Tools make it possible authors make it real

Abstract

In the thirty or so years and counting that digital interactive narratives havebeen acknowledged, we have witnessed themthrough hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, artificial intelligence programsand further media such as TV, films, games and other experimental forms[1].What could only be possible if one possessed technical and programming skillsin the early 70s, research and passion for the art has made it possible during the 80s,and to this day,forthe general publicvia an abundance of authoring tools toengage with and assert their creativity on developing more stories.Part ofmak-ingthe disciplineprosper are the variety of digital interactiveauthoring tools research-ers and developers have been tirelessly developing. In fact as gathered byShibolet et al. [2]there havebeen over 300 toolsavailable with the passing of the years. Every year new tools are introduced each one promisingto solve issues previous tools were not able to do so or introduce a feature that previous tools were not able to accommodate.It is almost as if there is arace to buildthe better tool.Without ignoring the need for the tools and their significance in narrative creation,unfortunately we have reached an iterativepoint of re-inventing the wheelwithout improving or solving the issues that bearthe use of all these tools[3]. Developers whom include a great variety of research-ers have taken it upon them to build tools for this and that type of narrative and a lot of their valuable time and effort goes into building and testing a tool for what the tool can achieve instead of how the tool can be used to achieve that. This sometimes means that those involved in the development and testing of atool without feedback from people who will ultimately use it, assess itwith their own usability and narrative construction biased expectations [4].For example if one is aiming at building an ideallocative hy-pertext tool and the tool performs well in attaching locations to narrative content, the developer may be pleased, but how does the developer assure that the tool is adaptable to an author’s creative expectations and how does that tool reflect functionally the pro-cess the author is going to follow? It is understandable that a lot of developers want to build the ultimate tool for creating complex interactive stories for an audience, however a majority of them neglectto realize who they are building the tools for.

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