The Expressive Space of IDS-as-Art

Authoring digital interactive narratives

“…When the digital medium arrived, it offered portability, a different form of navigation and freedom of writing against the print medium. Now the more recent digital interactive medium offers complexity in the exposition of the narrative, choices in the narrative traversal, kaleidoscopic views of the narrative structures not limited to sketching on a piece of paper, alternative plots through various interactive means, and the control to create a form of narrative which previous mediums were not able to do so (Bolter and Joyce, 1987;Knoller, 2012;Murray, 2018).…”

Educating Interactive Narrative Designers: Cornerstones of a Program

“…The skillset that interactive narrative designers need to master, is derived from these three essential components. First, we consider them to be artists (Knoller 2012), working with interactive technologies as their medium of (self-) expression. The skills pertaining to this narrative sensibility are, amongst others, the ability to imagine and express engaging and believable characters, worlds, events and conflicts.…”

A Framework for Classifying and Describing Authoring Tools for Interactive Digital Narrative

“…We further developed a system of 38 descriptors for the analysis and comparison of authoring tools, which attempts to describe which place a particular tool occupies on the widest definition available of the IDN expressive space. The underlying theoretical insights were gleaned primarily from two complementary theoretical models that strive to comprehensively describe the space of IDN/IDS: Koenitz's SPP model [11], which regards IDN as a system, and Knoller's userly text model [25][26][27], which regards IDS as interactive experience (see also a proposed synthesis of these two models in [4]). These insights were then crystallised into a list of descriptors describing what qualities of authoring tools are most pertinent and may be deducible via direct examination of tools themselves: their interface, design process, usage, etc.…”

“…Because our current list of descriptors traces the existing field of authoring tools, it isn't future proof, as it does not address what may be significant for the design of future authoring tools. We are particularly curious about tools that would model and connect the design of interfaces [50,51,54], interaction models and user experience [25,52] with narrative designparticularly through embodied\gestural interfaces [26,53]. These are accounted for in our models, as well as in IDN artefacts, but are at best implicit in IDN-specific authoring tools.…”