Interactive Digital Narrative

History, Theory and Practice

Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen, Tonguç İbrahim Sezen, Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen, Tonguç İbrahim Sezen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317668671
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Computer Science
• Categoría: Digital Media

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769189-1

Perspectives on Interactive Digital Narrative

Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen

1. An Opportunity and a Challenge: Vision and State of the Art of IDN

Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) connects artistic vision with technology. At its core is the age-old dream to make the fourth wall permeable; to enter the narrative, to participate and experience what will unfold. IDN promises to dissolve the division between active creator and passive audience and herald the advent of a new triadic relationship between creator, dynamic narrative artefact and audience-turned-participant. Within this broad vision of fully interactive narrative environments through the use of digital technologies, IDN aggregates different artistic and research directions from malleable, screen-based textual representations to the quest for virtual spaces in which human interactors experience coherent narratives side by side with authored narrative elements and synthetic characters.

The IDN vision is as much about narrative and control as it is about balance. Indeed, the quest for the right artistic measure, for equilibrium between agency and a coherent, satisfying experience, might be the ultimate challenge of the field. Yet, the artistic challenge does not exist in isolation and is joined by technological and analytical challenges. IDN is a truly interdisciplinary field, which includes scholars and practitioners with backgrounds in multiple disciplines: from literary studies to computer science and fine art. While guiding visions have been described, sometimes even heralded, in various forms for quite some time—for example, the image of Alice entering the rabbit hole or Borges' infinite labyrinth in the form of a novel—it is only with the advent of computer technology that its realisation seems possible, and constant developments in computer technologies seem to put them ever closer to our reach. Indeed, digital media has radically changed the way narrative content is being created, shared, experienced and interpreted.

In her seminal work Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Janet Murray notes that digital media is inherently procedural and participatory, referring to the capacity of computers to execute a series of commands and react to user input. While procedurality affords digital creators the expressive power to define initial conditions and rules under which an interactive work executes and reacts to input, IDN bestows cocreative power on its users through interaction and therefore reshapes the relation between creator, work and audience in a way that far surpasses aspects of interpretation and reader-response theory, but whose exact extent is a subject of scholarly debate. The complex relation between authorial control and the power of interactive agency is therefore an underlying topic in all three parts of this collection of essays, which focus on history, theory and practice.

While IDN has been an artistic practice and a topic of scholarly inquiry for more than two decades, it is still in its infancy compared to other narrative forms like the stage drama, the printed book or the moving image. As a technical and artistic challenge and opportunity, advances in the IDN field depend on the combined effects of developments in different parts within the greater field. However, progress in these different areas has historically been uneven. For example, graphical representation has seen rapid improvements from the humble beginnings as text on the screen to current cinematic-quality 3D depictions driven by simulations of highly realistic physics. Whilst the progress in graphics and physics is no less than astonishing, the same cannot be said for the larger challenge of creating specific narrative forms to produce compelling and captivating experiences: in this regard, the pace of development has been unsteady and slow. The virtual environments used for many contemporary interactive narratives are realistic, dynamic and feature high fidelity in terms of their visual presentation and physical mechanics. However, the narratives and characters they host remain shallow, static and lacking in believability, dramatic engagement and narrative development in comparison.

Indeed, while clearly eclipsed in visual presentation, the strong narrative of early titles like Zork (1982) holds up well even today. Maybe this fact should not surprise us, as resources for work on improving the graphical representation have been more readily available than for the more artistic problem of narrative development, spurred originally by the US Air Force's interest in convincing visuals for flight simulators (Myers, 1998). Research in IDN ideally combines technical development and advances in artistic expression, as well as the expansion of analytical perspectives; and historically, it has been difficult to find resources for such interdisciplinary projects. Funding, however, is only one aspect of the problem. Cinematic visualisation and real-world perceptions provide an ideal to aspire to for graphical representations. A comparable, shared goal on the side of narrative development and resulting form is elusive. Janet Murray's proposal of the ‘Holodeck’ (Murray 1997), an imaginary future form of entertainment first depicted in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation that immerses its audience in a dynamic, reactive narrative, has perhaps been rejected more often (Ryan, 2001; Aarseth, 2004; Spector, 2013) than it has been tacitly embraced (Mateas, 2001; Nitsche, 2008). Other visions, like constructive hypertext or interactive drama, share this fate. However, while the absence of a canonical set of narrative structures specific to IDN can be problematic, the lack of a unanimously shared vision also represents an opportunity because it provides space for experimentation and creative license to create new forms.

