Craig Mod has another excellent essay on interactive storytelling at the New York Times which (post the innovation report) makes a great point about the role that Snowfall has played:
'When we explore new ground (or re-explore old ground, forgotten ground) in new mediums, we often find it necessary to swing the design and interaction pendulum to the baroque side of the scale. We do this to see what “too much” feels like in order to understand the edges of “enough.”'
In a theme common to his other great essay on Subcompact Publishing (which I've referred to a lot since it was published), Craig describes how easy it is to throw the technological kitchen sink into something and call it the future. Instead the real challenge comes in thinking about the story you want to tell, being dispassionate but selective about the media you use to tell that story, using new technologies (or combinations of new technologies) so well that you're signalling the future of the whole organisation. Worth reading the whole thing.
I've written before about how much I like the kind of multimedia, immersive digital features that Snowfall has become emblematic of. A big part of this is because it represents a tangible departure from the kind of shovelware that typically characterises initial approaches to new technologies by publishing incumbents. But it's also because it's real multimedia experimentation. Finding out if you can do stuff. How hard it is. Whether it works. And it's only through that that entrenched habits, behaviours and approaches might really change.
