Page 140 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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character, Anna, wakes up in a mysterious castle following a power cut. The reader-player has to decipher codes, solve problems and find clues in order to progress.
Indeed, the moving images and illustrations are very well integrated into the text and give the setting a particular feel (a mixture of the cold- war years and the emergence of computers, the 1960s, and touches of the 1930s), in the same way that a book with illustrations would, only with movement. It marks a new step forward in the integration of new genres and format com- bining traditional storytelling with interactive involvement and participation, with the aim of making the spirit of reading the main concern.
This avenue has been explored by Cubus Games in Spain.86 These developers have stretched the boundaries of books by incorporating mechanics suitable for gaming and adventure, based on a powerful script that is nonetheless a far cry from the conventional image of books, and they have found a market niche for their gamebooks. It has not been easy for them, but they have brought out a series that has been highly valued by sector critics and has received various awards.
Geolocated stories
The iBookmark, presented at the 2009 In- ternational Conference on Human-Machine Interaction in Boston, showed us the possibilities of customised reading and geolocated writing: writers can create stories that vary according to the digital reader’s geolocation.
The iBookmark used an eBook plugin consisting in adding a GPS sensor to geolocate a reader. After locating the e-reader, the device analysed its content in order to modify some of it depend- ing on the geolocation (place names, names of heads of state...).
The idea of the creators of this device
– Johannes Schöning, Tom Bartindale, Patrick
Olivier, Dan Jackson and Antonio Krüger – was to enable writers to broaden their range of story- telling expressions to adapt more closely to their readers’ context. The story could thus be tailored to the place in which it was read by changing the names of places, monuments and other features in accordance with the reader’s location.
A similar example is the application The Silent History. 87 In this case the story is told actively, taking the concepts of place and time even further, as not only does it need to be read partly in the street but there is also a specific time- frame (the story takes approximately a year). Every day the reader receives parts to read – called “testimonies” – that tell the story of a group of children who are unable to speak but appear to communicate with each other.
Figure 16. The Silent History.
Source: http://www.thesilenthistory.com
All in all, the eBook is divided into six sections, and each section is divided in turn into small parts – episodes lasting from 10 to 15 minutes which are sent to readers’ devices every day of the week for a month. The interactive part takes the form of the site-specific “field reports” from places all over the world.
According to the author, the idea arose from the need to make the most of the possibilities of new technologies to create a digital story that was not limited to a varying degree of interac- tion but was gradually built up in real spaces, as in real life, thanks to these new mobile devices which accompany us everywhere.
READING MATERIALS
Readers in the digital age