Navigating Full-Motion Video: Emerging Design Patterns for Parameterized Replay Stories

Abstract

The 1980s saw full-motion video (FMV) titles inaugurate design patterns for a new genre of interactive digital narrative (IDN). Recently, this genre made a resurgence in popularity. Despite the intervening years, FMV’s design conventions remain tightly coupled to the affordances of laserdisc technology. This paper employs IDN affordances and aesthetics as a lens to examine modern FMV games, namely the recent works of Wales Interactive. Also, this paper leverages research on the emerging conventions of Timeline–an authoring platform for tightly parallel, parameterized stories–to address the challenges of FMV design.