Week 5 – Interactive Narratives
Interactivity is paramount to engaging an audience. Interactivity online should be more than clicking your mouse on a picture or a highlighted word. In my opinion, an interactive narrative, makes you feel like you’re in it. You become so immersed in the story but are able to exercise full control when choosing the path of your adventure. A good narrative should stimulate most of your senses.
interactivenarratives.org provides visitors with a more holistic view of a topic compared to a newspaper article or even an online story . Hence, the site is most useful for when there is an eagerness to learn rather than to simply be informed.
Most of the narratives are not particularly wordy – those that are seem to be less effective in allowing visitors to interact with it. That said, the site is testimony to the fact that interactivity can be packaged and re-packaged in many forms.
The multimedia journalists featured on the site have had to ascertain the most effective way to tell their story to their desired audience. It is not so much the content that proves interesting when watching the videos, but more so deciphering why the journalists have chosen to tell their story a particular way – ie. using photos instead of words, or a 3-D game instead of a video.
The NASA Missions is one of my favourites – possibly because there is lots of fun and games to be had, you even get to assemble space vehicles! (Yes, it’s hard to believe I’m 21 and will be graduating in six weeks.) It is so great because it ties in everything you want to know about the moon and you can tailor your experience on the site to skip the stuff that is not of interest to you.
A narrative can come in many different shapes and sizes but at the end of the day, for a narrative to be effective online, it should harness multimedia tools and utilise them to the best of its creative ability.
