Flashback in Interactive Storytelling

Abstract

We have a lot of literature on the static media but few on interactive ones. Many doubt [Costikyan, Juul...] that it is possible to use stylistic devices such as the ones that have pervaded the history of the ‘one- way’ storytelling. We have tried to imagine what it would be to have a flashback in IS. Stylistic devices, in classic media are not as immersive. They are immediately filtered by language – especially books- while IS has the major flaw of being sometimes incapable of telling a story by itself as it relies so much on intuition. The existence of the flashback in IS is possible to the condition of the narrative device called Uchronia, which leaves a chance of occurrence to potential futures that might have happened.The last part is made for designers who want to try to build Flashback IS application while taking back up on this paper. We have taken a lot of inspiration from movies, classics as well as modern and we have tried to set up a blueprint for an outline of a stylistic grammar in IS, starting with the device of flashback.

On the one hand we have decided to use the theory of language as it is the material of imagination – the one that makes stories- to try to find out if flashback was compatible with emergence and game engineering. On the other hand, we wanted to provide the basis for experimentation of interactive flashbacks – as we have tried to demonstrate exists under certain conditions- and we hope for other multimedia and stylistic devices in IS.