic operational unit, such as the camera or central processing unit (CPU) of a computer.

Both cinema and hypermedia must continually reinvent themselves due to new technologies and invention. Content is continually being redesigned, remade, and “repurposed” into new and different forms; hence, one finds video games based on books or feature films. In other words, since hypermedia and film survive by a cycle of revolutions in technology and talent, their respective products, such as motion pictures or interactive entertainment, will follow a similar life-cycle of birth-death-rebirth.

The clearest demonstration of this analogous cycle of reinvention can be found within the method of production. Much like film production, hypermedia progresses through five general phases. The first phase is “creative design,” or pre-production, where a team, complete with a director, art supervisor, producer and writer, discusses what their hypermedia program will do and how it will look. Secondly, the development moves into “storyboarding,” where the application is planned step-by-step. Next, is “script development,” where writers create dialogue, text (to be read), and further revise the critical elements of plot, character and action. The fourth phase is “production,” which involves actors, directors and artists (i.e., CGI animators, technical directors, visual effects supervisors), who create the various scenes, be it through animation, live-action film, sound recording, and so on. The fifth phase is 93"authoring,” where all the various elements are put together through programming. This last step can be compared to post-production, or editing, since authoring is used as a “completion” phase , structuring and finalizing the program into a finished whole.

The connection between hypermedia and film becomes more complex when considering hypermedia that are “adaptations” of films, and vice versa. CD-ROMs that are adapted from films are consistently on the Top 20 list of CD-ROM sellers. CD-ROM titles such as Babe, Toy Story, The Lion King Activity Center, Pocahontas Animated Storybook, Star Wars Rebel Assault II, and Dark Forces (from Star Wars) represent the cycle of reinvention as the content of a film is translated and “repurposed” into a hypermedia format. The confusion occurs when the origin of a piece of material becomes lost in this hyper-translation process. For example, the hypermedia title, Congo: The Movie - Descent Into Zinj, is a CD-ROM calling itself a movie, but the CD-ROM is actually adapted from a film, which was adapted from the novel by Michael Crichton. This leads to a cycle of reinvention that “repurposes” the source material so many times that the integrity of the original material can be completely lost, although it retains the original title.

Another stage of the reinvention cycle involves hypermedia that are adapted into films. Although less common than films that are adapted into hypermedia, films such as Mortal Kombat, Mario Brothers, and Street Fighter, originated as video games and were later produced as feature films. This has started a trend in both the video game and film industries to plan on the “repurposing” of material before the material is created. In considering the optimum mass-marketability of a piece of material (film, game, screenplay, book, and so on), material that offers the possibility of an extended life in multiple medias stand a far greater chance of being produced than material limited to only one media . This further illustrates the cycle of reinvention: product propagates product propagates product. The cycle of hypermedia will be more closely examined in the CD-ROM section of this paper.

Film and hypermedia help to define one another in terms of language and communication. Hypermedia is a convergence of many previous media along with new media being developed specifically for it. In other words, it is a convergence of the old and new. The interrelationship between film and hypermedia stems from this concept of “media convergence.” As these media come together, the syntax and language of film will be redefined, elaborated and changed according to the desires of the hypermedia creator. Traditional narrative cinema will respond in diverse changes of content and form, as it has already demonstrated with films such as Virtuosity, Toy Story, Jurassic Park and Johnny Mneumonic. These films display environments and stories inspired and created by the world of hypermedia.

Media convergence is the inevitable by-product of the digital evolution. Nicholas Negroponte observed this convergence when designing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in the late 1970s. Negroponte commented, “All communication technologies are suffering a joint metamorphosis, which can only be understood properly if treated as a single subject, and only advance properly if treated as a single craft.” To illustrate this point to the MIT Media Lab design committee, Negroponte displayed a slide presentation, with one slide from the perspective of 1978, and the other from the perspective of 2000.

These slides displayed Negroponte’s “marketing symbol” for the Media Lab, and an example of his concept of converging media. As Negroponte predicted, the industries that were once independent bodies (print, film, and computer), have become integrated into a cohesive media network. Modern examples of this convergence include the many communication empires such as Turner Entertainment, Sony, and Time-Warner. These media conglomerates are capable of producing broadcast television, film, magazines, video games and computer software.

