Authoring digital interactive narratives

Kitromili, Sofia

doi:10.1145/3522598.3522600

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 69 publications

(122 reference statements)

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“…This fits the problem of conceptual misalignment between the expectations of the author and the affordances of a tool [36,37], and suggests a general problem with embedding patterns in the interface [38] which gives certain structures a primacy that the author might not share.…”

Section: The Impact Of Patterns On the User Experiencementioning

confidence: 77%

Locative Authoring: Evaluating the StoryPlaces Authoring Tool

Kitromili

Hargood²,

Millard³

et al. 2022

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Locative Narrative is a form of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) where the readers' location and movement are the main form of interaction. The StoryPlaces platform provides a general toolset for the creation and delivery of these location aware stories. However, while there is existing research on the reader experience with this technology, comparatively little is known about the author experience. We recruited five interactive narrative design students to participate in a usability test of the StoryPlaces pattern-based authoring tool, using observations, interviews, and analysis of their stories to understand their experience. We show that while participants superficially liked the interface of the StoryPlaces authoring tool, they had difficulty understanding the aspects that were less clearly visualised and struggled to test their creations. The patterns enabled them to add complex functionality easily but became a barrier if they wanted to deviate from them. Our findings mostly support Green's five principles of IDN authoring (on the value of visual metaphors and fast track testing), but suggests they need refinement as in application it was important to distinguish between the visualisation of different aspects of the story (location vs. logical structures), and that failure to properly visualise sometimes led to avoidance or displacement of activity rather than a drop in its quality.

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Section: The Impact Of Patterns On the User Experiencementioning

confidence: 77%

Locative Authoring: Evaluating the StoryPlaces Authoring Tool

Kitromili

Hargood²,

Millard³

et al. 2022

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Self Cite

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“…Like many IDN tools, Genarrator is an authoring tool lacking any formal user experience (UX) evaluation [6][7][8][9]. There is a significant gap in our understanding of this, and we wanted to take a small step forward in conducting a small-scale evaluation using Genarrator, since it has been used in higher education and in community settings since 2010 and has produced around 1300 fully functioning IDNs.…”

Section: Figure 1 -Genarrator 'View All Narratives' Homepagementioning

confidence: 99%

The Genarrator Authoring Experience: A UX Evaluation Approach

Pope

2023

SIGWEB Newsl.

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The Genarrator platform provides a user-friendly online visual interface toolset for the creation and hosting of interactive hypertext multi-media stories. Offered as a free-to-use tool, it currently hosts more than 1300 working narratives. While there is existing research on the reader experience with this kind of technology and the narratives it offers, comparatively little is known about the author experience. To further explore the findings from an online survey involving 24 interactive narrative undergraduate and postgraduate students who had used Genarrator for an assignment, we decided to conduct a small usability test study with those students who previously provided feedback on the tool. We employed observations, interviews, and analysis of their story-creation process to understand their overall experience. We conclude that our user experience approach, albeit limited, allowed us to observe usefully how authors use Genarrator and recognise conceptual differences between how we as tool creators see the tool and how our participants as authors view it as users.

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