e-Lit Resource
Webyarns.com

Webyarns.com hosts a number of interactive stories, written in Flash, by Alan Bigelow. Bigelow repeatedly emphasizes their narrative character in the site’s work statement, identifying three premises for his work: “1) the stories should be multimedia events; 2) they should be easy to navigate; and 3) they should be interactive.” However, he calls these “non-traditional narratives,” and the association between “story” and “multimedia event” above provides a key to understanding how they depart from narratives in print. Rather than verbally relaying a sequence of happenings, these works instead blend interface, image, audio, and word to create meaning, with interface interaction supplying the motive, directional force of the narrative. Together, these elements combine to “make statements about contemporary life,” as Bigelow puts it, here undermining down the utterance-narrative hierarchy that the term “story” is traditionally associated with.