The concept of industrial communication convergence is the backbone of hypermedia and interactive entertainment. The problems and advantages of adopting the conventions of traditional media, primarily of cinema, into interactive entertainments will be the focus of the next three sections of this paper. These sections will analyze the cycle of reinvention and the metamorphical elements at work in hypermedia through an examination of the film and video, CD-ROM, and Internet formats. This analysis will demonstrate how this new medium is an essential, but unbridled, breach with other methods of communication, entertainment, and education.

FILM AND VIDEO

In the beginning of this paper, Mr. Payback was used as an example of interactive film as a device for novelty. The concept of “audience participation” used in Mr. Payback is what most consider to be an interactive film experience, but this hardly scratches the tip of the iceberg. However, since the present status of interactive filmmaking is at the level of Mr. Payback, the subject of a fully realized interactive film or video can only be discussed through examinations of the past, and through predictions about the future. The possibilities of the hypermedia-based interactive film—that is, an interactive entertainment designed and displayed via various media—are foreshadowed in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. Stephenson describes the interactive film as a panoramic event, explaining:

It is a mile high structure of moving two and three dimensional images, interlocked in space and time. It’s got everything in it. Leni Riefenstahl films. The sculptures of Michelangelo, and the fictional inventions of Da Vinci made real. World War II dogfights zooming in and out of the middle, veering out over the crowd, shooting and burning and exploding. Scenes from a thousand classic films, flowing and merging together into a single vast complicated story.

Obviously, the difference between Mr. Payback and the fictional interactive “event” in Snow Crash is great, but it is not a difference in purpose as much as it is a difference in method. What Mr. Payback attempted, and maybe succeeded in accomplishing, was an amusement park movie. Stephenson’s show aspires towards “total immersion” within the displayed environment. “Total immersion” is a term most often associated with virtual reality, but it is also a concept relevant to an understanding of interactive film and video. The idea of total immersion, as defined by Michael Heim, is to “submerge the user in the sights and sounds and tactility specific to that environment . . . creating the sense of being present in a virtual world.”

Creating this “sense of being” is the critical difference between an interactive film and a novelty gag. In other words, compared with the ability to “act within a representation,” as in Snow Crash, films created to be “interactive” in the style of Mr. Payback will only be “simulations” of interactivity, rather than interactive experiences. As Brenda Laurel explains, “There is a rudimentary measure of interactivity: You either feel yourself to be participating in the ongoing action of the representation or you do not.” By immersing the user within the fictional world (or, story), the experience becomes one of a personal virtual reality, rather than being a third-party viewer. Chris Carlsson points out how interactive entertainment utilizes the viewer: “The development of interactivity is an attempt to outflank the increasing emptiness of media consumption by using our participation to enhance the credibility of spectacular images.”

The interactive user enjoys the entertainment because they are in it—which leads to questions about spectatorship and its role in the structures of story. For over a century, film audiences have become conditioned to certain forms of story, primarily the story structure of the linear narrative. With interactive entertainment, this spectatorship is being challenged and redefined. What, then, separates the interactive from the traditional film or video? To answer this question, the structures of both traditional and interactive film must be explored.

NARRATIVE

The fundamental dilemma of interactive cinema is one of narrative structure. By the definition of interactivity (control and response), the traditional concept of linear narrative cannot operate within the interactive story. The narrative form, as defined by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, is “a filmic organization in which the parts relate to each other through a series of causally related events taking place in a specific time and space.” The film narrative in the traditional Hollywood cinema is “guided” along a linear path. This leads to a structured story, placing the events and actions in a specifically designed environment. Linearity is defined as, “a clear motivation of a series of causes and effects that progress without significant digressions, delays, or irrelevant actions.” However, the interactive entertainment is structured to remove this “series of causes and events,” and furthermore, to allow for any number of “digressions” and “irrelevant actions.” This is the central challenge in creating interactive entertainment.

The differences between traditional narrative and interactive story create several dilemmas. For example, how can the suspension of disbelief be maintained when the user/viewer is responsible for creatively guiding the narrative? And does this affect the creative input of the director, writer, producer and actor? The answers lie within new types of narrative, and, more importantly, with creative and talented applications of new narrative structures.

