Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive
Narrative
By Mark Stephen Maedows
New Riders, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2003
257 pp., illus. col., paper, $45.00
ISBN: 0-7357-1171-2.
Reviewed by Maia Engeli
CAiiA-STAR
University of Plymouth, UK
me@i-dat.org
After a first positive impression, this book was rather disappointing.
It lacks sufficient rigor, completeness, and preciseness in content
and formulation. Pause & Effect has a carefully designed and exploited
layout; mixing images and text, using colour coding and a flipbook movie
to combine different layers of information. The Table of Content gives
a good overview of the books sections Theory, 2D, 3D, and Practice
including short summaries of the chapters in the different sections.
Sadly this first impression is not sustained on closer inspection.
The theory section focuses on perspective, narrative, interaction, and
interactive narrative. The text is characterized by jumps between different
aspects making it hard to detect and follow a line of thought. In addition
there is badly researched information presented as facts, which results
in twisted and sometimes wrong claims. The discussion of perspective
extends from Giotto to the 17th century and back to Giotto
again in order to support the argument that we need perspective to have
an objective point of view and therefore an opinion. Cubism and the
possibility of multiple perspectives does not seem to fit the argument
at this point (although it does in the later section on 2D.) The part
on narrative seems to be stuck in the basic claim that there is a need
for a plot or in order to allow for interactivity a use-case-scenario,
and therefore locked into a tradition in which the author is in control
and the reader is not really the writer that Meadow insists they should
be. This seems to be exemplified in the assertion that: "A moral
that concludes a story is generally a summation of the story; its
a distillation of the storys purpose. Without it, the story wouldnt
exist." Similarly in the following sections numerous examples can
be found, which appear to be desperate attempts to explain recent recognitions
without fully understanding them, i.e. the explanations about the non-linearity
of time (p 52) or are not exactly state of the art in the
field. This would be forgivable but for Meadows declared intention to
write about interactive narrative as a new art form. In effect every
aspect discussed on a theoretical level in this book, has to be approached
with considerable caution. The frequent use of the vernacular exacerbate
the lack of a clear message. Remarks such as: "Any art student
worth half a can of gesso will tell you that there are lines of
sight that the eye traces when it looks at a canvas." will
make a reader ask if they want to belong to the audience that this book
is intended to address.
The layout of the book, is eye-catching, graphically interesting, and
consistent, but this aspect too has significant flaws. On every page
there a five images of a skeleton in various positions, but it does
not really relate much to the text and therefore must be considered
ornamentation. And the flipbook movie, which Meadows specially mentions
on the last page as "a minimal form of the narrative this book
discusses", is no more interactive than the text in the book. Perhaps
more of a problem for the reader is that many of the images are important
to understanding the text, but the captions have to be looked up at
the end of the book, which, whilst vaguely participatory, makes for
tedious work for the serious reader.
This is a valiant attempt but the serious flaws in the theory section
undermine the strength of Pause & Effect, namely the examples
and interviews in the 2D and 3D section which are both interesting and
unique. Here Meadows presents the broadness of the field of interactive
narrative, introduces the range of different media used, and lets the
reader learn from the pioneers. Meadows also presents a work of his
own and projects that he has collaborated in. They seem to provide a
better context for framing his ideas.
For the informed reader the deficits may be outweighed by the strength
and be just be no more than a nuisance, but for readers new to the field
it may be at best unhelpful and at worst misleading compounding a tendency
to trivialise the seriousness of what is at stake. On the cover and
elsewhere the book seems to have garnered significant support from high
profile figures in the field, but after my own careful reading I think
that this book is not quite of the quality that Leonardo readers would
find enlightening or rewarding.