real world columns: doucmentaries

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 documents,’ 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 movie? 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 the story progresses. Imagine interactively switching viewpoints during the story of the Bay of Pigs.

3) The story is built into the context, imagine an interactive simulation where you are a low income worker in India and you get chances to get out of the poverty cycle, gradually it dawns on you that you can never get out no matter what you do. The problems facing the low-income population and the solutions on offer become clearer. (The third-world charity Oxfam produced a board game like this once).

4) The story is encapsulated in a collection of primary-source interviews and archive materials. Rather than editing them together into a TV?/?audio documentary, they are linked together in a navigational framework that allows the user to explore the whole collection themselves. A high-level narrative element could be included in the organization of the materials. For example: recollections of the invasion of Poland in World War II, recollections of the concentration camps in Poland, recollections of the liberation, recollections of the aftermath and repatriation.

There are other ways, but very little has been tried, and it will be a while before they are produced well enough to succeed.

Making documentaries interactive is a big challenge, but it doesn’t stop there. When we get interactive and go on the web we can put a documentary together that is interactive and multi-user. What happens then? Ultimately one could envisage a sort of ‘documentary engine’; a multi-user web service that is kick-started with an archive of audio and film and then users react to the archive adding their own recollections, opinions etc and the whole collection goes through some sort of filtering process to extract and present the most visited elements.

Things are moving slightly in this direction, for example the addition of ‘talking points’ to news in the BBC news website (news.bbc.co.uk). The articles kick-start the process, moderated responses are added from the public, and this becomes part of the document. But isn’t the end result just a huge archive of material? Where has the narrative element gone? Perhaps there is some way of letting all the users trace their own paths through the material and then to offer users choices of the most popular paths through it? Users could then follow the popular paths carved out by the hordes of other users.

Similar in many ways to how one follows the paths that have been trodden through the grass in a university campus…