I'm rapidly coming to dislike multimedia. Many of titles I am seeing these days have about as much engagement as my neighbors' home videos.
Clark contrasts the "active engagement" of computer games with theater and stage magic which he characterizes as "passive." I would disagree--the actor and the prestidigitator both rely on the fullest mental and emotional participation by the audience to "suspend disbelief" or to allow their attention to be misdirected. Stage art is a cooperative relationship between performer and viewer, as is folk tales, ghost stories, film and other narrative forms. The worst books always describe everything in detail--whereas the best literature only sketches in appearance and scenery and lets the reader fill in the details.
In my lifetime, the highest point of audience-involvement art forms (where the audience has to the most work) was radio, where the most vivid images (and the prickliest goose bumps) were generated by the listener in response to purely auditory cues.
(I remember when a film was made of The Goon Show--how disappointing it was to see Spike Milligan's image of Major Denys Bloodnok, and Eccles, and the rest.)
To my mind, the problem with multimedia is that it is stimulus overload--it tries to show us everything.
Here's a little exercise in narrative development:
The NOVEL:
Charles Schultz' Snoopy is writing his great novel which inevitably begins "It was a dark and stormy night..."
In RADIO this might be translated into:
FX: Wind noise punctuated by ghastly howl
WOMAN: What was that?
MAN: Can't see a damn thing--it's too dark
FX: Crash of thunder...
In FILM we might experience it as:
EXT. HEATH. NIGHT
Silhouette of tree, tossed in the wind before scudding clouds.
Tilt down to reveal lantern swaying, approaching across the heath. Distant voices calling, words indistinguishable in the howling wind. A flash of lightning reveals, just for an instant, a hunched figure running into the trees...
Can you imagine the MULTIMEDIA presentation?
Screen depicts darkened landscape with forest, stream, and manor house. You can choose to view it in elevation, plan, or oblique angle. Use this control stick to rotate the landscape 360 degrees. Click on any animal or human or monster to hear its voice. You can click on any object to inspect it in detail as well as to find out its Latin name. Use the hand tool to pick it up and put it in your "smuggler's sack."
A villain is lurking somewhere. You can only see him when lightning strikes. Your current "Lightning reserve is 9" Click on the "Lightning panel" to choose FORK LIGHTNING, SHEET LIGHTNING, BALL LIGHTNING...
Yes, I know there have been creative, engaging, even artistic multimedia CD-ROMs, and Myst is probably still the best example. By these creations, which display an artistic voice and a creator/spectator tension are all too few. Clark's essay seems to deny the possibility of engagement through art and the unique voice of the artist and concentrate exclusively on the postmodern concerns of the "text" and the "reader."
Frederick Jameson puts it very well, I think. Even though he was writing about experimental film, he could be describing Microsoft's Encarta:
Now reference and reality disappear altogether and even meaning is problematized. We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of pre-existent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts [and CD-ROMS which collect them all] --such is the logic of postmodernism in general...
To my mind the creation of "engagement" is wedded to those taboo words (for instructional designers) "art" and "creativity" (Clark doesn't mention them either). Art lies in the very personal tension which an "author" creates with the reader/viewer. Engagement requires the viewer/reader to supply a great deal of the message from the imagination.
I guess what I'm suggesting is a recognition that whereas Clark's precepts may help us to create usable, interesting CD-ROMs (or textbooks) which transcend the rag-bag "postmodern" creations which bloat the catalogues that come across my desk, really engaging media requires tension, creativity, and (dare I say it again?) artistic vision.
OK lurkers, get up and fight!
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (p.61).