A Game of Thrones Companion (original) (raw)

Story-Map: iPad Companion for Long Form TV Narratives

2012

Long form TV narratives present multiple continuing characters and story arcs that last over multiple episodes and even over multiple seasons. Writers increasingly take pride in creating coherent and persistent story worlds with recurring characters and references to backstory. Since viewers may join the story at different points and different levels of commitment, they need support to orient them to the fictional world, to remind them of plot threads, and to allow them to review important story sequences across episodes. Using the affordances of the digital medium we can create navigation patterns and auxiliary information streams to minimize confusion and maximize immersion in the story world. In our application, the iPad is used as a secondary screen to create a character map synchronized with the TV content, and to support navigation of story threads across episodes.

Narrative Coherence: Interaction between Verbal and Visual in Game of Thrones

CROSS-INTER-MULTI-TRANS-Proceedings of the 13 th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS ), ed. Dario Martinelli, Audrone Dobarione, Simona Stano, Ulrika Varankaite. Kaunas: IASS-AIS., 2018

One of the most successful television series of the last decade has been Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s novel sequence A Song of Ice and Fire. Because the books are still being written while the television series is being produced, it presents an interesting opportunity to examine the interaction and contamination between the written and the visual versions of the story and the effects of serialisation on narrative structure. According to A. J. Greimas, both the syntactic and the semantic structures of a text can be understood as a series of transformations from an abstract deep level to a textual surface level. If the link between the surface textual structure and the underlying semantic structure is lacking, or cannot be perceived by the reader, the result is a feeling that the text is incoherent. This is also true of the syntactic dimension. An endless series of narrative ‘events’ or episodes that does not appear to lead to any significant change in the narrative, or confer any clear direction on it, results in a growing frustration, a feeling that the text isnot ‘going’ anywhere. The need for continuity between surface textual structure and underlying syntactic-semantic structure will be demonstrated by looking at the narrative and thematic structure of both Martin’s novels and their television adaptation.

Interactive Visualizations of Plot in Fiction

Visible …, 2011

Abstract: In this paper, we expand on our presentation at ICDS2010 (Dobson et al., 2010) in describing the design of several new forms of interactive visualization intended for teaching the concept of plot in fiction. The most common visualization currently used for teaching ...

Let me understand the poetry: embedding interactive storytelling within panoramic virtual environments

This paper presents a method for the merging of poetry into interactive storytelling that is based on still and video panoramas. This non-linear approach aims to give a young audience a new understanding of poetry, by exploring the poet Charles Causley’s house and the town of Launceston in England where he spent most of his life. His poetry mentions a number of locations from this town and artefacts located in his house. The user of the interactive application based on Adobe Flash plug-in and Lucid Viewer (panoramic viewer), take a number of narrative journeys in order to search for hidden poems, voice marks or trails signs that have references to the town. Still panoramas localised at decision-making points were linked by using video panoramas (360-degree video), which were recorded with a spherical video camera – Ladybug2 mounted on a motorised wheelchair. Still and video panoramas are elements that create a branching narrative. The aim of this application is to develop the interest not only in the Causley’s biography but also in literary output of the poet.

Interactive Digital Narratives for iTV and Online Video

Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies, 2015

In iTV and online video, narrative interaction has long been a Holy Grail for both audiences and creators of these digital audiovisual works. On the one hand, interactive digital narrative promises interactors some exciting opportunities: to enter the world of the story, to affect the story and perhaps even to control its outcome, and in the process to gain a transformative self-revelation. On the other hand, this new medium changes the role and craft of the author and entails a host of technological, conceptual, and institutional challenges. The authors describe these opportunities and challenges in detail, before examining various projects that have attempted to realize this vision and grapple with the challenges. Works discussed span several decades, from the late 1960s to 2015. They also span a variety of forms, including interactive cinema, online video, interactive television, and both video- and animation-based games. Particular emphasis is given to contemporary interactive documentaries (iDocs). The chapter further discusses current research directions, such as explorations of the increasing incorporation of the interactor’s body and affects as well as second-screen and cross-device integration, and concludes with a fresh look at the original vision in light of conceptual and design approaches, current technological developments, their implications on the changing landscape of audiovisual content creation and consumption, and the new creative space of opportunities that they open up.