Despite a broad consensus by the
educated caste of Canadians who continue to believe that the novel always has outmatched
and always will outmatch the comic book, in recent years books have begun to
follow some of the trails blazed by comic books in using available
technology (see the included example of how a short horror comic becomes even more
terrifying thanks to technology).
For a long time, the highest degree of interactivity that could be experienced by a
reader progressed slowly from “choose your own adventure” tomes, (which both lend
themselves to carpal tunnel through obsessive page flipping and lead to the development of a very tenuous
sense of the morality of reversing decisions) to children’s books which included small sound panels with in-text prompts to press a corresponding
button to hear an associated sound, and in later years, the
development of more advanced Leapfrog style interactive children’s reading aids.
Moving beyond the
sphere of multiple story arcs and noisy books however, modern eBooks have so
flawlessly integrated technology into their storytelling that they blur
the lines of what constitutes a book. An app like the 2014 iTunes submission
SHERLOCK: Interactive Adventure (which some reviews state as a game
despite its app store description as a book) is one such genre-bending
effort in recent years. It combines classic literary characters and well written
text with interactive 3d characters who act out what you read as you read it
(replacing the standard illustration plates which served as a way to give a
general idea of a character or locations appearance, which could be seen
simultaneously as a great tool for authors to show their vision, but also as a hindrance
to the imagination of the reader.)
Beyond the work of
SHERLOCK: Interactive Adventure, other titles have taken the advancements
of modern entertainment media and spun them into unique applications of
storytelling, meaning that -- with the success of the early projects -- future
iterations and uses of creative storytelling will not only continue, but will
evolve and become more complex as technology develops. It’s just a matter of time until the brain is nothing more than a projection backdrop of laser-guided storytelling.
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