In “A Guide to Interactive Documentary,” Rob Munday advises that one should put story first in any narrative-driven project. Do not go interactive unless it benefits the project. He then dives into covering all of the bases of digital interactive non-fiction: definitions of non-fiction documentary as well as what one needs to know to gets started and how one can design one effectively.
I don’t believe interactive documentaries essentially need to be digital. This is because it can be done on paper, physically, just as well, with a different interface than a digital screen. The first forms of interactive narrative were written in this manner or told out loud. The difference in the interface is simply rather than clicking a mouse or typing on a keyboard, the viewer flips through pages or tells the reader where to go. A form of interactive documentary could even take the form of an oral report, in which the presenter and the listener(s) “interact” through asking and answering questions. Each of these methods present a different narrative to each person who views them, in the same manner a digital interactive documentary would.
Effectiveness, Efficiency, Engagingness, Error Tolerance, and Ease of Learning
In “Bear 71”, effectiveness is manifested through the combination of the visuality of the hidden cameras in the forest, the voiceover relaying interesting stories from a bear’s perspective, and the text illustrating various relevant statistics.
It is efficient because it takes up twenty minutes at most of someone’s time, however I think its efficiency could be improved by reducing the number of clickable buttons on screen (because every time I saw something that looked interactive, I’d click on it, distracting myself from whatever the narrator was saying or whatever else was on my screen that might’ve added more to the narrative).
This experience was engaging because it was told from the perspective of a bear, which often times we humans do not get to experience. That made it unique, which in turn made it worth paying attention to.
There weren’t that many ways to err in this interactive experience, but I found a couple of ways in which it was streamlined to reduce errors. One was, if you missed a certain piece of information relayed by the narrator, you could buffer the video backwards a few seconds using the slider at the bottom. Also, if you wandered too far away from the subject of the documentary on the map, there was an arrow pointing the direction in which Bear 71 was, so you could rejoin her.
I found myself learning how to navigate this experience slowly. For the first few minutes, I thought that the voiceover would stop if I X-d out of a video player, until I realized that the video was just on loop. I then found, accidentally, that my mouse placement had relevance because the avatar that was labelled “Human (You)” moved at different rates when I moved my mouse to different areas of the screen, then realized with some difficulty that it was in fact following my mouse. So there was a learning process, and while it could have been more streamlined, I did find my way through all of the interactivity of the experience.
