Keywords

1 Introduction

When it comes to interactive digital narrative design, there is both a lack of formal training and formal knowledge. Yet, at the same time, the job title of “narrative designer” exists in many places, and many critically and commercially successful interactive digital narratives (IDN) have been realized during the past three decades, as narrative games (e.g. Adventure [1], King’s Quest [2], Monkey Island [3], The Last Express [4], Dear Esther [5], Heavy Rain [6], The Walking Dead [7], Firewatch [8] and Oxenfree [9]) and other manifestations, including interactive documentaries (e.g. Fort McMoney [10], Last Highjack Interactive [11]), installation pieces (e.g. Text Rain [12] and others [13]), journalistic ‘interactives’ (e.g. [14, 15]), VR and AR works [16,17,18], and Electronic Literature pieces [19].

This discrepancy – between a considerable body of work and the lack of formal resources stems from the fact that interactive narrative design knowledge is mostly private, earned “the hard way” through trial, error, and intuition. The problem with this state of affairs is that design knowledge can be shared only with great difficulty, due to its use of private – and therefore usually inaccessible – vocabulary.

In this paper, we detail the implementation of our multipronged approach [20] to address these issues. Individual measures are:

  • an empirically-based method to identify and verify design conventions [21,22,23]

  • the development of a formal vocabulary (an ontology), which we hope to establish as widely-used ‘lingua franca’ for designers and researchers [33]

  • an online platform for the collection of convention candidates, which opens our effort to a wider community of practitioners and researchers

  • the organization of local events to raise awareness of interactive narrative design amongst practitioners and industry.

2 Verifying Interactive Narrative Design Conventions

2.1 Defining Design Conventions

We have previously described Design Conventions [23]. Essentially, we differentiate two levels: abstract ‘design concepts’ and concrete design methods – the latter we understand as ‘design conventions’ which we have defined as “concrete design methods to create conventional comprehension and effects in interactors.” [21,22,23] Design concepts are higher-level categories that describe and overarching function, e.g. “scripting the interactor” (StI) [24] or “delayed consequences” [25].

We also position Design Conventions and Concepts vs. “Design patterns” [26], a concept originating in architecture, that has been applied to describe games design [27, 28]. The issue with patterns is the varying levels of abstraction, which makes comparisons difficult and also means that one collection cannot be used to extend another one [27].

2.2 Verification

To verify a design convention candidate, we use a combined qualitative and quantitative approach, specifically an extended version of Roth’s measurement toolbox [28]. Concretely, this means the creation of two nearly identical IDNs that differ only in the use of the convention candidate. The effect of these two different variants on the user experience (A/B testing) are then compared in a post-test-only randomized experimental setup. In the case of a significant positive impact in line with the intention of the convention candidate and a sufficient effect size, the convention is verified for the given context [21,22,23]. The database also collects replication studies with different artefacts, using the same design conventions, and similar or different samples to further prove validity.

3 A Specific Ontology for IDN Conventions

Previous work was undertaken on ontologies for videogames [29,30,31] and similar typologies [32]. These efforts were focused on creating general formal descriptions. In contrast, our effort is more focused and dedicated solely on a vocabulary to describe interactive narrative design. In the following section we briefly present a first public version (1.0) (c.f. [33]).

 

Top-level category

Second-level category/description

1

Proposers

Names of submitters

2

Convention name

Design convention (DC, verified) or candidate (DCC, unverified)

3

Design concept

Conjunction with an overarching category

4

Primary function

Purpose of a convention

5

General description

Further explanation

6

Examples

Artefacts implementing the proposed DC(C)

7

Design intention

high-level design perspective regarding guidance, goal setting, challenge, reward, distraction

8

Intended effects

Concrete effects on user interaction and user experience in the categories of agency, immersion and transformation [21, 24]

9

Production impact

Costs (work hours) and professional requirements (e.g. writing skills, modelling/animation skills, programming skills)

10

Manifestation

Sense level (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile …); implementations (text, graphics, tangible user interface elements), relationships (mechanics, rules).

11

Application

Form (narrative games, interactive novels, interactive documentaries, interactive installation, …), genre (action, thriller, comedy, …), visual representation (2D, 3D, 2.5D, independent), physical representation (screen-based, installation, mobile, VR, AR, MR, …), platform (console, PC, smartphone, tablet, platform independent, …), user input type (keyboard, mouse, touch screen, standard gamepad, motion controller, …)

12

Interdependence

Conjunction with other design approaches

13

Cultural dependence

DC(C) requires a specific societal or historical context

14

Research status

References to existing studies that empirically tested/verified DCs

Examples entries can be found here: http://interactivenarrativedesign.org/DC/.

4 Online Platform

In order to enable participation from the community we have created an online platform at http://interactivenarrativedesign.org/DC/ including an online form to submit design convention candidates. As stated earlier [33], we connect a number of goals with this endeavor, in particular, the growth of design knowledge through collaboration between diverse researchers and also practitioners. Therefore, we position the Design Convention database as:

(a) a tool that allows researchers and practitioners to enter design conventions candidates (names of contributors will be clearly visible and we will moderate the entries to assure quality)

(b) an open basis for research that enables researchers to test and verify design convention candidates (and take credit for their work)

(c) a means to improve the ontology through scholarly and practitioner’s feedback

(d) a growing resource for interactive narrative designers to look up verified design conventions.

In our view this approach creates all-around benefits for the community: contributions are clearly listed, topics that need more research are easily identified and can be picked up by researchers worldwide, including replication studies.

5 Local Events

Research is in danger to be disconnected from the practice. In order to engage with the practitioners and other interested parties, we plan a series of events. A local conference will serve as a kick-off meeting to discuss early results, industry perspectives and question of collaboration. Then, ongoing meetups will build a community to foster mutual understanding and collaboration, for example on design conventions, but also on the development of programs for formal education.

6 Concluding Remarks

This work documents our ongoing, multipronged research and community-focused effort in creating and sharing interactive narrative design knowledge. This includes the collection of empirically verified design knowledge, a related ontology with the goal of providing a ‘lingua franca’ for the dialogue between research, education and application, a public online platform in order to enable collaboration and a series of ongoing events to engage a wider community of scholars and practitioners in an effort to move the community forward.