childrens book… not the same as choose your own adventure, choose your own adventure has ‘endings’ and only limited possibilities – whereas the book has 1000 combinations out of 10 pages with 3 options…

for example: hundred thousand billion poems > estimated to take 200 million yeas to read them all > aint nobody got time for that > ten sonnets > virtually unlimited options

what kind of genre is an interactive documentary ? is it a documentary:
– documentaries make statements or observations of reality, when the format is changed it becomes more of an interpretation than a subjective presentation
– straightforward response – brian: ‘yes’ it is a documentary in a different textual form. documentary itself is a genre that goes across many different forms
– genre is not about form, form is not the only thing determining that it is part of a genre
– “I was there when rap and hip hop first arrived…. and people were saying what the fuck is this?” just had to quote this, its not related to anything but I can imagine brian secretly blasting snoop dogg in his room at home alone, terrific mental image, brian, you ultimate badass
– the forms don’t go from avant garde to mainstream, rather they become a popular form that people can recognise > hypertext is not a “popular” form but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there
– truth claims of non-fiction have to be about THE world not A world > definition of documentary > therefore yes it is a form of documentary because the form is unimportant as long as it is referencing and observing the world we belong to and actual events
– “old media” is dead

If, “Interactive narratives have no singular, definitive beginnings and endings,” then what would be the constraints for an author of interactive media to control the interpretation of a narrative?
– reading is not about interpreting the mind of the author because we have no way of knowing , it is about your own interpretations
– we interpret TEXTS not authors… we can’t know about the authors only the works they produce
while I agree with this on some level, what about psychoanalytical and other theories that infer things about the author through their use of language, form, subject matter etc? saying that we can’t interpret things through what somebody has written is also saying that psychoanalysis is invalid > adrian answered this question by mentioning the ‘unconscious’; if we cannot ever know what occurs unconsciously in one’s mind then we can’t read into it, we can only speculate about the text rather than the author’s psychological state > I agree with this but if psychologists can infer things about people’s psychological states through examining their dreams or their thoughts, then surely writing is in the similar vain as you are merely documenting what is in your unconscious mind > our ideas come from our unconscious, why we choose to write about particular topics, form our stories in particular ways, use certain words over others all comes from our unconscious, so by sharing these ideas it is, in a way, a window into our minds > the imagination itself is part of the unconscious in the same way we can’t control our dreams we can’t control our imagination the same
– story order vs. plot  (they are two different things)
– green light > stop scenario/example by adrian > adrian uses this as an example of the author having no control while elliot disagrees and uses the example to prove the opposite point
– why try to reach out and communicate to an audience if they will not connect to the text?
– encoding and decoding texts > the way in which an author might have certain codes in a text that an audience might be familiar with > thematic / visual > uses these codes to structure the story in the hope that the audience will decode this and get at the deeper meaning/message
– use known probabilities when you’re writing to reference topics and ideas that your audience may or may not get > has to work some of the time (when you take a gamble you don’t always lose)
– the authors “mind” is unreadable but you can read their compositional strategies