Mallon & Webb | “Structure, causality, visibility, and interaction: propositions for evaluating engagement in narrative multimedia”

Literature review // Mallon, Bride & Webb, Brian (2000). “Structure, causality, visibility, and interaction: propositions for evaluating engagement in narrative multimedia” Int. J. Human-Computer Studies. 

What was the author arguing?

Mallon & Webb was looking to create criteria for evaluating the experiential impact of design. In looking at this through narrative computer games, the authors were gauging user experience. There focus was capturing the effect of the narrative (broadly defined) in these experiences because they believed “each microunit has some significance at some level for the global purpose, thus creating unity and meaning.” In other words, the nuances of the narratives greatly affect the overall experience (not surprising :) ). One of their significant conclusions was that interaction and story telling seem to have an inverse relationship to one another: interactivity is essential to multimedia but it also disrupts the sequences of an author’s control of events (p 283). And from their research they found that participants obviously wanted to feel like they were making progress and part of that was feeling like they had control of the future.

Why is this relevant?

I thought this was relevant to my thesis in that it was increasing the literacy of this interactive media. The authors explicitly state: “Narrative was the “suggested lens for evaluating the experiential impact of a product.” It was an example of researching the way interactivity could be measured as a narrative and what the qualities of a positive interaction are for these games at least.