Extraordinary Crimes Against People and the State must be Avenged
What happens when text or story line becomes overshadowed by the graphics, image layout, interface, and interactive features?
In an attempt to download the Disney app Jeremy discussed in a post a few days ago, I stumbled across a digital, interactive graphic novel. It is a free app on Amazon's Kindle called Marvel's The Avengers: Iron Man - Mark VII. It was created by Loud Crow Interactive Inc. which makes a lot of interactive apps for kids, namely ones from the Charlie Brown series. They take children's classics and make them fun interactive game-style books; one example being, PopOut! The Night Before Christmas.
The Avengers graphic novel on Kindle has some standard features that has become expected in children's book apps: the ability to have the novel read aloud to you and to swipe to the next page at your leisure, allowing you to look at the comic art work to your hearts content.
Someone has recorded the app onto Youtube. Watch a few seconds of this video to get an idea of what the app is all about:
Take the first comic box for example. What you can't see in the video is that to get the guns to shoot you need to click on them with your finger. That's part of the interactive experience.
Rather than enhancing the Iron Man story, I see a lot of fun interactive features that distracts from the story line. The optional features that do not pertain to the story, such as making Iron Man fly too high into the atmosphere will yield prizes or tokens which the user is meant to collect as bonus material. Taking the time to explore all the interactive options really makes reading the graphic novel disjointed. The reader is encouraged to explore the interactive features on the screen - by clicking on boxes, machines, gun, faces, etc - and is then rewarded for their efforts with collectible tokens. Finding these tokens is an optional task to endeavor between reading pages of the story. To find a "security token", for example, you may help Iron Man aim his weapon at the assailants. Trying to discover the interactive features in the app, I think, breaks up the user's experience as a reader. The story line falls to the wayside and the user becomes more interested in discovering the next interactive feature of the page.
The app features exciting background music, interactive explosions, collectibles, and other challenges that engages the user but shifts the focus away from the story. This app had me mindlessly clicking all over the screen just to find out what items are interactive. The interactive component lets users do interesting things, such as putting on or taking off Iron Man's suit or causing Iron Man to shoot fire from his hand-flame-thrower-thing. In this case, the digital graphic novel is less of a book and more of a game to discover what images are interactive.
The visual and auditory components of this app are very detailed. So much so, I experienced a bit of sensory overload. True, the sensory overload may have enhanced my experience of Iron Man as a character, it still de-emphasized the content of the story. Too many bells and whistles. Walking away from the app, I remember it more as an interactive game than a mini graphic novel.
It may be more accurate to say that this app is a game that takes place over the landscape of a graphic novel. The graphic novel is just a means on which an interactive experience is played out. The layers of interactive experiences (the music, the sounds of guns firing, the moving images, the searching for and collecting of items and so much more) are all layered on top of a story to the point that it is almost unrecognizable as a graphic novel. It is certainly a departure from the traditional understanding of a graphic novel - on print or in e-book format. I'd be interesting to hear if you think this a good thing or bad thing. Do you disagree that all the interactive fluff distracts from the plot?
One redeeming quality is the narrator (if you choose to have narration), by virtue of reading the page aloud, does a pretty good job of reminding the reader that there is a story to be enjoyed here. And I concede that it could be a good thing to add some sensory stimulation - but the Marvel's the Avengers app is overkill.
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