narrative experience

Skawennati and Jason Edward Lewis talk about their experience as co-directors of the Skins workshops in Indigenous Storytelling and Experimental New Media, through which Indigenous youth across Turtle Island have been taught how to make both video games and machinima. Skawennati explain how and why she adopted the internet as her homebase, touching upon early projects such as CyberPowWow and Imagining Indians in the 25th Century and showing excerpts from TimeTraveller™ and She Falls For Ages.

Integrating story with games in a flexible way that gives interactors meaningful choices within a narrative experience has long been a goal of both game developers and digital storytellers. The "micronarrative" is an unexplored avenue of narrative structure that can be a useful tool in analysis and design of such experiences. A micronarrative is a smaller moment of plot coherence and miniature arc that is nested within a larger narrative structure. The concept was first labeled by Jenkins in 2004 in the context of a game's "meaningful moments" and expanded upon in Bizzocchi's 2007 analytical framework for videogame storytelling. It has its roots in earlier examinations of arc and scale, such as Propp's concept of "Functions" or McKee's "Beats" in literature, as well as in Barthes’ classification of a “hierarchy of levels or strata” which incorporates “micro-sequences” as described in his structural analysis of narrative (1975).

Identification and analysis of the micronarrative allows us to examine how small events build in a fractal-like pattern to form larger nested narrative arcs. The presentation argues that micronarrative units exhibit a recognizable level of coherent yet flexible granularity that is at once modular, hierarchical, and cumulative. This presentation will address the application of micronarrative as an analytical tool to three works: the commercial console videogame Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Square Enix, 2011); the art game Samorost (Amanita Design, 2003); and the interactive drama, Façade (Mateas and Stern, 2006). The presentation examines the role of micronarratives in structuring flexible narrative arcs in three artifacts that incorporate differing modalities of interaction and story design. In conclusion, this project will show that micronarrative is an essential tool for understanding the poetics of a diverse and evolving medium.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

“Interactive narrative” is a loaded phrase that invokes different dreams for different populations of people. For new media theorists like Janet Murray (1) and Brenda (2) Laurel, it elicits visions of participatory stories enacted within immersive simulated “holodecks.” For theorists of hypertext and interactive fiction like Jay David Bolter (3) and Emily Short, (4) it suggests branching textual environments and rhizomatic tangles of linked lexia. For researchers in computer science and AI, it has manifested in simulations of believable human characters (5), and intelligent storytellers that direct the action in a simulated storyworld along desirable narrative paths (6). Within the digital games community, theorists like Henry Jenkins, (7) Celia Pearce, (8) and Jim Bizzocchi (9) suggest broad framings of narrative that allow it to infuse and enhance gameplay. Outside of academic research, interactive narrative conjures images of “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, role-playing games, and improvisational theater. For the purposes of this article we take a broad perspective on interactive narratives, which we view as stories that afford active participation on the part of the reader. We assert that a robust understanding of the experience of readers and players engaging in interactive stories is crucial to developing this new medium.

While much work has been done to explore the technological boundaries of computational narrative forms, (10) and extensive theory has been written about the poetics of interactive stories, (11) comparatively little research has been done on how readers approach narrative experiences, and how readerly expectations inform the interpretation and reception of an interactive narrative. (12) In this paper we describe an interactive narrative that we have designed that is experienced via a custom tangible embodied user interface called the Reading Glove. We present three important theoretical perspectives on how readers make sense of mediated experiences and apply them as analytical lenses for viewing the experiences of participants interacting with our system. (13) We have previously written about the design of the technology and the interactions in this system and about the authoring process of the narrative content, (14) and so in this paper we will be emphasizing the ways in which readers experienced the narrative elements of the system. Our analysis of the responses of readers using the system allows us to propose three design heuristics for future interactive storytelling systems.

Source: article's introduction