I had the opportunity to play/read “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.” It is a beautiful, interactive book, with a story that looks and feel like a Pixar short movie with lots of heart.

The general layout is that each page of the book has an interactive picture that you can explore. Underneath the picture is the text for the story that is also read aloud by an American-accented narrator.

Each picture is a little different, so it really was like exploring to see what each could do.  (I particularly liked a piano-playing moment, where the note and the key was highlighted, suggesting new possibilities for learning music!)

It is a beautiful little app. Even so, I have some reservations.

I have had many people tell me that this is the way kids will read book, and I feel uncertain, even a little reluctant to embrace this future.

Firstly, when people mention the word “interactive”, my mind tends to flash to this 1999 essay by Douglas Adams, who reminds us that Twentieth Century media has tended to make us more passive, and that putting the adjective “interactive” as a selling-feature is ironic as entertainment for most of human history has been so interactive that we haven’t needed to call it such.

My second reservation involves a question: what is the ultimate goal for the producers of the app? Will adding an interactive capability to stories increase the engagment of readers to the story?

My son Gabriel had used the app before me, and when I asked him about it, I started by asking him about the story. What was it about?

“I don’t know,” he told me, before telling me in the same breath that I should turn to a particular page to interact with a picture.

It leads me to question the purpose of reading using tablets. In some interactive books, the words on the page take second fiddle to the other gadgets that the reader can play with.

Comprehension was something we did in English in when I was twelve years old, where we would have to answer questions about a piece having read it only once.

My research space of one (just turned five) suggests that comprehension of “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” after the first read is very low.

The user’s temptation (and natural inclination) is to ignore the text and focus on the awesome interactive pictures around the text. Ignore is perhaps the incorrect word here: psychologist may call it “perceptual blindness”, while magicians call it misdirection. There is so much happening on the screen that our brains will not notice the gorilla standing in the room.

As a larger comment on the “interactive story books” I have so far seen for tablets, let me step back twenty or so years. I remember computer games in the nineties was spent discovering and developing storytelling in this new world of interactivity. When CD-ROMs came out, the by-line “interactive movie!” was often splashed across game boxes. It was an explosion in the gaming industry with many titles forgotten, but a few still remembered today (Myst, The Secret of Monkey Island to name just two.)

“Interactive books” on tablet devices seem to have forgotten all the major lessons from that game story-telling hey-day, and focus on the technology rather than asking what is the outcome that they want for their app.

In the case of reading, my vote is for “comprehension” to be way up the list, and scattering the page with distracting gadgets slams that down.

It might be argued that repeat ‘reading’ of the book will mean the reader will get a better understanding of what the story was about. This is assuming that with all the other distracting apps on your iPad will let you get back to it. Once you’ve flipped through the pages and played with your favourite interactive six or seven times, will the reader want to return it the story again? I have no research to back this up, but having seen the demise of the graphic adventure game in the nineties, and knowing how my son’s limbic system is looking for the next dopamine hit, I would think the new levels of Angry Birds will win out every time.

The first time I saw an episode of Good Game was late last year when I finally replaced the clunky analogy TV with a computer tuning card.

I quickly found myself turning over at the end of Top Gear on a Monday to watch Good Game on ABC2. It’s well made; slick and silly without being (too) corny, and presented actual reviews of computer games without becoming advertorial pieces like other electronic entertainment shows on some commercial channels I could name.

(The one review that got me hooked was a preview for Gears of War 2. The team were not allowed to film their own in-game footage, and rather than use the provided PR footage, Bajo and Junglist decided to make their own.)

Fast-forward to last Monday when I tune in and find the duo of Junglist and Bajo has been replace by the new duo of Bajo and Hex.

(And I recognised Hex; a few months ago the Me On 3 competition was on, and of all the videos uploaded to YouTube, Steph’s was the first that I saw that was actually, well, good. And I commented as such at the time to no one around me who will remember.)

During the episode, I kept half an eye on the Twitter #ggtv tag, and read various comments along the vein of “Who is the blonde girl?” This was both expected and disappointing as people use the pseudo-anonymity of Twitter to vent their spleen and be mean.

As the episode went on I felt another disappointment: not not the fact that Hex replaced Junglist, but that he’d been replaced at all. I liked Junglist, and I liked the Junglist/Bajo team. Junglist was the Yin to Bago’s Yang; Junglist’s dry wit juxtaposed Bajo’s bouncy “someone’s setting fire to my foot” delivery. The team made it something to tune in for, in the same way we watch Top Gear for Clarkson, Hammond and May doing something stupid, rather than reviews of cars we’ll never drive.

So with Junglist being replaced without warning, and probably against his will, I’m feel a funny sense of loss. I’m not going to rage, pound my fists bloody, write strongly worded letters to the ABC (PO Box 9994 in your capital city, BTW.) But I sincerely hop this isn’t the end of him on the ABC.

Having said all that…

It’s written in the Hagakure: “It is said that was is called ‘the spirit of an age’ is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world’s coming to an end. In the same way, a single year does not have just spring or summer. A single day, too, is the same…For this reason, although one would like to change today’s world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.”

The old Good Game, for good or bad, is gone. Possibly by ABC management looking for a different slice of the demographic pie, and I doubt online petitions are going to change things. The point is, the show is still here, and we can still the get best out of it. Once Bajo and Hex find their groove.

Bow, Nigger changed the way I looked at writing about computer games. Instead of a list of requirements and features, writing about computer games could be a postcard from imaginary places.

Another piece I was following from the same site was Fools Rush In which was documenting a different way of getting storytelling into a computer game. This piqued my interest because for years I have been bugging the disinterested around me with my wild ravings about how computer games could be different. Or to put it another way, here’s a kick-arse realtime 3d engine; can we do something with it other than running and shooting zombies? “Fools Rush In” is an interesting, though incomplete read; it hasn’t been touched since 2005 and I have a feeling the author has a few more pressing things on his plate.