The linear narrative is created by a filmmaker with the intent of “telling,” or showing, the viewer a carefully constructed story with the three principle points of beginning, middle, and end. The beginning travels along the narrative line, introducing characters and plot elements at various intervals, but everything along the narrative line leads towards the conclusion. Thomas Uzell demonstrates a similar structuring device in the design of a short-story or the chapters of a novel:

The numbered “factors” can represent settings, plot action or characters. By establishing the factors that constitute a narrative structure, and by framing them in this pattern, the above model centralizes on the inherency of the “left-to-right” method of traditional narrative. This model illustrates Bordwell and Thompson’s definition of linear narrative: “a series of causes and effects that progress without significant digressions, delays or irrelevant actions.” Although the definition and diagram are generalized concepts, a vast majority of traditional cinema and literature can fall under these formalized “terms” of linear narrative.

The introduction of an interactive structure into the domain of narrative is largely due to the influx of video games during the 1980s. The process of redefining narrative structures owes a great deal to the post baby-boom generation, which was raised in an environment where game entertainment offered an entirely new way of storytelling. The structure of the video game “story” is called the interrupted narrative, where “interruptions” occur during the story in the form of problems, discovery, tests, probing or examination. These interruptions are both controlled and responsive, thereby changing the next step on the narrative line according to the user’s actions.

The various elements in the large squares represent possible user actions, while the smaller squares breaching the narrative line represent the action taken. Through the interrupted narrative, the user learns more about the story and characters through their own interaction. In the world of cinema, this concept of interruption was experimented by a variety of independent filmmakers. Carolee Schneemann, a filmmaker and performance artist, blended stage performance (theater) and film, in works such as Illinois Central (1968) and Night Crawlers (1967). Schneemann utilized the different presentational forms of film and theatre to agitate, or, “interrupt,” the flow of traditional theatre, thereby provoking the audience to become more “involved.”

The next step in the narrative evolution towards interactive film is a more complex rendition of the previous examples. The “branching narrative” extends the concept of the interrupted narrative, but builds different narrative paths once the linear structure is changed.

One of the earliest motion pictures to apply this model was the Argentine film, La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, circa 1976), by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino. La Hora de los Hornos was created as a “film act,” to force the audience to think about the controversial subject matter within the film. The four-hour film about Argentine politics and culture includes various legends which appear on the screen, instructing the projectionist to stop the film and the audience to have open discourse about what they had just seen. The filmmakers also left the film open-ended so that they could change the film as a result of audience participation, thus, hypothetically, no screening was ever the same as the previous screening. In this respect, La Hora de los Hornos initiates audience participation in the truest sense, since the filmmakers would repeatedly change the film in relation to previous audien ce response. Solanas and Gettino used the interrupted structure when stopping the film for discussion and then furthered the interactivity by changing, or “branching,” the film to suit the audience response.

I’m Your Man (1992) also demonstrates the structure of a branching narrative. Created by Interfilm, the same company that produced Mr. Payback, I’m Your Man is stored on two Laserdiscs, which allowed for random access, but the narrative options were “randomly” chosen by majority decision, such as in Mr. Payback. The audience was allowed to “change” the narrative of the film at fifty different branching points. By using buttons attached to theater seats, viewers could “vote” for which branch, or direction, they wanted the film to travel.

The mathematics of the branching narrative bring up a considerable problem. For example, if the above pattern were followed for a feature film, over twenty-eight variations would have to be offered from the original. This raises issues of storage capacity, cost factors and hardware capability. Theoretically, as the technology increases, the possibility for branching interactive films will be realized. Significant progress has been made in this arena with the development of the digital video disc, or DVD. A digital video disc offers multigigabyte storage capacity on a five-inch optical disc (the size of a normal music CD). Over the past few years, there has been constant debate (between Sony and Phillips on one side and Time Warner and Toshiba on the other) over the issue of a standardized format for DVD. In 1995, this corporate battle was resolved and a standardized format was agreed upon, belying fears of a VHS-vs-Beta-style fiasco. DVD is expected to be o n the consumer market by early 1997, and promises to become a consequential piece of the interactive film/video puzzle.

Finally, there is the object-oriented narrative, which is the most radical break in narrative structure. The object-oriented structure is highly responsive and introduces a certain degree of entropy or chaos. Object-oriented structures in interactive entertainment are derived from design techniques used in computer programming. Object-oriented design is “a method in which a system is modeled as a collection of cooperating objects and individual objects are treated as instances of a class within a class hierarchy.” Utilizing independent objects within a specified “hierarchy,” or environment, offers the advantages of a changeable and fluctuating story within a designed setting. Currently, this structure has only appeared on the Internet, but it is the direction of the interactive narrative media of the future.

