Interactive Comics/Stories

I've been looking into existing media that could be presented or described as an interactive comic or story. I wanted to see what type of interactions they contained and how effective they were as a medium to tell a story.

Dead On Arrival

Matt Gibson and Geoff Gaviria created the interactive comic in 2007 for their final year project at the University of East London where they were both studying BA (Hons) in Interactive Media.

I really liked the photographic style that they applied to the comic and thought that it was done well, I also thought that the turning of the pages was done really well, I had been considering doing something similar for my own comic. I thought that the use of music in the background added a lot of depth to the story and fit the scenes well.

A few criticisms I would make of it though was that even though I thought the panoramic views were done well I believe that they could have done a lot more with them, these were the main interactions that were included within the comic and even though they did allow you to look around each one they only offered one interactive object that could be clicked on that would continue the story. Another thing that I believe could have been done better was if the story offered a less linear path, the comic does offer some choice towards the end as to what other characters you want to confront but it inevitably ends with the same result each time you play it through.

Ctrl Alt Del

This is a popular web comic that recently done a "choose your adventure" styled space themed comic where the creator decided to present a choice during specific parts of the story and leave it up to the fans to decide what story arc he would then follow for the next comic. The process behind this was rather simple he'd offer up a choice of A,B and sometimes C ad get the fans to e-mail him with their choice. The option with the most votes would be the route the story took.

I prefer this kind of structure for the story over the one in Dead On Arrival as it had many different paths that the story could branch out into, many of them ending in a different way. The creator of the web comic published the structure he had devised for his comic here. Although the downside of this is that it has very little interaction at a single user level and with it being a published web comic it will not hold a lot of replay value for the viewer.

Dead Cal

Dead Cal is another example of an interactive comic/story that I came across, although I wasn't impressed with the level of interaction it provided, a simple click on the page for the next text box to appear or scene to change. I also thought that it stayed on the one scene too long which made it rather boring pretty quickly, I ended up losing interest pretty early on.

Facade

This is quite an interesting concept. You play a character in a 3D environment that can interact with the other two characters that dwell within the apartment. The story begins with you being invited over by the couple as they haven't seen you in a while. You are able to interact with the characters by typing in text and entering it, responding to the other character's questions or asking some of your own. As with many games like this I did attempt to break the game being overly offensive and and rude towards both characters but it deals with this by throwing you out of the apartment.

I did enjoy the level of interaction that was presented, although not all requests or comments are understood by the characters they do still respond to the majority of what you say to them, including getting drink orders correct.

Hello World

Although I didn't get to interact with this comic I did view the video on how it works. Essentially the comic is presented as a book that has been cut in half. The top half is used as the narrative for the story while the bottom half keeps a record of your inventory throughout the story and according to the choices that you make. The narrative like most choose your own adventure books gives the user a choice on what to do or what item in their inventory to use and tells them what page to go to for the outcome of their decision. I haven't seen an inventory system incorporated into one of these books before but do find it to be quite an interesting and intuitive feature.

The creator, Jason Shiga won an Eisner award for “Talent most deserving of wider recognition.” in 2003 for the production of his choose your own adventure comic book.