What is Rashomon Café?

Rashomon Café is a web-based interactive narrative where the viewer navigates the main character through a story making good, and sometimes bad, decisions. Developed by Tatu Design, this site is a contemporary version of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories that became popular in the early eighties. Unlike the stories I read when I was a kid (Jungle Safari) this story isn't about trekking through the jungle, its about helping a waiter at an upper-class restaurant finish his shift on time so he won't be late for a long awaited date.

Rashomon Café is more than an interactive narrative, it's an example of how a new media technology (web based presentations) can retain characteristics from other story-telling genres (cinema and printed word) and deliver its message in a completely new way. I will use selected theories from the Internet Detective and Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, to investigate this site's mixture of genres. I will first look at Form Criteria, that is, how well does the organization and interface of this site present itself to its users. Related to Form Criteria, I will then look at Manovich's theory of Selection and how this site (and its production) supports his that theory. Then, I will move onto Manovich's theory of Transcoding, or in laymen's terms, the borrowing of one genre and its transference into a different genre while retaining some of its original characteristics. Related to Transcoding is the Human-Computer Interface, or HCI, another Manovich perspective that examines the computer interface, its history and the common characteristics between cinema, the printed word, and what Manovich calls a general-purpose interface. Finally, I will analyze Process Criteria, that is, the system, or process, in which the information (or message) from the author is retrieved by the audience. These five elements will guide us through the structural and conceptual theories while we closely investigate and discover Rashomon Café.

User Notes / Site Instructions:

This site is set up like an essay with several different pages. At the top of each page you will find a set of links that you can use to quickly navigate to specific sections of the site (essay). If you wish to read this essay from front-to-back then you can use the links at the bottom of each page. The 'Next' and 'Previous' links will take you in order through all the pages of the site. If for some reason you are having trouble or need to communicate a problem with the site you can contact me by clicking on my name at the bottom of each page.

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