http://pixiestixkidspix.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/trendwatch-inanimate-alice/ Thoughts, Observations, and Ideas About Children's Books Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:49:43 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://pixiestixkidspix.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/trendwatch-inanimate-alice/#comment-6265 Convergent storytelling for EFL & ELE: Inanimate Alice Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:17:18 +0000 http://pixiestixkidspix.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/trendwatch-inanimate-alice/#comment-6265 [...] In a nutshell, Inanimate Alice is an example of storytelling, increasing its complexity and interactivity with us as the main character, Alice, gets older and develops her career as an animator. Are we watchers, readers or characters in the story? As a hybrid genre -mixing video, pictures, sounds, text and illustrations- it requires some sort of hybrid reading and participation to an extent. Nonetheless, this participation is just confined to clicking on fixed elements of the story and on the >> button, although it gets more complex as the story unfolds. This kind of interaction and linearity places Inanimate Alice closer to books than to interactive games, for instance. However, it seems the creators of the story (Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph and Ian Harper) didn’t want to produce an interactive game where readers had to divert from the main story but an engrossing multimedia narrative (I recommend you to read Kristen McLean’s review). [...] [...] In a nutshell, Inanimate Alice is an example of storytelling, increasing its complexity and interactivity with us as the main character, Alice, gets older and develops her career as an animator. Are we watchers, readers or characters in the story? As a hybrid genre -mixing video, pictures, sounds, text and illustrations- it requires some sort of hybrid reading and participation to an extent. Nonetheless, this participation is just confined to clicking on fixed elements of the story and on the >> button, although it gets more complex as the story unfolds. This kind of interaction and linearity places Inanimate Alice closer to books than to interactive games, for instance. However, it seems the creators of the story (Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph and Ian Harper) didn’t want to produce an interactive game where readers had to divert from the main story but an engrossing multimedia narrative (I recommend you to read Kristen McLean’s review). [...]

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