~3 minute readElectronic Novel Lets Reader Really Get Into Story
At the expense of working out and watching television in his Sherman Oaks home, Dr. Arnold Kravatz often spends hours of his time engaged in an age-old pastime–reading. However, the literature Kravatz eagerly consumes is a relatively new art form that threatens to alter the shape of novels as they are currently known.
Kravatz is not only absorbed by the stories he reads, he is part of them. He reads electronic novels etched in glowing letters across the screen of his Apple personal computer. Kravatz does more than turn pages and read. He directs the main character from place to place. He questions other characters. He picks up objects and examines them to see how they fit into the story.
"They (electronic novels) allow you to put yourself into the story,"
Kravatz said, pecking away on the keyboard of his computer terminal. He was about to begin a popular story titled "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' –- a whimsical tale of a character who first learns that his house is about to be demolished to make room for a freeway and then discovers that the Earth is about to be similarly destroyed to make way for an intergalactic freeway.
The hero of the story, which Kravatz directs in a mission to save the planet and his home, first has to get out of his wildly spinning bedroom. Kravatz looks around at various objects that might be used to get the room to stop spinning long enough to get outside and start the adventure.
Patience and logic finally direct Kravatz to look into the pocket of a gown in the room. In the pocket are some aspirins. Taking the aspirins causes the hero's hangover to disappear, and the room settles down.
Such are the challenges facing those who interact with the new computer programs. Kravatz notes the importance of picking up and examining everything in every setting of the novel. "If you don't, you may never get from one chapter to the next," he said. Logic, not joystick skills, is necessary.
Says Connie Nemmers of Brouderbund Software, "You are not just watching things happen; you make them happen."
Perhaps not since Edgar Allan Poe and his concept of the short story has literature undergone such radical tampering.
A reader, knowing all the right moves, would still spend about three hours with the electronic novel to reach its ending. But the task is probably never accomplished in that time. It is more likely to take hundreds of hours. Indeed, one electronic novel comes with a tongue-in-cheek warning from the Programmer General that the interaction "can be habit-forming."
These habit-forming interactive games, selling for around $30 each, are taking over the shelves of software stores, eliminating space once devoted to gee-whiz arcade-type games that wowed with dazzling graphics and required swift eye-hand coordination.
Most interactive games are without graphics–just text.
"They sort of take me back to the days of radio," Kravatz said. "You have to use your imagination to visualize the settings."
Generally, the writers of these games, who must work within the confines of a 1,700-word vocabulary, are more experienced with typewriters than computer terminals, said Spencer Steere, a spokesman for Infocom Inc. The 5-year-old, Cambridge, Mass.-based company, which has already put 18 interactive novels on the market, including the leading seller "Zork," employs eight full-time writers.
For now, most of the interactive stories are mysteries. "We haven't touched on interactive romance or horror stories–yet," she said.
Even in its limited format, hundreds of thousands of these interactive novels have been sold; it is a number likely to increase as personal computers become more widespread and the interactive games get "smarter."
In a year's time, since the introduction of their first interactive game, the 5-year-old Broderbund Software Inc. has seen sales steadily increase. Now interactive games account for 20 percent of the company's $20 million in sales, said Nemmers, a spokeswoman for the San Rafael-based company.
One of the more popular games produced by Broderbund is a mystery titled "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" Interactive games, which usually are packaged with trinkets and hints, have been one-upped by this game, which comes with a current version of the World Almanac Book of Facts. The reader uses the almanac to help solve the mystery. The game also teaches geography as players track 10 possible suspects through 30 cities around the world while examining as many as 1,000 clues.
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
