Interactive Narratives

When I went to Bornmagazine.org's website, my first impression was that the homepage looked like a receipt you would get in a grocery store. But that's not a bad thing, it means the layout is simple, clean and easy to comprehend.

I took a look at "Shirtless Others" by Jason Ockert and Matthias Dittrich. It's an interactive flash animation that tells a story. In order to advance the text to continue reading, you have to pull a butcher knife through a shark. While it's a very interesting idea and a good concept, it's poorly executed. The flash animation is fairly advanced because the animator tried to make it look 3D using some complex methods. This makes the animation look choppy on some computers. Having to continually click and hold the left mouse button to continue reading is annoying especially if the animation is running slowly.

I then took a look at the Super Bowl Multimedia website. The webpage opens with an amazing panoramic picture of Super Bowl XLV and has an interesting pre-loader that tells you its progress by adding color to the picture. How close the picture is to being loaded is represented by how much color is in the picture. The user is then allowed to view the entire picture by scrolling around. The user can either click on one of the arrows that point in the desired direction, or click and drag on the screen. There is even an option to view the panoramic picture in full screen so the user can view all of the the detail.

Below the panoramic is a menu with links to panoramic pictures taken at Super Bowls of years past. This is a very good website that's well laid out. I can tell that there was a lot of thought and effort put into making this website. The design is very crisp and easy to navigate. It provides plenty of interactivity through flash.

"The Personal is Historical" by Bruce Sterling

Sterling uses the term "authentic" numerous times throughout his piece in order to describe how his dad felt about working on the ranch. It's implied that his father preferred working on the ranch to his original job which was working in a factory. Sterling's father started out being successful while managing factories, but also owned a ranch in Texas on the side, and eventually left his job managing factories to run the ranch. He claims that working on the ranch was more "authentic."
When his father was working on the ranch, he didn't have to take orders from anyone. He's not living in a "product technosociety," and that's what makes it more authentic. While managing the factory, he would have to run it in accordance with the companies rules and regulations. When running the ranch, he is the company and he makes his own rules and regulations in whatever way he sees to be fair. He's on honest man and he felt that the people who ran things in the product technosociety were dishonest and greedy. On the ranch he's away from all of the technology and dishonest people he believes to run big corporations. His ranch is authentic because he runs it in an honest way.

The ranch is something that's nostalgic for Sterling's father. It's a part of his personal history. Like him, I too have something that's nostalgic for me, something that triggers a certain kind of feeling or memory. That would be the Sony Playstation 2.

When I was younger, I used to play video games a lot, sometimes too much. Despite the possible negative implications of that, I made some great memories with my friends when we would play video games, and the Playstation 2 used to be the video game console we would play the most. When I play classics games such as Tony Hawk's Underground and Kingdom Hearts, I'm reminded of a simpler time when I was young and didn't have a care in the world because I had no responsibilities.

Just as the ranch is to Sterling's father, the Playstation 2 is to me. The ranch is where his father grew up, so being there sparks fond memories of his childhood.