Linear Interactivity

There has been a lot of attention on the issues of interactive media, non-linearity and the new perspectives that these two open. At a workshop at the International Conference of Interactive Digital Storytelling 2009, several examples of successful interactive storytelling applications have been considered. One of these was The Graveyard by Tale of Tales. It was easy to classify it as linear. It uses interactivity just as a means to push the predefined story forward.

I have written about a similar game before. There are many others as well. Today I came across another game of this kind: We The Giants. However We The Giants does bring another interesting aspect beyond linearity and it is user contribution at the end of the game. I like the idea of people sharing reflections at the end. However this game shows that the quality of these statements in not always as good as we want it to be.

I have had a similar idea for the project I've been working on. However the interesting part is what actually happens to the so-generated user content. How are the good statements to be filtered out and reinforced? Maybe a like/dislike voting mechanism? And this part is yet to be found out.