Interactive Documentaries: A Golden Age

This article is motivated by the opportunity presented by recent advancements in information and communication technology – particularly by faster broadband connections and faster digital media processing capabilities – to interactive television to extend towards and develop interactive storytelling or interactive narratives. This will give viewers the ability to shape and configure the programmes they watch, whilst watching, according to their needs and desires. Rather than consuming a predefined linear narration – represented by the traditional dramatic or factual programme – which has to address the potential audience as a whole, individuals or group of viewers can receive tailored made personal narratives. Each viewer can thus potentially become an active explorer of a narrative space rather than a receiver of a predefined narration. This article presents the production of A Golden Age, an interactive configurable documentary about the arts of the Renaissance in England, as a comprehensive illustration of the potential offered by interactive narrativity, but at the same time as a successful example for the employment of the recently developed, production- and genre-independent, ShapeShifting Media technology to the realisation of a good quality interactive narrative. The article describes the concept, the content production process, carried out from the outset with the aim of producing an interactive experience, and, finally, its authoring and delivery with the ShapeShifting Media toolkit. The focus of the presentation is on the design and implementation of the computational interactive narrative structures expressed in Narrative Structure Language (NSL), the declarative representation language underlying ShapeShifting Media. A Golden Age placed a distinct emphasis on the quality and style of each emerging individual narration, having aimed for levels at least comparable with those of (good quality) linearly compiled documentaries. NSL and the ShapeShifting Media toolkit provided the means to achieve this. A Golden Age is a productio