Is interactivity all it’s cracked up to be?

Forget real-time video. Forget stereo sound, glitzy titles and animation. Forget even the megabytes of information behind that torturously designed user interface. What interactive multimedia is really all about is storytelling.

That was the consensus reached by several longtime multimedia producers at the “Multimedia Computing: Is Interactivity All It’s Cracked Up to Be?” panel at Digital World. But how you tell the story with interactivity as an integral part of the telling process is what producers are still trying to figure out. And even if they can figure that out, some veteran producers still wonder whether there is a viable market for interactive multimedia products.

BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING

After several years of producing interactive presentations, Max Whitby, founding director of the London-based MultiMedia Corporation, an interactive media company associated with the BBC, believes that the key to success lies in linear narrative, that is, providing a central story as the backbone to any interactive presentation. Without a central story, the film clips, sound bytes and text boxes that make up an interactive presentation are no more meaningful than the sound and video bytes that are the stock of TV news and information programs.

Assuming that the viewer is excited by interactive technology is not enough. “Narrative is the driving force that keeps people engaged,” said Whitby, whose many interactive credits include Hyperland, an interactive fantasy about the future of TV that was written by and starred science-fiction writer Douglas Adams. “The real challenge is to come up with a way to offer people interactivity while retaining the narrative.”

To illustrate his point, Whitby showed a video of viewers watching an interactive exhibit about the earth, designed for a German museum. Images were projected onto a screen, so that viewers who wandered upon the exhibit would first be attracted by the enhanced satellite imagery showing scenes of the earth, while a computer-based presentation operating in parallel contained more in-depth information about the images being displayed.

RADICAL STORYTELLING, NARRATIVE BACKBONE

Greg Roach, publisher and editor of an electronic literary magazine called HyperBole, The Art of Digital Storytelling, and a longtime believer and producer of interactive projects, agreed that interactive multimedia, which he called “a radical new art form,” should be focused on a main story.

“You take a central event and go off into it. Branching structures don’t yield anything in the long run,” said Doug Crockford, formerly of LucasArts Inc.’s New Media Group, who recently signed as director of new media for Paramount Communications. “Instead, there should be linear paths, linking you to the narrative backbone.”

Find a good story. Since interactivity requires interaction between the user and the medium, whether a computer or television, the story being told must prompt the viewer, accustomed to passively receiving information, into action, said Crockford. “Participation is not measured in keystrokes per minute,” said Crockford. “Interactivity should deliver a transforming experience. It should move you.”

“A multimedia encyclopedia knows what it wants to be. It’s a reference,” agreed Elizabeth Young, an interactive multimedia producer for Warner New Media, who designed Warner’s interactive CD-ROM, Desert Storm: The War in the Persian Gulf. “What we’ve been missing [in other interactive products] is that we haven’t been motivating people to experience.”

Young believes that multimedia games, such as BrØderbund Software’s Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? series, which leads users on a globe-trotting chase to catch a thief as a way to teach geography, is on the right track because “they set up a situation that starts to engage you. That makes you want to do it.”

INTERACTION = ACCESS

Shelley Duvall, an actress, director and producer who has spent the last decade producing children’s stories for cable TV, described interactive technology as a way to “enrich the canvas” of storytelling. Through her Think Entertainment production company, Duvall is working with a multimedia firm called Sanctuary Woods on her first “I-CD” — interactive CD-ROM — because she believes interactive technology not only offers artists a new way to express themselves, but that consumers will be excited by the ability to access information however they choose.

Allen DeBevoise, cofounder of AND Communications Inc., an interactive multimedia production company, agreed. “Multimedia is an integration of information in various forms… . What it’s really all about is greater access to information.”

DeBevoise, who helped design and produce the first widely seen (and debated) interactive multimedia presentation, on Picasso’s Guernica, as well as the IBM-funded Illuminated Books series, said that interactivity should be offered in various degrees, depending on the kind of information being presented.

Presentations, for example, provide information only on demand; interactivity is not required unless users want additional or supplemental information. The middle ground of interactivity is multimedia encyclopedias or training programs — you need to get interactive with them in order to get at the information you want. At the high end of the scale DeBevoise sees video games, “where interactivity is the experience.”

LIGHTS. CAMERA. AUDIENCE?

Despite the fact that they are in the business of producing multimedia presentations, several panelists and audience members admitted that the market for interactive products is either still in its infancy or perhaps may even be stillborn, at least in its present iteration. “Multimedia is one of those things that is more fun to make than to eat, just like home movies,” said Crockford. “If you want to be a starving artist, multimedia is it.”

During 90 minutes of animated panel discussion, it became abundantly clear that interactive multimedia has already created a generation of arrow-riddled pioneers who have learned the hard way that making interactivity succeed is not as easy as pointing and clicking.

Nothing was so striking as the contrast between Whitby and Duvall, both seasoned producers of highly regarded television programming. Whitby, a veteran of early interactive multimedia, has watched its underwhelming progress; Duvall burned with the neophyte’s zeal. You didn’t need an interactive presentation to get the message: the newly converted cannot afford to ignore the blood shed by veteran producers, and if a new interactive art form is to emerge, the pioneers must pull out the arrows and allow themselves to be swept up in the infectious enthusiasm of the newcomers.

Connie Guglielmo, Denise Caruso