Interactive Narrative Design beyond the Secret Art Status: A Method to Verify Design Conventions for Interactive Narrative

Abstract

In recent years, game narrative has emerged as an area for novel game concepts and as a strategy to distinguish a particular title. However, innovation in this area comes primarily from indie companies and individual efforts by noted designers. There is a lack of trained specialists ready to produce interactive narrative experiences. Many existing practitioners are self-trained and often rely on intuition in their design practice. A key element missing from the effort towards a more sustained development and improved professional training is a set of design conventions that fulfill a role comparable to cinematic conventions like continuity editing or montage. Therefore, our research focuses on identifying, verifying and collecting such design strategies. We describe an empirical method to verify candidate design conventions through the evaluation of user reaction to A/B prototypes, which improves upon the trial-and-error process of old.

What is the post-game depression? A narrative inquiry

“…As the results show video games are able to evoke such strong emotional states and, probably, adventure games and role-playing games might be especially suited for this type of emotional involvement (e.g., Arbeau et al, 2020;Butt & Dunne, 2019;Dechering & Bakkes, 2018;Koenitz et al, 2018; see S. L. Bowman & Lieberoth, 2018). For some players, sadness evoked by the game is experienced as a reward, an appreciation of a thought-provoking experience (Bopp et al, 2016).…”

Editorial: Interactive digital narratives representing complexity

“…Given the status of IND research as an interdisciplinary field of study, the questions of adequate frameworks (Koenitz and Eladhari, 2019;Koenitz, 2021), design conventions (Murray, 2011;Koenitz et al, 2018a), transhistorical approaches (Rouse and Holloway-Attaway, 2020;Holloway-Attaway and Rouse, 2022) and evaluation (Roth, 2016;Steinemann et al, 2017) are ongoing concerns. Lately, the question of ethics in the creation process (Fisher and Schoemann, 2018;Barbara et al, 2021) and of decolonialization of underlying narrative structures and other assumptions (Koenitz et al, 2018b;Silva et al, 2022) have found increased attention in part inspired by similar developments in game studies (Mukherjee, 2018;de Paula, 2021;Trammell, 2022).…”