*** From the Archives ***

This article is from April 23, 2003, and is no longer current.

Pause & Effect: Using Perspective and Interaction to Convey Information

These stories are taken from “Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative.”

New Riders is offering this book to creativepro.com readers at a special discount. Click here to learn more.


One of the ways in which new media and the Internet has changed the way we convey ideas is by allowing readers to interact with the information. Readers are no longer passive consumers of information but active participants in the story. By employing such storytelling techniques as perspective, narrative, interaction, and design, you involve the user in your project, whether it be Web site, video game, digital film, user interface, or even printed book.

In these excerpts from “Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative,” you’ll see some of the theory that’s behind narrative storytelling. You’ll learn the roles that perspective and interaction play in pulling the reader into your project.

The layout of this book is very rich and detailed, so we’ve posted these excerpts as PDF files. All you do is click these links — “Perspective” and “Interaction“– to open the PDF files in your Web browser. You can also download the PDFs to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDF, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader. Get it here:

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To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, try these tips from Adobe:

From “Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narration” copyright 2003 © by Mark Stephen Meadows, published by New Riders Publishing. Used with the permission of Pearson Education and New Riders Publishing.

 

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