interactive digital narrative

Playable Comms is an interdisciplinary, collaborative network of projects with the aim of examining interactive digital narratives (IDNs) as tools for educating audiences on topics of science and health. More specifically, the research evaluates the efficacy of using IDNs for health and sci-comm, attempting to measure message uptake from outright rejection to holistic adoption engendering associated behavioural change. As a practice-based practitioner/researcher composing IDNs and evaluating their efficacy on multiple projects, I aim to develop a model for health and science communication through reading and writing IDNs that can be implemented in a wide array of scenarios and topic areas.

The lack of a shared vocabulary is a crucial obstacle on the path to a generalized, accessible body of knowledge about Interactive Digital Narratives. This describes a platform to solve this issue, developed in the EU COST action INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations) - a community-driven encyclopedia, defining concepts and applications. Two similar and successful projects (The Living Handbook of Narratology and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) serve as examples for this effort, showing how community-authored encyclopedias can provide high-quality content. The authors introduce a taxonomy based on an overarching analytical framework (SPP model) as the foundational element of the encyclopedia, and detail editorial procedures for the project, including a peer-review process, designed to assure high academic quality and relevance of encyclopedia entries.

"Do it" by Serge Bouchardon is an app that encourages the reader to be a more active participant in their lives. Posted in this issue is a sample video of Bouchardon’s app. Upon opening the app, the reader is told they are at a job interview and then is prompted through the various existential anxieties that follow. You can shake, tap, and expand the narrative, but the most important thing asked of you during the experience is: can you adapt?

The work has been presented by "The New River" for the Spring 2018 edition.

The app is avaiable for Ios and Android devices and it can be found here:https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/DoIt/DI.html

Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/editor.html

This paper reports on an the initial stages of compiling a comprehensive, historically deep "atlas" of the structures of interactive stories, with initial surveys in branching narrative genres including gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, and Twine games. In particular, it considers the "gap" between approaches to two highly related yet radically different archives of branching works: an archive of over 2500 interactive print gamebooks stretching from the 1920s to the present, and contemporary collections of the approximately 1500-2000 extant Twine games available in popular public repositories such as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and itch.io. What do we find when we consider these forms of electronic literature (and their crucial precurors) as one comprehensive atlas of a vast transmedia territory of interactive storytelling? Which methods may be adapted between print and digital works, and which demand new approaches?In summer 2017 the Transverse Reading Project began surveying an archive of over ~2500 interactive gamebooks in the Katz Collection at UC Santa Barbara -- and began building a collection of visualized interactive plot structures that shape a reader's choices. Mapping interactive stories is a tradition in gamebook culture, with examples of mapping by authors and readers dating back to at least the 1930s. Writers created hand-drawn maps as an aid to writing -- and then readers re-created their own maps as an aid to tracking the explored and unexplored options of interactive reading. In this project, data visualized "story maps" use similar network graphs that simultaneously reflect the branching plot structures of each gamebook or digital game, the way scenes are ordered in the pages of the codex, and the order of individual choices on each page. In addition, the patterns of an "interactive periodic table of elements" are extracted for each work.In print, data was collected by student researchers using a custom format for rapidly encoding gamebooks (~30 minutes on average), and data-mined / visualized using the open source and cross-platform software tool Edger -- which was custom written for this project. These techniques of data collection, visualization, and exploration will are of particular interest to scholars in related popular interactive genres such as visual novels, Twine games, or life sims. In the second case study, on Twine, automatic harvesting and mapping methods where used to extract network patterns from a large subset of publicly available Twine works -- with results bringing in to focus both the deep similarities and the surprising differences in interactive works from the 1930s to today.

(source: ELO 2018 website)

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

(Source: Routledge catalog copy)

1. Introduction: Perspectives on Interactive Digital Narrative Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen Section I: IDN History Section I Introduction: A Concise History of Interactive Digital NarrativeHartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen 2. The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It? Scott Rettberg 3. Interactive Cinema in the Digital Age Chris Hales 4. The Holodeck is all Around Us — Interface Dispositifs in Interactive Digital Storytelling Udi ben Arie and Noam Knoeller Section II: IDN Theory Section II Introduction: The Evolution of Interactive Digital Narrative Theory Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen 5. Narrative Structures in IDN Authoring and Analysis Gabriele Ferri 6. Towards a Specific Theory of Interactive Digital NarrativeHartmut Koenitz 7. Emotional and Strategic Conceptions of Space in Digital Narratives Marie-Laure Ryan 8. A Tale of Two Boyfriends: A Literary Abstraction Strategy for Creating Meaningful Character Variation Janet H. Murray 9. Re-considering the Role of AI in Interactive Digital Narrative Nicolas Szilas Section III: IDN Practice Section III Introduction: Beyond the Holodeck: A Speculative Perspective on Future Practices Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen 10. Interaction Design Principles as Narrative Techniques for Interactive Digital Storytelling Ulrike Spierling11. Post-Hyperfiction: Practices in Digital Textuality Scott Rettberg 12. Emergent Narrative: Past, Present and Future of an Interactive Storytelling Approach Sandy Louchart, John Truesdale, Neil Suttie and Ruth Aylett 13. Learning through Interactive Digital NarrativesAndreea Molnar and Patty Kostkova 14. Everting the Holodeck: Games and Storytelling in Physical Space Mads Haahr 15. Narrative Explorations in Videogame Poetry Diğdem Sezen16. Artistic Explorations: Mobile, Locative and Hybrid Narratives Martin Rieser 17. Remaking as Revision of Narrative Design in Digital Games Tonguç İbrahim Sezen