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My research into Authorship and Interaction has led me to designing a concept for a digital narrative.

A digital narrative is a story that incorporates multiple paths into it. This equips the audience with the power of choosing the direction that the narrative takes which means there is a change in role for the participant; "The subject is forced to oscillate between the roles of viewer and user, shifting between perceiving and acting" Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 2001. This method of story telling is similar to that of a digital game. However, the plot of a digital narrative is often more complex, sacrificing the interactive freedom offered by games for narrative depth.

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The Outbreak
Digital narratives are not limited to being lines of text, they can and do take many forms. An example of this is the interactive movie 'The Outbreak' which is made up of multiple clips all following the same story. At the end of each clip the audience is provided with the option of continuing down one of two paths, the choices made alter the direction the narrative takes with the intended goal of reaching the end of the movie with the main character remaining alive. The movie can be experienced through its website:

www.survivetheoutbreak.com

or can be played through YouTube (shown right)

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By clicking 'Chapter Select' during the movie the above interface is displayed which allows its user to see the choices they have made and to jump to another scene.

Text games are games which allow its player to direct the direction of gameplay using typed commands. The first example of this kind of game is 'ADVENT', based on the 'Dungeons and Dragons', which was created in 1976 by William Crowther, in 1977 Don Woods reworked the original to include more fantasy elements in it causing the game to become more widely known.

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Another example of a text game is The Hitchhiker Adventure Game which is based on the story by Douglas Adams. The gamer begins in a dark room and from there has to navigate through the story using a series of typed commands. If the correct sequence is not followed the result is the end of the game.