Computer Games

Remembering Bogle Chandler is a digital narrative that incorporates photos, line drawings, text and sound playable using a graphical user interface (GUI). The work describes the characters and events surrounding the mysterious deaths of Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler in Sydney on New Year's Day 1963. Users can retrieve and play 104 movie clips (photographic images, animations, text and sound) from the project's digital library. The GUI is both an image illustrating connections between movie clips and an instrument for controlling them.

Remembering Bogle Chandler tells an old story in a new way. In order to explore the novel qualities of the work, this article employs terminology and concepts from three essentialist theories of digital media that define the ways in which digital media differ from old or legacy media. To assess the impact of these properties on storytelling, the article also explores audience responses to the work.

If all culture is becoming computer-mediated, what is the future of narrative ? We have yet to see if new media narratives are a viable art-form. Yet if the narrative forms of cinema and literature do not evolve, they may be subsumed as bit-players within the dominant new media forms of the web page and the computer game.

Increasingly, visual artists, writers and musicians are using social media to enable participation in their art projects (PostSecret (Warren 2004-2014, We Feel Fine (Kamvar & Harris 2005-2014, and the Virtual Choir project (Whitacre 2009(Whitacre -2014). However, recent literature has addressed the use of social media to 'self-present' or to construct idealised and unrealistic virtual identities (Lanier 2010; Marche 2012; Turkle 2012). The question of whether people can, or want to, use social media platforms for authentic self-expression is an important one for crowdsourced art projects, especially those projects that purport to explore the human condition. The creative project, 1000 Tears, approaches this question from a practice-based orientation. We invited expressions of regret from the general public to see whether they would choose to participate via Facebook, SMS or postcard. We collected these regrets in a database that enabled us to analyse the regrets against a number of criteria, principally the mode of interaction and the theme of the regret. This database aligns with the literature on the topic of regret, which reports self-blame and self-harm to be common features of this emotion. We conclude that the participants in the project did not want to share their genuine life regrets via Facebook, rather they preferred to express themselves via the anonymity of a postcard.