Message
“The art form of comics
is many centuries old, but it’s perceived
as a recent invention and suffers the curse of all new media. The curse of being judged
by the standards of the old.” – Scott
Mccloud
New media
can convey a message in new ways, but people must first come to understand the
language of each new medium.
message – An idea that a sender seeks to transmit to a receiver.
Is the message always an
alternate reality?
The message being conveyed by
every form of media can be thought of as a virtual world. A virtual world is a real representation of a
world that may or may not exist in the real world. Some media and examples of the virtual worlds
they create are:
Medium Virtual
World
Imagination Daydream/mental model
Storytelling Legend of Loche Ness
Maps
Animation Fantasia
Ham radio/CB Roundtable discussion
Novel Moby Disk
Motion Picture Citizen Kane
Puppetry The
Muppet Show
Illusions (Magic) Pulling a rabbit out of a hat
Board Games Chess/Clue/Risk
World Wide Web www.yahoo.com
Flight Simulation Boeing 747 training system
Virtual Reality (game) Dactyl Nightmare
Virtual Reality (design) Caterpillar virtual prototyping system
Video Games Pong/Donkey Kong
It may not be obvious that
pulling a rabbit out of a hat is a virtual world, but it is a simulation of a
world where a rabbit can be conjured from thin air.
Qualities of Media
Each media has certain
qualities that affect the message that the creator intends to deliver.
Storage
The great advance of the
written word was that what was previously stored in oral fashion could be
preserved. The written word is very
resilient to alterations in the presentation format (i.e. font changes, paper
vs. computer text) and the context within which it is received (i.e. in bed, by
the lake, on a train). Not all media are
appropriate for storage. The higher the
degree of interactivity, the more likely that storage is not an option.
Interactivity
Even a novel is an
interactive medium when one considers that the response of the audience to the
last novel may affect the next novel. Herman Melville was so affected
by the critical reception to his first novel Moby Dick that his next three
novels have been described as a response to the experience of creating his
first. Interactivity plays an important
role in determining whether the immersion of the medium is mental or
physical. It can be said that patrons of
Shakespeare’s Globe Theater were physically immersed in the play because the
company routinely addressed them, utilized them as extras, and changed the
dialog in response to the crowd’s actions.
As a result, they where authors themselves of the resulting play.
Authorship
As interactivity with the
medium increases, the idea of authorship changes. It is easy to say that a novelist has
authored a book. Yet in the case of
Melville, we can argue that his contemporaries were part of the authoring
process with his later books. In the
case of physically immersive and highly interactive media such as virtual
reality, the role of the author is much less obvious in conveying the desired
message. When the receiver of the media
can choose which aspect of the media they want to focus on, interact with, one
has no guarantee that they will receive the author’s message. As a result, mediums with more interactivity
must utilize the language of that medium to deliver their message.
Language
Each medium has its own
unique language. The language lies in
the tools at the disposal of the author to transmit their message. The tools of film are familiar to us;
perspective cuts, temporal cuts, location cuts, linear direction. With more interactivity comes a loosening of
linear storytelling. This is not a new
phenomenon; consider a child being told a story, aspects of the story that
interest the child will prompt questions and as a result the story may get
diverted. As with teaching a class, one
must balance the intended message of the author with the direction the audience
takes the interaction. Scott Mccloud’s
quote applies also to interactive media because the language of these media
have not been fully established. The
language of a media lies very much in the interface between the user and the
virtual world created by the medium.
Interface
The interface of a medium is
the access point between the recipient and the virtual world. A single medium may deliver its content
through different interfaces. A person
may interface a movie in a theater with a crowd or at home alone. This interface affects the recipient’s
ability to receive the message being delivered.
An author will take advantage of the assumption that the reader has read
each previous chapter in presenting the narrative. If the reader starts in the middle then the
author’s assumptions about the interface are incorrect and the message may not
be received. Furthermore, an author must
work to keep the reader aware of the details of the scene because the medium
does not reinforce this information.
Authors of textbooks frequently take advantage of the interface of the
printed book by referring frequently to diagrams on proceeding pages. Yet, an author of an immersive medium might
take advantage of the fact that the viewer is fully aware of their physical
surroundings.
reality – Even in the physically immersive reality we know
everyday, there is still an interface between us and the real world. This interface is our 5 senses. The “ultimate display” described by Ivan
Sutherland is an Interface that is invisible to the user.
virtual reality – In a physically immersive reality the interface is
unlikely to have all of the attributes of physical reality. The user may not have the same peripheral
vision they do in real life. The user
may not move through the world in the same manner that they do in reality. The author may have created the world with
the assumption that the user can feel, hear, and smell the world as they do in
the real world. Yet, the interface
through which the user accesses the world may greatly influence whether the
author’s message is communicated.
The Human Interface
The 5 senses together form
our interface to the world. Each of the
senses has unique qualities that influence our ability and motivation to use it
to deliver information.
Taste
Smell
Touch
Audition
Vision