Hybrid books for interactive digital storytelling : connecting story entities and emotions to smart environments

Nowadays, many people use e-books, having high expectations regarding their reading experience. In the case of digital storytelling, enhanced e-books can connect story entities and emotions to real-world elements. In this paper, we present the novel concept of a Hybrid Book, a generic Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) artifact that requires seamless collaboration between content and smart devices. To that end, we extract data from a story and broadcast these data in RDF as Linked Data. Smart devices can then receive and process these data in order to execute corresponding actions. By following open standards, a Hybrid Book can also be seen as an interoperable and sustainable IDN artifact. Furthermore, according to our user-based evaluation, a Hybrid Book makes it possible to provide human sensible feedback while flipping pages, enabling a more enjoyable reading experience. Finally, the participants positive willingness to pay makes it possible to generate more revenue for publishers

Oliver\u27s Rumination: A Short Video Game About Failure

Studying and working in a creative field requires designers and artists to produce consistently high-level, novel work. In some cases, taking risks to pursue new concepts, methods, or products is highly valued. At the same time, not all companies, students, or individual artists have the resources to risk should their exploration fail. What remains is a crossroad: creative professionals and students are rewarded for taking risks, but are often unable to do so because the possibility of failure carries too much weight. Changing the way creators see failure could revolutionize the way they work. By accepting and incorporating failure into the beginning stages of a creative project, designers and artists can free themselves to think beyond the expected and create stronger work. They stand to lose less time, money, and quality than if that failure happens in the later design or production stages. For some designers, even this early failure is still daunting, because the way some creators view failure is purely negative. In order to avoid negative feedback and pain, failure is avoided altogether by pursuing weaker concepts, simpler methods of execution, or it can result in a project being abandoned altogether. What remains is a situation where many artists and designers would benefit greatly from a change in the way they view their own personal creative failures, in order to improve their working process and overall performance. Currently, the video game industry is expanding to include more experimental titles which allow for contemplative gameplay and emergent gameplay. These new games often tackle complicated themes, and can offer players a space in which to experience trauma, struggle, or moral dilemmas without real-world consequences. In doing so, these games introduce coping mechanisms to players in a low-stress way, and there is research which suggests this experience can translate to real-world skill development. This thesis project aims to combine visual design principles and simple gameplay into an interactive experience which provides players an environment to experience failure without real-world consequences. The goal of this experience is to provide a cathartic experience for the player, with the game acting as a reminder that failure and iteration are common, and that they can be used strategically for creating stronger end results

Interactive Digital Narrative: What’s the Story?

Hartmut Koenitz / Gabriele Ferri / Mads Haahr / Digdem Sezen / Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen (Eds.): Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge 2015 (= Routledge Studies in European Communication Research and Design 7). Pp. 286. GPB 90.00. ISBN 978-1-138-78239-

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

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

INDCOR white paper 1: A shared vocabulary for IDN (Interactive Digital Narratives)

COST Action 18230 INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations) is an interdisciplinary network of researchers and practitioners intended to further the use of interactive digital narratives (IDN1) to represent highly complex topics. IDN possess crucial advantages in this regard, but more knowledge is needed to realize these advantages in broad usage by media producers and the general public. The lack of a shared vocabulary is a crucial obstacle on the path to a generalized, accessible body of IDN knowledge. This white paper frames the situation from the perspective of INDCOR and describes the creation of an online encyclopedia as a means to overcome this issue. 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. Also, a sample entry provides guidance for authors

Interactive Digital Narratives. Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and Expression of Identity

INTERACTIVE DIGITAL NARRATIVES Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and Expression of Identit

Lecture Notes on Interactive Storytelling

These lecture notes collect the material used in the advanced course 'Interactive Storytelling' organized biannually at the Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Finland. Its aim is to present the key concepts behind interactive digital storytelling (IDS) as well as to review proposed and existing IDS systems. The course focuses on the four partakers of IDS: the platform, the designer, the interactor, and the storyworld. When constructing a platform, the problem is to select an appropriate approach from tightly controlled to emergent storytelling. On this platform, the designer is then responsible for creating the content (e.g., characters, props, scenes and events) for the storyworld, which is then experienced and influenced by the interactor. The structure and relationships between these partakers is explained from a theoretical perspective as well as using existing IDS systems as examples.</p

'Stitched up' in the 'Conversengine': using expressive processing and multimodal languages to create a character-driven interactive digital narrative

My practice-based research, which this thesis supports, explores the question: How can a convincing interactive character, with apparent psychological depth, be modelled in a playable digital narrative that adapts to reader choice? To this end I am building my own platform, the 'Conversengine', for authoring and, in future, publishing and playing text-driven interactive narratives that rely on enactment rather than narration. Currently, the platform consists of the 'Convowriter', the authoring tool, which I am using to develop 'Stitched Up', an interactive psychological thriller. Using the concept of the black box from second-order cybernetics with possible worlds and theory of mind from narratology, I show how combining these theories, mapping one onto another, provides a framework for not only thinking about the character-driven interactive narrative, but also a methodology for authoring one, in both natural language and computer code, and designing its richly responsive visual interface. This incorporates a unique emotional data visualisation system ('emoviz') to dynamically represent interactive fictional characters. This system is built upon the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance Emotional State Model (Russell and Mehrabian, 1977) and informed by existing psychological research into colour, shape and motion. I contend that abstract visualisations, coupled with the characters' text-based thoughts and/or speech, can eloquently express convincing mental and emotional behaviour. This provides the feedback in my cybernetic 'steering-a-course' game engine, which, whilst maintaining narrative coherence, allows the reader-player to steer their own course through the narrative. Creating an interactive narrative of this kind, which simulates psychological rather than physical action, requires a different approach to game writing, development and design. In part two of this thesis, I explore how the distinction between story and narrative discourse has practical implications for the creation of interactive digital narratives. I discuss how using existing game engines and tools can be limiting, and how this led to building my own interactive narrative engine with its own expressive domain-specific language. I show how the combined features of the 'Conversengine' offer a new way of representing complex interactive characters with psychological depth