After tracing my academic journey from eighteenth-century English literary scholarship
to new media production, I interweave three discursive strands: descriptions
and demonstrations of several experimental interdisciplinary projects being
produced at the Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative
that I direct at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication;
five general principles learned while making these projects; and tentative
suggestions about how they might be applied to Pacific Island studies.
Despite the diversity of works presented (Mysteries and Desire: Searching the
Worlds of John Rechy, an interactive memoir about gay Chicano novelist John
Rechy; The Danube Exodus, a museum installation developed in collaboration
with Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács; The Dawn at My Back: a Memoir of
a Black Texas Upbringing, a dvd-rom based on an autobiography by African-
American photographer Carroll Parrott Blue; an e-learning course on Russian
Modernism with an online role-playing game at its center; a computer game for
teens called Runaways; and a website called Dreamwaves), all adhere to five
basic principles: honoring the past, emphasizing conceptualization over technical
mastery, taking a collaborative approach to interface design, searching for culturally
specific metaphors, and leveraging the transformative potential of database
narratives
