Jon Samsel

Sequential structure is the basic building block of both interactive and linear media projects. User navigation follows a strictly defined procedural path— one node after another. A user cannot jump from node A to node C, for example, without having first traversed node B.

Although sequential structure is built into the design scheme of practically every new media application ever produced, it is often not talked about. That’s because, for most interactive projects, linear structure is not the primary design structure used in the application; it’s simply an underlying design system that keeps things moving along (see image).

In the early days of multimedia (late eighties to early nineties), sequential structure was used quite heavily in projects such as electronic books and multimedia novels. The Voyager Company published many of these self-label “expanded books,” titles such as Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and The Complete Annotated Alice based on the Lewis Carroll stories.

Electronic books (“e-books”) helped to redefine the boundaries of the printed word. Writers and publishers were able to create works of fiction or nonfiction that their predecessors only dreamed of. Electronic books enhanced the standard text by adding elements such as images, sound, and animation.

In 1991, the first stages of the 3-D graphic novel Sinkha were put into production by noted Italian science-fiction illustrator Marco Patrito and his production team, Virtual Views. Sinkha was a labor of love that was created over a five-year period on a shoestring budget. Upon its final release, the title won the 1996 New Media Invision award for Best Electronic Book and was hailed as an idyllic mesh of art and fiction.

Sinkha stood out from every other e-book on the market because it was neither book, feature film, nor game. It was truly something different—the first 3-D multimedia novel—as its press kit proudly proclaimed. Tens of thousands of hours went into creating the title and the result is a beautifully rendered graphical environment unlike anything you have ever seen. The artwork in Sinkha has been compared to the quality images found in mainstream games such as Myst and The Journeyman Project.

The central story of Sinkha concerns the character Hyleyn, who wishes to leave home in search of adventure. She hooks up with the Sinkha, a godlike race of creatures who seduce her into their magical, synthetic environments. Hyleyn’s enchanters soon become her captors and the race is on to see who will prevail the innocent girl torn away from her family or the dark forces of the Sinkha. To advance Sinkha’s story, the user is required to click an icon to turn each “page.” This limited user interaction triggers new pages of text, mood-altering music, and a poetic dance of photo-realistic 3-D images to appear onscreen. Since the images are basically static (no animation or QuickTime movies in this title), users are drawn into the images in a search for deeper meaning. The end result is a user experience more like browsing pictures