The examples I brought up on the screen were my parallax test (with the original comic on another tab behind it), a To Be Continued infinite canvas page, Lights' Skin&Earth Instagram map, Margot's Room and a character twitter account. (will refer to as: parallax, TBC, S&E, MR, twitter)
Some things I noticed:
- Some people were mostly interested in the parallax and TBC. One person in particular commented on how they like the movement, and how you scroll to reveal more of the story, it's very dynamic. He was more interested in the dynamism of the main story as opposed to S&E and MR where you have to click around and discover things (he said that those were't particularly interesting to him).
- Whereas some people absolutely loved S&E, thought it's very cool and kept saying "wow! wow!!" when I showed them how it led to other accounts/maps. Some people talked about how they love to explore extra things like worldbuilding through maps, or to find little extra nuggets of things when you explore something more.
- People's reactions when they scrolled the parallax and suddenly noticed the different layers, or when TBC suddenly changes scrolling angles was interesting (usually they exclaimed out loud)
- With the parallax (the original version, not just mine) and TBC, some people read it properly and some just scrolled back and forth exclaiming about how cool it was.
- Therefore something like that needs to have very strong visual storytelling and not rely on the text. Also would probably suit shorter comics that you read in one go rather than long things? If you're not invested in the story you're unlikely to come back to it every update. For example, I think TBC is really cool but I haven't read past season one because I don't actually care about the characters or story, (and only read half the text of what I did read)
- Although I think there is also a point to be made that something that looks cool and is fun to play with and nothing else isn't necessarily a bad thing! It's just in terms of what kind of narrative/storytelling is intended
- I had an interesting conversation with Kezia about that - that there needs to be a mixture of good art, good format and good plot/characters to keep people interested in a comic. Doing fancy web things may bring in viewers but won't keep them if it doesn't work with the rest of the story
- We also talked about the concept of medium of storytelling being determined by necessity - some of the research I've been doing talks about [when adding things makes something other than a comic - if adding some sound effects or animation enhances it, surely it'd be better as a full animation?] but Kezia pointed out that people may not have the time/money/skills to do that, therefore they only add the little bits of it.
- Talked to someone who said what they liked about all the examples was the interactivity - and it really draws you into the story. We also talked a lot about how the different methods work for telling different types of stories.
- also talked about the ambiguity of these comics and where they become games/animations/etc and how that's a good thing, and that in the end it doesn't matter what type of thing it is if it's an interesting & engaging story
- i think specifically in regards to interactivity in comics - it's something you don't necessarily expect going into it? whereas when you go into a game you expect to interact with it
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