The object-oriented narrative advances the opportunity for multiple users to interact within a user-controlled environment. An example of an object-oriented interactive entertainment is David Blair’s WAXweb, a self-described “multi-media integrated narrative.” WAXweb is an interactive film on the World Wide Web (WWW), based on David Blair’s eighty-five minute electronically-constructed independent feature, Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991). WAXweb is a practical application of repurposing a film via the Internet, complete with video, audio, still pictures and text—all of which can be added to, rearranged, expanded or commented on by anyone using the site.

WAXweb operates through a system called a MOO (MUD Object Oriented). MOOs stem from a type of Internet gaming called a MUD, which stands for Multi-User Domain. Generally, these are text-based adventure games played on-line, which were inspired by role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. MOOs follow the object-oriented narrative structure illustrated in the diagram, and serve to create a collaborative and modifiable operating environment. These systems involve multiple users who assume their own, virtual identities within the MOO. David Blair explains the interactive process in the MOO and MUD environment:

To play in a MUD, people travel (telnet) to a machine running the software, log on under archaic pseudonyms, and wage text against other users. The live, on-line intercommunication is what makes them unique... they are text-based virtual realities. While MUDs are fixed gaming areas, with fixed rules, MOOs are completely open and allow users to reconfigure the space, make new rooms, and even do a certain amount of Basic-style programming. MOOs can still have gaming aspects, but they are more often used as meeting, presentation, and workplaces, where you can be alone, or with many people.

Through the MOO, audience members (users) are allowed to reprocess the film, since they can read from and write to the WAXweb site. The effect is extraordinary and takes some time to get use to. When I first visited WAXweb, my interactions were a chaotic series of point-and-click sessions. Since WAXweb is structured as an object-oriented environment, I was unfamiliar with its organization, and, more importantly, what it was trying to say. In other words, the confusion stemmed from WAXweb’s non-linearity. Once the user realizes the necessity for causal learning, WAXweb can be an invigorating and captivating experience. The creative possibilities are vast: one can create back-story or link parts of the film together in uncommon ways, expand on certain concepts, images or sounds . . . or, simply talk to other people within the film. In WAXweb, the audience literally becomes the author of the story, and the film becomes a global endeavor.

The future of interactive cinema is not strictly object-oriented narrative or branching narrative or interruptive narrative, but a combination of all of these. The evolution of the interactive narrative form will result in a method of non-linear storytelling, similar to tribal forms of storytelling where the story could be expanded, altered, rearranged and visualized through dance and song. Object-oriented structure is the current evolutionary stage of interactive narrative, and establishes that interactive cinema is moving towards a return to natural modes of storytelling, multi-tasking in the same way the human mind works in reality.

CD-ROM

One of the primary sources of home entertainment for children in the 1980s was the video game. During this decade, as millions of children were learning the language of computer video gaming through games and systems like Pong and Nintendo, a new format to store massive amounts of data was introduced. In 1985, Philips and Sony released the CD-ROM, or Compact Disc Read Only Memory. The CD-ROM optically stores computer, audio and video data in a digital format, which is read by a laser, and translated via the computer.

The combination of a computer-game literate generation and the CD-ROM publishing boom during the late 1980s contributed to a large-scale convergence between the world of the cinema and the world of computer games. The following section will discuss this convergence, its causes and effects, as well as the branching industries that CD-ROMs have helped to create.

THE MOVIE/GAME HARMONY

The release of Dragon’s Lair in 1983 foreshadowed the future merge of games and movies. Dragon’s Lair utilizes videodiscs (around the size of an LP) to cross-reference animated scenes as the user makes different decisions throughout the game. Dragon’s Lair displays these clips, like small chunks of a movie, determined by the user’s reaction to the previous scene. In the early 1980s, this concept was an extreme break from the traditional point-and-shoot arcade game such as Asteroids or Space Invaders; Dragon’s Lair is literally a “playable” movie.

With the capabilities of CD-ROM to hold and display full-motion video, audio and text, game producers saw the limitless market of interactive, cinema-based games. In 1989, Rand and Robyn Miller produced The Manhole for Activision Games, a CD-ROM based on their floppy disc game of the same title (released the year before by Cyan). It is a computer-animated, navigable virtual world in 3D black and white. The Manhole displayed the potential of gaming through a movie-like experience by immersing the user into the narrative. This concept would be expanded in other titles such as Mad Dog McCree (1990), Spaceship Warlock, Condor (1991), and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (1992).

