INDCOR White Paper 5: Addressing Societal Issues in Interactive Digital Narratives

This white paper introduces Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) as a powerful tool for tackling the complex challenges we face in today's society. In the scope of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation, a group of researchers dedicated to studying media, systematically selected six case studies of IDNs, including educational games, news media, and social media content, that confront and challenge the existing traditional media landscape. These case studies cover a wide range of important societal issues, such as racism, coloniality, feminist social movements, cultural heritage, war, and disinformation. By exploring this broad range of examples, we aim to demonstrate how IDN can effectively address social complexity in an interactive, participatory, and engaging manner. We encourage you to examine these case studies and discover for yourself how IDN can be used as a creative tool to address complex societal issues. This white paper might be inspiring for journalists, digital content creators, game designers, developers, educators using information and communication technologies in the classroom, or anyone interested in learning how to use IDN tools to tackle complex societal issues. In this sense, along with key scientific references, we offer key takeaways at the end of this paper that might be helpful for media practitioners at large, in two main ways: 1) Designing IDNs to address complex societal issues and 2) Using IDNs to engage audiences with complex societal issues

Playing Games with Tito:Designing Hybrid Museum Experiences for Critical Play

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges

Interview with Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library

This interview with Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library in the UK, focuses on illustrating the ways video game technologies have become inspirational for curatorial practice and public outreach activities that support new research on digital media. Wisdom discusses her role working with games and related games media and activities from the perspective of a cultural heritage organization working with the preservation and collection of complex digital artifacts. She identifies games as a significant kind of emerging format in which a traditional heritage organization, like the British Library, has become increasingly interested based on the complex cultures, stories and media that intersect with games and users. She shares her experience running games competitions and hosting activities for developers and players, including with children, demonstrating how games have become a key focal point for libraries, museums, and digital archiving practices helping to create new knowledge. Her close cooperation with video game developers (such as Inkle and Crytek) and with other creative industry partners illustrates the importance of understanding games as complex material and game social objects. The transhistorical connections among games and with other media forms, analog and digital, in the Library’s collections, provide inspiration for many interesting collaborative research projects. This work forms a foundation for others interested in researching, developing and preserving games as meaningful cultural artifacts for analysis.2302561

Trans-Missions and Resonant Encounters : composing the non-human body

In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka frames his discussion of ‘media as insect’ as a way to foreground media as more-than-technology and more-than-mediation. Insect media do not exist as a site between the natural world and the constructed, built, or human world. They do not negotiate duality. Instead such ill-conceived binary spaces converge in embodied forms of bestial, non-human, interconnectedness within living/lived spaces. Insect media do not interpret, describe, or represent realities for us (that is us humans). For Parikka, insect media are “a contraction of forces of the world, specific resonating milieus: internal milieus with their resonation, external milieus affording their rhythms as part of that resonation. ”What does it mean then to inhabit, discover, and become such an insect media body? How might such intensive states of being be revealed in the act of encountering, resonating with, and moving through embodied spaces? How might one be both inside and outside bodies, subject and other? In an age where transmission and infection bring fear of the ‘foreign body ’and its impacts, and where human bodies inscribe their devastating impact on the geological and atmospheric forces of the earth, what can we learn from becoming with such non-human, inhumane, bodies? What are their fluid, multimodal methods of cross-disciplinary trans-mission and how might we receive them? In our audio paper/audio walk, we explore what it is to inhabit these resonant spaces. Reflecting on theoretical models from posthuman, non-human, and more-than-human perspectives, we design a narrated audio experience that incorporates psychoacoustic phenomena such as auditory brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, and fragmentation/granulation of sound materials that de-centralize and deconstruct the sounding world. The boundaries between music, field recording, sound art and sound assembly are blurred and reinterpreted in the listening/explorative space. Spaces convolve, disperse and digitally re-order through patterns and rules evolving simultaneously through the sounding expanse, developed and mediated by the sounding, resonating space that emerges.CC BY-NC 4.0</p

Augmenting Affect : Interaction, Materiality and Mimetic Communication in Augmented Reality Books

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 "This volume collects documentation of the 2019 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) Art Exhibition and new scholarly texts from the artists involved." 12th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2019, Little Cottonwood Canyon, UT, USA, November 19–22, 2019</p

Playing at the Page : Designing to Support Creative Readership Practices

In this paper we look at examples of creative, emergent and performative practices in readership. Starting with the history of the book, and including a discussion of a range of reader practices we make connections with our own creative practice as designers of interactive mixed reality movable books today. A theoretical frame for characterizing the reader today as postdigital is presented to push back against commonly held beliefs about the act of reading as passive or somehow less creative or enacted compared with digital technologies. Finally, our own interactive movable book project Simmer is discussed as a means to bridge historical methods and materials with the digital, and a set of design strategies are provided in support of postdigital readership.CC BY 4.0Published: 2022-04-01</p

Making COVID dis-connections : designing intra-active and transdisciplinary sound-based narratives for phenomenal new material worlds

