Signs of telling: narrative voice and the interactive

In terms of sign systems and the way they are used, the experience of the interactive resembles nothing else so much as it resembles the experience of narrative. Narrative is best understood as a relationship between a Teller and a Listener, a relationship that is formal, moral and structural. The interactive reframes acts of narrative from re-counts and re-presentations towards simulation and generation, from editions to instances. This markedly affects the kind of signs that work within the semiotic ecology of narrative relationships, unsettling the notion of Telling, and re-working the ‘voice’ of a narrator. Narrative and Culture are inextricably linked in the forming and continuance of world views. Narrative is a meme, and interactivity a meme variant of narrative. Change in the semiotic economy of Narrative, in the meme and its function, implies equivalent change in culture and world views (ideology).