In 1993, the CD-ROM industry experienced a massive production boom. Critical to this growth was Greg Roach, who had devised a Virtual Cinema environment which allows the user to have a first-person point of view and direct control over their character’s actions. Previously, Roach had produced semi-interactive novels, such as The Madness of Roland (1992), that gave the user the ability to move through various viewpoints within the story, but had limited control and input capabilities. In 1993, Roach produced Quantum Gate, the first true interactive movie on CD-ROM, with scripted scenes performed by trained actors and actresses. It revolves around a pre-determined narrative, therefore Quantum Gate is a linear story, but it was remarkable in the early 1990s because it offered the user many different ways to traverse through the story. In this context, Quantum Gate provided a significant step toward developing a new creative geography.

Movie-game CD-ROMs flooded the market in 1993. David Bishop, Vice President of Product Development at Virgin Interactive, comments:

A few short years and 40 million kids later, the Nintendo bug had reached epidemic proportions . . . somehow, though, video gaming in the late ‘80s was always looked down upon by Hollywood as a passing fad or something that was for kids . . . ten years later, with the advent of the CD-ROM, everyone in Hollywood is tripping over themselves to ‘get into interactive.’

Of the multitude of interactive CD-ROM titles released in 1993, Myst and The 7th Guest represent two of the most significant in terms of success, aesthetic vision and influence. Moreover, both Myst and The 7th Guest illustrate the dynamic harmony formed between the convergence between the cinema and CD-ROM games.

In 1991, Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros had ambitious goals of mixing live-action and animation for a new type of game. Creating their own company, Trilobyte, the two pioneering programmers hired novelist Mathew Costello to write an interactive horror script for their new multimedia CD-ROM, The 7th Guest. Their goal was to create an interactive game similar to Clue but with “Twin Peak” overtone—with the main thrust at designing a real-world interface without icons, menus or other computer-based symbols. For example, if the user sees a knife on a table, he points his mouse-controlled cursor toward the knife, walks to the table, clicks on the knife and is now holding it in his hand. The 7th Guest is composed of computer generated images, live-action video, sequences of puzzles and discovery-based scenes (sequences that leave the user alone to explore rooms in search of clues, hidden doors, certain books on a shelf, and so on). Becau se of its unusual structure, many of the major names in the game industry told Devine and Landeros that no one would ever publish The 7th Guest. When it debuted in April 1993, The 7th Guest sold close to one million copies in its first year alone.

Five months later (October 1993), Robyn and Rand Miller, the designers Myst, had encountered a similar landslide success. They attribute the attraction of Myst to “the same nebulous thing that attracts people to a good book or a good movie.” The game is a first-person perspective of an uninhabited island world. As Robyn Miller explains, “It is an experience that you keep revisiting”; an idea described in the slogan under the title, which reads: “The Surrealistic Adventure That Will Become Your World.” Through text and clues discovered along the way, the user can piece together Myst’s storyline to learn what happened on the island. Unlike the majority of other interactive games on the market at the time of Myst’s release, the user cannot die within the game. This allows the user to enter and leave the game at his or her convenience, without having to start over, or play against the clock. Myst generates a complex storyline from a limited number of facts, thus drawing the user into the narrative much like a reader is drawn into a mystery novel. In addition, the visual interaction is smooth, and the game is embedded with ambient sounds and subtextual plots. In this aspect, Myst proved to be enjoyable, and marketable, to both children and adults.

What Myst and The 7th Guest signify is a move towards a more cinematically styled game playing, where the user/player travels through the narrative of the game much like a character within a film—although, at this stage, the user has no control in the changing the overall narrative. Still, these two highly successful games suggest a trend of complex, interactive, movie-like experiences. Both Myst and The 7th Guest inspired countless similarly designed 3D environment-games (see filmography), and represent a large contribution towards the interactive rhetoric. Michael Backes, screenwriter and co-founder of Rocket Science Games, explains that, “interactive fiction is less about story per se, than an environment in which a variety of stories can be created.” Of course, the need for creative stories will always exist, but it is the virtual environment that will make the difference between interactivity a nd spectatorship. As the technology of programs like VRML and DVD increase and become economically available to the general public, users will do more than “play” in the worlds of The 7th Guest and Myst—they will become part of those worlds as real-time, totally immersed characters.

