![myst 3 digital copy myst 3 digital copy](https://img.youtube.com/vi/-p48Fil_7qA/hqdefault.jpg)
Having considered film as essentially pictorial, we can evaluate interactive media within the same framework. This is a fundamen- tal problem, especially since, as already noted, the classical film excludes the use of multi-part displays, allowing only a single view at a time to occupy the screen. Though Grasso, Ebert and Finin (1998) enumerate several differences between graphical and multimodal user interfaces, they omit this basic fact, that graphical interfaces are bound to make all available objects visible. Multimodal interaction, allowing the user to interact using a mode such as speech (Cassell et al 1999, Oviatt and Cohen 2000), could radically affect this spatial characteristic since users would then be able to address elements which they could not see.
![myst 3 digital copy myst 3 digital copy](http://s.pacn.ws/640/cv/pa.231519.1.jpg)
Though Poole (2000 73) lumps together joysticks, joypads, mice and keyboards as ‘curiously alienating devices’ it is visual pointer-based interaction which dramatically constrains spatiality. It is thus quite unlike an object in the space of film which has earlier been seen by the viewer and which is assumed to be still present even when not on screen. This requires the presence of an object on the screen at the time when the user wishes to make the interaction. This is that the user must be provided with visual objects to interact with by pointing, normally by directing a cursor using a mouse, trackpad or similar device. There is currently a very particular constraint on the spatiality of digital interactive media, arising directly from the technologies which it employs. Where the apparently transparent presentation of the fiction film is made truly transparent, narrative itself tends to collapse. Even so, most games hardly qualify as interactive narratives, for the simple reason (as Cameron pointed out in 1995) that there is insufficient difference between the action and its representation. Computer games designers are still struggling with this problem, which they generally solve by splicing together as smoothly as possible two distinct modes, one comprising short chunks of fixed narrative (‘cut scenes’) and the other the interactive game play. On the contrary, it is clear that the diegetic space is a fundamentally pictorial construct, and to enter it is in many ways to destroy the narrative. This is a problem largely overlooked by writers such as Murray (1997) who seem to believe that the facility for the user to freely explore the diegetic space, to look anywhere and see anything they choose, can be achieved with no loss to the narrative. The third lesson from film is that the specific spatial practices of narrative film can provide only part of the visual vocabulary of interactive media, for the simple reason that the spatiality of film is driven by narrative, narrative which is authored in a way quite unlike the user’s interactions with interactive media. We have seen how important this process of mutual education has been for film. However interactive media also suffer from the characteristic problem of any young medium that there is a lack of shared knowledge of a body of conventions between makers and users of each multimedia genre. This contrasts with pictorial interactive media which are still struggling to find spatial forms appropriate to their objectives, partly because in some cases those objectives are unclear.
![myst 3 digital copy myst 3 digital copy](https://cdn.wallpapersafari.com/54/29/1DKgXZ.jpg)
What film-making attempts to convey and the effects that it attempts to exercise on the audience are well served by its spatial forms. Secondly, in film there is a close fit of spatial practice to objectives: this is evidence of film’s maturity.
MYST 3 DIGITAL COPY FREE
The designer of interactive media is therefore free to experiment, untrammelled by any requirement to copy some putative model of natural vision. We can say that film imitates vision, but only in the sense that it aspires to evoke visual experience, real or imagined, not to imitate optics. In the history of cinema, innovations are tried and if they ‘work’, they are retained. simple mimesis of vision is not necessarily (perhaps is never) the answer, since even those films which aspire to seem highly naturalistic are really informed by a deeply pragmatical approach.