As my partner and I have started the long process of brainstorming ways to show off the ideas of interactive and multifaceted, one big question has come up: should we create something fictional or non-fictional?
Our recent discoveries on interactive pieces had been surrounding non-fiction, so my initial thoughts were to make something non-fictional. However, I did also feel that finding something that was a completely real, fully formed story all on its own would present many difficulties, so it was important that I explored exactly what interactive fiction can look like before finalising the decision.
I explored some pieces of fiction work from The Interactive Fiction Competition. The first thing I noticed as I scrolled through the pieces is that nearly every piece was in a game format. I engaged with a piece called Future Threads, which was set against a white background, with only one small visual of two icons on a map. The user had to give the character Kayla directions through the various settings and command her every move without actually being able to see the space. Like with the non-fiction pieces I engaged with, I found that engaging with this piece helped push the boundaries even further on what can be considered to be an interactive piece. The game told a story, and allowed me to interact and choose my own path, however basically none of the content was in a video format like I had previously imagined pieces needed to be.
These explorations have been an important part of working out the differences between fiction and non-fiction online screen media and what I am able to create for this project. In terms of non-fiction, the parameters are much broader. With a fiction piece, the entire universe has been constructed and the story planned to sit a certain way. With non-fiction, while you are always going to have a plan with regards to what you plan to film, there is always a chance more will happen, that other things will appear to film. Yet, fiction also has the chance to be more experimental, stories can be about anything and do not necessarily need to be fact checked or even politically correct.
While there are many clear differences between fiction and non-fiction works, there is also a very important, seemingly hidden, similarity between the two. It’s this idea that everything in the media is constructed, no matter how real a piece may seem, the piece is merely a construction. I discovered this first hand when making our first assignment. While we did create a piece that displayed the typical things we would do on our phones, we did not actually do these things, rather, we planned them and completed them in a specific sequence.
This idea of the media’s construction takes me back to my early days as a media student in high school, where a whole term was spent talking about the idea of media representation: everything in the media is a representation of something. Media educator Brett Lamb, creator of Lesson Bucket, summarises this idea quite well in his piece on representation: ‘ Representation refers to the idea that everything we see or hear in the media has been constructed. While some media representations – like television news and documentary film – may seem realistic, we have to remember that they’re just constructions. At best, the media can only represent reality. What we see on our television screens or on the front page of our daily newspapers is someone else’s interpretation of reality’. While fiction is much more highly and obviously constructed, both fiction and non-fiction pieces are constructed in some way.
Keeping all of this in mind, we felt that starting to think about a concept would be a good way to decide whether we would create something fictional or non-fictional. Having a good concept is incredibly important when creating a media artefact, as it helps to drive the production of the work and ensure that people actually want to view it at the end. I recently engaged in a Youtube web series called City Girl: A Rom Com by a 12 year old, which followed the life of a young lady who worked in a store and had really bad headaches. The only way to describe the acting, characters and overall story was bad. But, that was exactly the overall concept. The lead actor Sarah Ramos found the script of this web series when going through her old things; she had written it when she was 12 years old. With such a clever concept it was hard to turn my eyes away from the piece.
My partner and I considered a few things when coming up with our own concept, obviously whether we preferred fiction or non-fiction, what life experiences we could tap into, and what the actual purpose or final end goal would be. We also thought about what we could create that was interactive, yet achievable to create. And that, is how we came up with our concept.