EDUTAINMENT

Within the past five years, the word “interactive” has been used to describe everything from grocery store product displays to automobile dashboards. The actual process of interactivity is clearly a concept surrounded by debate, most likely because of its many diversified applications. Earlier in this paper, the two pivotal criteria for interactive entertainment were distinguished as control and response. Under these criteria, can Myst be considered truly interactive? Can the film/theatre experiments of Carolee Schneemann be considered interactive? Having the criteria is useful—to a degree. These types of questions about interactivity underlie the development of the new language of digital entertainment, or, as writer Janice Diamond explains: “The difference is that the audience gets to insinuate themselves in the story. The question is how.”

One answer to this question is “edutainment,” or, “infotainment.” What these two terms denote are programs (CD-ROMs) that contain elements of education, or information, combined with entertainment frameworks and features. Edutainment and infotainment disseminate knowledge through interactive means. However, they differ from interactive movies and games by concentrating on teaching the user something in particular. This is not to say that a game like Myst could not teach its user something, only that it is not designed for that purpose, whereas edutainment is designed to be an entertaining lesson. In short, edutainment’s purpose is to make learning fun.

Edutainment CD-ROM titles are as varied as those of CD-ROM games. As previously mentioned, by the time CD-ROMs started to have a profound effect on the consumer market (late 1980s and early 1990s), millions of children had been spending countless hours familiarizing themselves with the “physiology” of the computer. By playing computer games (such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario Bros.) and controlling CG characters on the screen, children were learning the basic procedures of computer operation. Executive producer of ActiVision for Kids, Dr. Cheryl Weiner, notes, “There is a lot of strategic thinking and problem-solving that goes on. It’s not just a twitch mode. Kids figure out all the strategic ways to get through a game and win.” With the advent of CD-ROM technology in the mid-1980s, a generation of computer game players became fluent in the general concepts of hypermedia.

Edutainment is a sibling of the reference CD-ROMs that emerged in the late 1980s, also known as, “infotainment.” Titles such as Grolier’s Electronic Encyclopedia (1986), Microsoft Bookshelf (1987), and The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog (1989), constitute some of the early applications of educational CD-ROM programming. Most of these infotainment titles use interactive-styled interfaces (generally, these are flashy point-and-click screens), to access libraries of information. Often, infotainment programs use quizzes or mental puzzles to further involve the user. In general, infotainment CD-ROMs are structured like a pyramid, designed to give more (or less) information to the user as they progress down a given path.

For example, the USA TODAY - The ‘90s, Volume 1 CD-ROM is a hypermedia “time capsule” of news and events from the 1990s, compiled from articles, photographs and audio clips gathered by the USA TODAY newspaper. If the user searches for the collapse of communism, he could find numerous articles which are hyperlinked to other related articles, in much the same format as the World Wide Web. From communism, the user could click on the hypertext “Baltic Independence” and find additional articles, pictures, or sound clips. If the user wanted to swiftly overview the decade, there is a “Quick Look” feature that will display the top events of the 1990s through a collage of sounds and pictures.

Infotainment, or reference CD-ROMs, such as these helped to lay the foundation for edutainment. After the first interactive entertainment CD-ROM, The Manhole, was released in 1989, CD-ROM publishers realized the mass market potential of fun educational CD-ROM programs. Interactive storybooks such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Cinderella (both by Discis Knowledge Research, 1990), started to emerge, and the field grew in leaps and bounds. Edutainment CD-ROMs are successful primarily because they allow the user (child) to learn at his or her own pace. A user can experiment and explore through a personal trial and error process that can simultaneously challenge and promote curiosity, without the pressures of time or the prejudice of different levels of learning. As an educational tool, these benefits are enormous since negative interferences can be nearly eliminated through one-to-one interaction between student and computer. Further, this positive and entertaining environment encourages the user to learn digital communication skills such as hyperlinks, navigation and browsing, accessing and entering data, and so on. This exposure to simplified computer functions helps to promote a social infrastructure for a digitally fluent generation.

THE INTERNET

To date, the narrative evolution from linear story to non-linear interactive story has been most fully explored on the Internet. This section will investigate ways in which interactive entertainment is being applied via the Internet, as well as bring to question the issues of cyberspace and virtual reality.

