Clarity from chaos, turmoil and turning corners in the #docsandbox camp this last two weeks, as we’ve been getting down to the real nitty gritty of making the ‘things.’ No doubt all of the project teams feel a sense of trepidation given that the impending finishing line is looming over them, still there’s definitely an emerging shared sense of having a good grasp on the road map ahead.  We’ve had a couple of teams changing tracks, some chiselling down to achievable goals and one big U-turn in the cohort, but hey it wouldn’t be Sandbox without a dash of disruptive thinking and a pinch of risk taking.   

In fact this is without doubt the view of the speaker for our third community workshop, Future Doc Sandbox advisor, silicon valley based Daniel Burwen who’s the brains behind CIA Operation Ajax, the first interactive ipad graphic novel. He lives by the mantra of going with a hunch after completely changing tact when developing Ajax, which originally was going to be in print but after he saw the interactive potential of the ipad, decided to tread an different path and the rest is history. We invited Daniel to Bristol to give some insight into his experience of creating interactive narrative in games, as he has worked previously for Activision and EA games. The talk contextualises the development of technology in relation to the history of the film and games industries, with a particular focus on narrative mechanics. Daniel spoke about how film and games are coming closer and closer together, the mechanical depth of games and the emotional complexity of film and how the two need to be seamlessly interwoven to create a purely interactive narrative.

It certainly struck a chord with the project teams and created a frenzy of debate around the fact that interactive narrative hasn’t really been resolved. They are all similarly dealing with how to smoothly over layer interactivity over a main narrative, whilst checking in and out of a story to do the interacting. This was followed up with an intensive quick fire workshop session from Fergus Roche, which asked the teams to interrogate theirr narratives and where the interactions will take place across their timelines. It was a really productive day of workshopping and conversations all in all, now to get down to the making. 

Daniel's talk will be up on DShed soon, I’ll be back with a link soon… Watch this space for project updates incoming this week.