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Writing Interactive Scripts

© Carol Megrail

Writing for multimedia requires focus, restraint, clarity, and an understanding of the medium's interactivity and visual needs. For example, your words often are perceived as part of the design by end users -- as in internet web sites or catalog CD-ROMs. And this is in addition to providing audio enhancement and cohesion. Most certainly, they will be a guide, a series of "mini-scripts" to explain, enlighten, and entertain, while challenging the writer to accomplish these goals in seconds.

For those of you familiar with the game Myst, and others of that type, you'll recognize that multimedia not only lends itself to informational, but to creative writing through its interactivity. The ability to proceed in a non-linear fashion through a virtual world -- or navigate a base of specialized information -- while catering to varied attention spans, interests, and needs is this medium's strength and the scriptwriter's challenge. Whether on the web, on a CD-ROM, on visual disc or other method of transport, your writing must remain deceptively simple to convey complex ideas.

There are many excellent articles on the web devoted to interactive writing "tips". Since the internet is the largest single dispenser of multimedia and interactivity, we'll start there. Three articles of note which should answer most of your practical questions concerning the basics are: Writing for the Web,Thoughts in Progress, and Script Guidelines. Next month, we'll discuss how writers organize a typical branched site for more effective communication.

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