Scenarios are an effective tool for materializing user goals and discovering system requirements. However, system use scenarios are essentially limited to only exemplified views of real-world system use, and requirements identified through the abstraction of the scenarios often shed off necessary situational and contextual details of a user’s purposeful interaction with a system. This paper explores an alternative scenario authoring method to capture discursive system use for more prosperous requirement identification. Adopting an ecological psychology perspective, we approach system use cases as an episodic narrative system. We derive five constituents of the narrative system: system genotype, user effectivity, task closure, affordance, and situational constraint, and describe focal relations between these constituents as a generative mechanism. The episodic narrative system will advance existing requirement identification methods by including situational and contextual factors and users’ confrontations with them