Randall Walser, a cyberspace pioneer, offers one of the most understandable definitions of the term “cyberspace”:

Whereas film is used to show a reality to an audience, cyberspace is used to give a virtual body, and a role, to everyone in the audience. Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies . . .A spacemaker sets up a world for an audience to act directly within, and no just so the audience can imagine they are experiencing an interesting reality, but so they can experience it directly . . .The filmmaker says “Look, I’ll show you.” The spacemaker says, “Here, I’ll help you discover.”

In physical terms, cyberspace is the virtual space of computer memory, networks, telecommunications and digital media. William Gibson coined the word in his seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (1984): “Cyberspace: a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation . . . Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light arranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.”

In the novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino explores the labyrinthine possibilities of narrative structure: “Each story runs into another story . . . because the stories told from left to right or from bottom to top can also be read from right to left or from top to bottom, and vice versa, bearing in mind that the same cards, presented in a different order, often change their meaning . . .” Similarly, the Internet user discovers that cyberspace is a 93"virtual” labyrinth where all branches and alternatives can be explored. Because the Internet allows for the “stories,” or “cards,” (information) to be read and discovered in any desired sequence, cyberspace becomes the ideal “geography” for hypermedia—where media can converge and distribute in any desired order.

Cyberspace is where the Internet exists. The “Internet” is a global, non-commercial network linked by telecommunications. An important faction of the Internet is the World Wide Web, or WWW. Although the Internet has been in existence since 1969, the WWW did not exist until after 1992. The WWW is a graphical interface for the Internet, and has become the primary gateway for Internet users; because of the user-friendly and interesting presentation of information, the WWW is the most significant part of the Internet and is currently growing in usage twice as fast as the Internet itself. This rapid growth has caused the WWW to become one of the most dynamic frontiers for digital entertainment and technology.

The WWW presently operates through a process called “hypertext.” Hypertext allows the user to “hyperlink” to various locations using a text-based, non-ordered, non-linear system of pathways, or “links.” Generally, hypertext links relate items of text together, which gives the user the ability to randomly cross-reference information in an environment unrestricted by physical location. A hyperlink is usually highlighted or underlined, often the link will be the name of the location where that link will take you. For example, if you were reading this sentence and the word “Library of Congress” was highlighted and/or underlined, you could move the cursor to that word, click on “Library of Congress,” and the hyperlink would take you to the Library of Congress’s WWW site. This is how users “move” through cyberspace.

Currently, the majority of the WWW is text-based, which limits the range for interactive entertainment in comparison to multimedia CD-ROMs. This is quickly changing. The future of interactive entertainment on the Internet is in “virtual reality.” David Blair’s WAXweb demonstrates the use of interactive film on the Internet, but its interactivity is limited by its lack of total user-immersion. As discussed earlier, immersion involves placing the interactive user within an artificial world, or what is commonly called virtual reality. Virtual reality is a complex and incredibly over-used term. In essence, virtual reality, or VR, is a computer-generated simulation of a “world,” that is both immersive and interactive.

Morton Helig’s “Sensorama Simulator” (1962) is the earliest example of a practical and mechanical application of VR. Helig was a renaissance man for his time; his concepts of simulated realities were highly avant-garde, but received very little public attention. Helig’s revolutionary ideas were outlined in the patent for the Sensorama, which describes “an apparatus to simulate a desired experience by developing sensations in a plurality of the senses.”

The Sensorama was a large machine which used stereo sound, smells, wind and 3D film loops to simulate the experience of riding a motorcycle through Brooklyn. The user was seated and placed their hands on motorcycle handlebars, while his or her head and upper torso angled into a projection “hood,” which filled the user’s peripheral vision. The Sensorama was the first simulator designed for entertainment, and was part of Helig’s larger plans of the “Experience Theater,” which, among other things, included a head-mounted stereophonic television display, precursor to the stereo-optical visors used in VR today.

Ivan Sutherland, the developer of Sketchpad, incorporated many of Helig’s concepts into his own work in VR, but included an element that Helig overlooked—the computer. In 1968, Sutherland combined head-mounted displays and television-based technologies (similar to technologies used by Helig) with computers, which were programmed with three-dimensional models of landscapes and buildings. Sutherland’s contributions were further expanded by NASA and the Department of Defense which developed flight simulators as well as tank and submarine trainers with this new technology.

