Flash Interface for Fiction

Here is a list of some of the current projects hosted by a very interesting website called Digital Fiction .

• Book of Waste
  Short experimental/interactive fiction imposed against a series of anonymous objects, buildings and animated landscapes. Compelling wasted tales with full motion video backgrounds.
• The Diary of Anne Sykes
  An unfinished, chaotic mix of sculpted paper scribblings, childhood memories and fragments of a poisoned relationship from imaginary author Anne Sykes.
• Inside: A Journal of Dreams
  Living alone and secluded, an elderly man keeps a surreal record of his dreams as he is slowly poisoned by his gas fire leaking carbon monoxide.

I’ve been challenged, by a friend of mine to think about interface. I had a drink at the pub with someone who thinks about interface for a living, working with video games and that sort of thing.

I told him that I’m going back to the drawing board with my hypertext, To Win, Simply Play, and complained that I’ve seen more of the cutting room than the drawing board.

He told me to snoop around, to look at things that seem more like games, and to look specifically at what’s going on with Flash Animation these days. There’s some cool stuff going on in that area, but it has its pros and cons. We have some ideas for ways to cheat around some fo the cons, too.

The results of my snooping are that I have a few new favorite websites. I’ll be posting about a few of those this week.

Digital Fiction

Digital Fiction projects are created as an exploration into accessible and engaging writing for the internet. These works are not ‘e-books’ or hypertext sites in the traditional sense, nor do they adhere to the usual styles and standards incorporated into ‘quality’ Flash sites. The aim of Digital Fiction is to use Flash to create interesting ways of telling ’stories’; to offer a blend of challenging writing, user-entertainment and user-interaction.

Digital Fiction doesn’t claim to know what it is exactly. It tries to be appealing and entertaining, compulsive and, at least in some ways, literary. Above all, it tries to be a celebration of an evolving state of artistic affairs, an opportunity to imaginatively explore (sometimes its own) lack of identity, appeal, even meaning.

Digital Fiction as a reading experience offers a purposely, almost naturally, fragmented narrative; sentences, happenings, cut off as though erased, re-emerge elsewhere; complex text animations allow only random fleeting glimpses of what is or what might be going on; the choice is yours not only in which direction you click or scroll - but in which direction you allow the narrative to take you. Or, in which direction you wish to take the narrative.

If this sounds like a lot of “interactive multimedia” buzzword bullcrap to you, then you might be interested to know that each one of these fictions is legible in a text-only version as well. My hope, here, is that this kind of a production will lead to texts that fare well as texts, with or without the addition of hypertext/media elements to them.