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Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative

By Mark Stephen Maedows
New Rider’s, 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; it’s a distillation of the story’s purpose. Without it, the story wouldn’t 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.

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Updated 1st June 2003


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