Interactive Media Authoring volume1 | Page 5

Runescape

The game displayed at the bottom of the page is called Runescape, as the image shows it's being played on by both a laptop and a tablet. This is called cross platform functionality and because of the wide range of devices people have this is often required of interactive media. This makes common developer tools for interactive media like flash moot and undesirable in a lot of cases because it cannot be operated on platforms such as Linux.

Other Limitations

There are also other limitations such as file size for interactive media such as adverts (not so much games) . Usually adverts are loaded in the browser and are viewed for only a few seconds, if you're going to have an interactive advert then it must be a reasonable size that can be downloaded in a second and played without too much processing power on a low end machine.

You must also be considerate to the fact that if you're going to rely on one interactive asset to make your function useful the end user may not have that media asset available to then. For example, if your interactive function relies on sound what if they have no sound? Your interactive advert is now rendered useless. There should be no dependency on one media element, and if there is it should be a low level one that most people can utilisesuch as text.

iMagazine / April, 2013 5