Interactive documentaries

I was walking through the campus of the university with a colleague. We were following the muddy paths carved out of the grass by the trampling students going from one lecture hall to another and talking about documentaries. 'Well', said my colleague , 'This city has quite a reputation for making documentaries. When radio first started we were in there with audio documentaries. In the early TV years we broke the mold with the first video documentaries. Now that everything is interactive I suppose we ought to start thinking about interactive documentaries ... Whatever they are.' Is there such a thing as an interactive documentary? Let's start from basics. The word 'document' usually refers to a chunk of information printed on a bit of dead tree. I have documents for all sorts of things, but the word also implies a certain official/ factual quality to the information. You have 'travel docu-ments', and 'legal documents' but you don't have 'shopping list documents' or 'gone to lunch, back soon, documents'. Add the 'ary' bit on the end and it all gets very different; a 'documentary' is a presentation of this sort of information. More than that, it is a presentation of information woven into some sort of narrative. It tells a story. Sometimes a documentary will actually say that in the title, 'The story of interface design at Apple'. It is about gathering chunks of information, and giving them a structure in time, giving them a story that unfolds. This brings us back to the old problem of narrative versus interaction. How can we tell a story if it is interactive and the user is in control. This is a question that has engaged the interactive games market for years; how to produce a game that is interactive but that evokes the same emotions as a good story in a film? It is a real challenge. As far as documentaries are concerned there are structures where a story can be told yet remain interactive, consider the following four structures: 1-The story of the documentary is built into the system and the user uncovers parts of that story to gradually build up the whole picture. Imagine interactive archeology and searching old records to piece together what happened to the tomb of Rameses the second. 2-The story of the documentary is told from several different viewpoints and the user can switch between them as …