In this article, we reflect on the design and implementation of an interactive transhistorical and transmedial web-based digital narrative audio experience, PATTER(n)INGS: Apt 3B, 2020 that we developed in 2020. This work is an immersive audio-only application, and it focuses on the complex, material living conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing inspiration from PATTER(n)INGS and its complex, material audio and narrative design, we propose a model for creating the content and delivery for similar sound-based interactive digital narratives. Our proposed model focuses primarily on the creative process for designing such sound-based work. To construct our analytical model, the New Material/Spectral Morphology Design Model (or NM/SM Design Model), we draw on theoretical influences from critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism and non-human narrative that critique notions of stable subjectivity as sites for power and authority over semiotic meaning-making. We combine these views with foundational theoretical research in electroacoustic musical composition notation, and audio experimentation that complicate notions of sound, sound making, spatial perception, psychoacoustic phenomena, and listening practices. Together, this theoretical/compositional framework provides a unique method to consider how one can sustain and maximize sonic agents as core phenomena to create anti-cognitive worlds and stories.CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Received 19 Aug 2022, Accepted 30 Jan 2023, Published online: 14 Feb 2023Taylor &amp; Francis Group an Informa businessCONTACT Lissa Holloway-Attaway [email protected] Division of Game Development, University of Skövde, Skövde, 541 28, SwedenThe work presented in this text has been partially supported by the EU COST Action 18230—Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR) and the GAMEResearch Group at University of Skövde, Sweden.</p

Trans-Missions and Resonant Encounters : composing the non-human body

In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka frames his discussion of ‘media as insect’ as a way to foreground media as more-than-technology and more-than-mediation. Insect media do not exist as a site between the natural world and the constructed, built, or human world. They do not negotiate duality. Instead such ill-conceived binary spaces converge in embodied forms of bestial, non-human, interconnectedness within living/lived spaces. Insect media do not interpret, describe, or represent realities for us (that is us humans). For Parikka, insect media are “a contraction of forces of the world, specific resonating milieus: internal milieus with their resonation, external milieus affording their rhythms as part of that resonation. ”What does it mean then to inhabit, discover, and become such an insect media body? How might such intensive states of being be revealed in the act of encountering, resonating with, and moving through embodied spaces? How might one be both inside and outside bodies, subject and other? In an age where transmission and infection bring fear of the ‘foreign body ’and its impacts, and where human bodies inscribe their devastating impact on the geological and atmospheric forces of the earth, what can we learn from becoming with such non-human, inhumane, bodies? What are their fluid, multimodal methods of cross-disciplinary trans-mission and how might we receive them? In our audio paper/audio walk, we explore what it is to inhabit these resonant spaces. Reflecting on theoretical models from posthuman, non-human, and more-than-human perspectives, we design a narrated audio experience that incorporates psychoacoustic phenomena such as auditory brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, and fragmentation/granulation of sound materials that de-centralize and deconstruct the sounding world. The boundaries between music, field recording, sound art and sound assembly are blurred and reinterpreted in the listening/explorative space. Spaces convolve, disperse and digitally re-order through patterns and rules evolving simultaneously through the sounding expanse, developed and mediated by the sounding, resonating space that emerges.CC BY-NC 4.0</p

Troubling games : Materials, histories, and speculative future worlds for games pedagogy

Games are trouble. As faculty members in a Game Development program we are aware of the troubles. As inside–outsiders, given our status as queer women in the male-dominated Games field, both with interdisciplinary art-tech-humanities backgrounds as opposed to STEM, we are the ones commonly tasked with ‘fixing’ these troubles. This tasking comes to us in the form of both assumptions and requests about our providing particular types of education to others, both faculty and students, as fixes to Game-troubles: teaching the gender module; sitting on an LGBTQ+ committee; advising a particular student who is also outside the more comfortable purview of Games; and so forth. While our labor is often assumed, it is not fully valued, evidenced by the ways in which it is chronically under-resourced. And, given this lack of sustainability, our labor is not effective in the ways we intend. Often, our fixes only serve to a fix ourselves, further cementing us as outsiders. Our fixes are diluted until they become performative gestures, absolving others of the need to act, but changing little else. Acting ‘in a fix’ is something we no longer wish to do. Instead we untangle and re-tangle in a new way, drawing on the work of Feminist New Materialists (Ahmed, 2008; Alaimo, 2016; Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2011; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Coole and Frost, 2010; Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012; Grosz, 1994; Kirby, 1997) to develop imaginative new models for a more just and joyful future Games pedagogy. We share not only our research on this topic, but also invite you into our own intimate experiences of play-making, foregrounding this as knowledge-making too. We offer these crossings between text and context, history and future Ahmed, 2008, memory and fiction as a speculative fabulation for future Games pedagogies.CC BY 4.0First Published February 22, 2022Corresponding Author: Rebecca Rouse, Department of Game Development, University of Skövde, Kanikegränd 3A, Skövde 541 28, Sweden. Email: [email protected]</p