Authoring Digital Interactive Narratives

Abstract

The introduction of Storyspace, a hypertext authoring tool for digital and interactive fiction, at the first Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Hypertext conference in 1987, brought forward a set of digital and interactive storytelling opportunities that offered new and exciting narrative possibilities. There has been progressive development towards the implementation of new and interesting authoring tools offering different narrative components for the creation of digital and interactive stories. There is however, one particular concern mentioned by several scholars and experts in the field that prevents this new discipline from fully spreading its wings. The tools have a level of complexity in their use and process of writing which requires authors to conceptualise their story through a specific narrative pattern and attempt to create that using the constructs of the tool. This poses an ‘authoring problem’ specific to digital interactive narratives. This report presents an investigation of the authoring problem through the identification of an underlying authoring process and major issues that surround it. First presented, are autoethnographic story adaptations conducted to enable understanding on how digital interactive authoring tools affect storytelling, and how they influence the authoring process. Then, a systematic literature review on the work discovered so far on digital interactive authoring tools and the authoring process. Lastly, an analysis of interviews with digital interactive authors on their personal authoring experience and difficulties they encounter. The report concludes with a summary of the main findings which involve the identification of an authoring process model for digital interactive narratives, a list of authoring issues and a mapping of those issues onto the authoring process. A final discussion explains the importance of the authoring process in interactive narratives, how that process reflects the actions of authors and how the tools can be built to accommodate those actions by considering where in the authoring process many of the authoring issues can occur and how those can be remedied to alleviate the authoring problem.

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Identifiers

ORCID for David Millard: orcid.org/0000-0002-7512-2710

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