Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative

By Mark Stephen Meadows

Book Overview

Any interactive medium whether it be a game or a website is only as good as the underlying narrative that pulls the story or experience together. Mark Meadows explains the key elements that have to be... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735711712
• ISBN13: 9780735711716
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: New Riders Publishing
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 9.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

a great introduction to the subject

This is a beautiful book, more at place on a coffee table than a bookcase. It benefits not only from its many full-color photos, graphic reproductions, and illustrations, but also from the freedom Meadows had to lay out these images with the text on the page, creating effects more typically seen on complex web pages than in traditional print books. From the Use-Case Scenario flow charts to the flipbook narrative that appears in the upper corners of the book and the related comic cell narrative that runs five panels to a page along the bottom of the book, Meadows is both telling us how interactive narrative "combines traditional narrative with visual art and interactivity" and showing us how these insights can be implemented in print. Because Meadows believes that understanding the art of interactive narrative requires familiarity with a wide range of principles, he attempts to cover an ambitious amount of information in Pause & Effect. This would be challenging enough if Pause & Effect was exclusively an introductory "how-to" book for would-be interactive narrative designers, but the book, as Meadows says in his preface, "is designed for anyone interested in narrative art forms" (xiii). Therefore, Meadows is engaging a general audience, and does not assume any pre-existing knowledge in the field. While such a broad approach may be good for sales figures, it is not without its costs. His writing, while always refreshingly clear, is at times overly simplistic, leaving many of the good ideas he puts forth insufficiently fleshed out. Meadows attempts to compensate for this limitation by incorporating interviews and case studies that give the reader alternate viewpoints about the production of interactive narrative. The incorporation of complementary and sometimes conflicting viewpoints from important creators of interactive content adds depth to the work, making it more interesting to the general reader and more credible as a design "how-to" book. The basic claims of the book are easy to understand. The book assumes that an author can combine narrative and interactivity and claims that the development of imagery in the Western tradition gives us crucial insights into how this process should work. Meadows' approach is to bring together traditional concepts of narrative construction, two-dimensional and three-dimensional art creation, and interactive systems design in a way that defines the role of the author in the new art form of interactive narrative design. Meadows lays out his arguments very clearly, giving his readers useful background information and examples to illustrate his points. He also, in a style similar to a self-help guru, breaks down complicated concepts into easily remembered components or steps, such as his "Four Steps of Interaction": 1) Observe; 2) Explore; 3) Modify; and 4) Change, or his "Three Different Structures of Interactive Narrative": 1) Nodal Plot Structure; 2) Modulated Plot Structure; and 3) Open Plot Struct

A composed approach to a large problem

Other readers have found the book shallow. Unfortunately this is an indication of the reading that went into the book, not the writing. Pause and Effect assumes a level of reader education, reader participation, and it moves over large ideas quickly. The book points to the invention of visual narrative and goes on to explain how it has changed over time, showing why video games are part of a much larger narrative history and that "interactive narrative" is an emerging process. It is rare to find an academic book that is both as carefully constructed and as beautifully co-ordinated as Pause & Effect. There is nothing shallow about showing how visual art, interaction, and writing are combining in new ways, and what this means to contemporary literature. One has to only read the table of contents to see that Meadows is being conscientious about his approach. Each of the 4 chapters (Theory, 2D, 3D, and Practice) are viewed through the triple lenses of perspective, narrative, and interaction. It makes for a 12-part composition that only a careful eye will notice. The book is overambitious, as it sifts through 2,500 years of history and better examples could be found, but in the end it is an excellent read and one that stands alone in a field where consideration is needed.

INSPIRING!!

An excellent book! It is beautifully designed, no question. It made me look at video games (and television and books) differently. Most useful is that it tries to make a general approach to narrative. There's examples from thousands of years ago that are still worth thinking about today. A GREAT inspiration for designers! Meadows does a great job (though a few sentences I had to go over again). I've read it twice because, like a good movie, it deserves it. I'd recommend you not only buy it, but read it twce yourself.

A must buy for interacitve storytellers

As a documentary filmmaker who is starting to work in the the interactive arena, this book is a map through the maze. Mark Meadows provides a detailed and interesting explanation of the evolution of narrative and how that evolution is pushing us into interactive narrative. The book helped me understand interactive design but also expanded my horizons for the work I am presently doing and will do in the future. Interactive narrative is the future for us storytellers, and this book helps us ride the turbulent waves of its development.

A beautiful and lucid introduction

Anyone, theorist, artist, philosopher or entrepreneur, who has an interest in contemporary media and communications theory, cultural theory, aesthetics and design, and the philosophy of contemporary culture ought to read this book. It is a seminal text that seeks to cross boundaries, seek new borders, and open new horizons. In the often abstract realm between ideation, culture, and aesthetic theory, Pause and Effect seeks to act as a bridge that links these elements and grounds them within the prescient moment.In an era in which history as we have known it has come to an end, this books serves as a singular oracular perspective on that tradition and where it may yet lead us. This text, if it can be limited to such a closed system, is for anyone who seeks to exist in the future. "A Story is only a beginning..." Pause and Effect is a calling out to writers, artists, designers, students, and anyone wishing to have a voice. Really, it is a call to that within us that makes us want to write and tell stories and to our very ideas of stories themselves. This is not strictly a book about the future of Internet based design; it would be a mistake to categorize this as a text only of interest to programmers, graphic artists, and computer game designers... Over the next 240 pages Meadows takes us through an extraordinarily rich landscape, filled with hundreds of stunningly beautiful images, from classical art to contemporary animation (including many of his own), dozens of interviews, and his own reflections on the theory of the development and possible future of narration...His objective is to link interaction, visual art, and literature by pointing to the importance of "perspective" in each of these. Via a discussion of perspective in art, from medieval art and the long dead voice of Giotto di Bondone, Meadows weaves a history of perspective from the individual to the cultural and societal and now, once again, back to us, the reader as the individual. He guides us through narrative history, from Aristotle to Gustav Freytag, to Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary games like Deus Ex and the on-line world of Banja. Interwoven with this is the notion of interaction - not simply its roles, its definitions, its applicability and its changing shape before us, but true interaction. Meadows doesn't simply tell you about the storytelling worlds he sees forming, he brings you into them via a series of candid interviews from leading programmers like Marcos Novak, to comic writer Scott McCloud.There is a final affect that Meadows adds to the text of Pause and Effect - the "narrative" of St_Elmo. It is perhaps not fair to call this a text itself, however, as this artist, Meadows, almost sneaks it by us. Along the margins of each page is a series of boxes, each box containing a character and a series of scenes. St_Elmo is a story, a narration, embodying a deep semiotic meaning and calling to us to not simply read the story, but to take part in it. If this ind