In 1978, a group of MIT pioneers were approached by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The ARPA was interested in the possibility of designing a simulation training device for Army commandos. What the ARPA wanted was a full-scale, photo-realistic environment to test its soldiers in; this required much more than a responsive flight simulator-type program. The MIT people, headed by Nicholas Negroponte, provided the ARPA with an answer: the Aspen Project. In short, the MIT crew filmed every street in Aspen, in every direction, taking a frame every three feet. The streets (including turns) were put onto videodiscs and the computer was programmed to allow the user to drive down any street and turn in any direction. Furthermore, the Aspen Project allowed the user to stop, enter a building and talk to people inside. The year could be changed, as could the seasons, temperatures, driving conditions, and so on.

The Sensorama and the Aspen Project illustrate the odd coupling of mechanical and digital technology in creating VR. Until 1995, the VR experience was encumbered with mechanical accessories, such as the Dataglove or Space Glove, visors, steering wheels, and joysticks which act as sensors that record movement on a computer screen. Because of this type of “techie” looking gadgetry, VR has been limited to arcade-type venues and special convention demonstrations. This will change with the development of VRML.

When Apple’s QuickTime software was released in 1991 (Windows version in 1993), the ability to display video and animation, without additional hardware, became available to consumers. Correspondingly, Macromind Director (1989) allowed home users to create animation and edit video, all upon their desktops. The technological breakthrough that QuickTime and Director heralded was one of individuality—the power to create and display was now at the personal computer level. Home movies had taken on an entirely new meaning.

With this structure in place, and with the number of Internet users rapidly expanding, “VRML,” or Virtual Reality Modeling Language, may be the ultimate interactive entertainment frontier. Designed by Mark Pesce, Brian Behlendorf, Gavin Bell and Tony Parisi, the first version of VRML was ready by October of 1994. By February 12, 1996, fifty-six software developing companies had committed to making VRML related products supported by Moving Worlds, a platform-independent VRML specification designed to provide VRML abilities to low-cost PC’s as well as high-end graphics computers. Although very much in its infancy, VRML is a 3D language and file format, that allows virtual 3D objects, people, places, things, or worlds, to be created in the WWW. Undoubtedly, VRML will change the way people navigate through the Internet. Whereas users once traveled through the WWW by jumps from hyperlink to hyperlink, VRML will allow travel through 3D worlds. By adding hyperlinks to 3D objects, VRML users can navigate through virtual reality. Instead of jumping from a word, a user can “walk” through a doorway or up stairs to the next location.

How will VRML affect interactive entertainment? As WAXweb creator David Blair concludes:

The principal behind VRML, and virtual reality, is first-person perspective. The point of view through VRML is provided by a virtual camera: as a user navigates through a VRML world, he or she can move the camera around. The VRML camera also will simulate human depth of vision, diminishing the detail of objects in the distance. Through VRML, MUDs, MOOs, and interactive films, such as WAXweb, will be fully realized as immersive, controllable, and responsive environments that can be created, entered, and explored in a highly realistic manner.

The future of interactive entertainment on the Internet will involve the use of CGI in creating VRML worlds. It also will combine varieties of narrative structures, along with many other technical advances in hardware, software and talent. A new storytelling language is being written to accompany the many diverse forms of interactive entertainment on the Internet, and these new forms of communication and experience are becoming ingrained into contemporary culture. Since the future of interactive entertainment depends on its success as a mass media, cultural understanding is a tremendously important part of the interactive evolution. As producers and audiences learn that there is much more to interactivity than a film such as Mr. Payback, the future of interactive entertainment will evolve in large measure. Chris Douglas, Production Designer at Origin Systems, Inc., vividly describes this state of cultural awareness, stating: “Interactive today is like TV in th e 1950s. Those who think it should be just like movies with choices are like those who thought TV should be just like radio with pictures. It is not that they are wrong: it is that there is still so much to be explored no one can possibly understand what the full potential is.”

Interactive entertainment will never make traditional storytelling or filmmaking obsolete; people will always maintain a desire for passive narrative entertainment. What it will do is make the range of entertainment choices much more diverse and interesting. As interactive entertainment incorporates techniques and content from traditional media, and as new and creative content is designed specifically to be interactive, this new media will allow audiences the opportunity to breech the invisible barrier between the spectator and the screen. Like the evolution of motion pictures, the success of interactive entertainment relies on individual pioneers to make both the content and technology work together in inventive and gratifying ways.

© 1996, William Homer Hilf

This paper is part of a longer work titled: “Digital Entertainment: Art, Technology, and The New Forms of Storytelling in the Digital Era.”

Homer Hypermedia

Respond to the author at homer@compuall.com