If the defining artistic moment of the book was the advent of the novel in the 17th century¹ and of film was the invention of montage (Eisenstein, 1949), a similar breakthrough is still elusive in IDN, and maybe there never will be a comparable moment in this field. Instead, we might see existing design modes (e.g., third-person versus first-person perspective, modes of audience participation and novel narrative structures) grow into mature artistic conventions applied in a conscious way by a new generation of authors. A possible defining milestone for IDN might even be the emergence of a consistent group of practitioners, IDN auteurs or cyberbards, to use Murray's term (1997), who feel more confident with the notion of relinquishing some of their authorial control to users, players and interactors, and see themselves not as the creators of singular visions, but as designers of expressive potential.

Analytical perspectives have developed considerably since the 1980s, when the first scholars with backgrounds in design and the humanities became interested in the topic. Where early treatments of the topic focused on the comparison to older narrative practices, later works have become increasingly more focused on specific aspects like space (Jenkins, 2004; Nitsche, 2008; Ryan, in this Volume), on the particular manifestations (Montfort, 2003), specific theoretical concepts (Koenitz, 2010) and the connections to larger frameworks (Ryan, 2006; Koenitz et al, 2013a) and most recently on particular theoretical aspects (Bruni and Baceviciute, 2013; Mason, 2013; Ferri, 2013). Amongst this much needed focus, scholars in this field are also engaged in a meta-reflection on the defining characteristics of IDN (Murray, 1997; Aarseth, 1997, 2012; Juul, 2011; Eskelinen, 2012; Mateas, 2001; Ryan 2001, 2006; Frasca, 2003b; Crawford, 2004; Koenitz et al., 2013b). A particular example of this discussion emerged in the early 2000s with the advent of computer game studies as a discipline. In that debate, narrative-oriented and game-oriented approaches were framed as a dichotomy, painting games through the simulative aspects as a “radically different alternative to narratives as a cognitive and communicative structure” (Aarseth 2001). A group of game studies scholars (Aarseth, 2001, 2004; Juul, 1999; Eskelinen, 2001; Frasca, 2003a), opposing narrative-centric views, adopted the name of ludologists; and thus the discussion is often referred to as the ‘narratology vs. ludology debate.’ The very first ludological perspectives not only opposed the use of narratological concepts to describe video games but, in their early forms, also described interactive narrative as practically impossible: “computer games [are] simply not a narrative medium” (Juul, 1999, p. 1). Jesper Juul's argument conflated two claims; notions derived from narratology—or related disciplines—are not effective to read games, and games cannot convey narratives. The first claim followed from the need to legitimise game studies as an independent academic discipline, thus defining it by contrast with others and establishing its own vocabulary. This was a move understood by Stuart Moulthrop (2003) as a necessary “defensive maneuver (sic),” however at the cost of an “alarmingly narrow” point of view, one that carries the danger of creating “conceptual blind spots” (Jenkins, 2004). As game studies became a recognised academic discipline in the following years, a gradual softening of perspectives finally allowed Janet Murray to pronounce the end of the debate (Murray, 2005). The second claim about the constitutive dichotomy between play and narration—although retracted by Juul himself (2001)—today remains influential, especially in the professional practice of game design where gameplay and narrative are often seen as opposing parameters. In this vein, game designer Ralph Coster, for example, defines narrative in contrast to gameplay: “The commonest use of a completely parallel medium that does not actually interact with the game system is narrative” (Koster, 2012). He categorises the narrative parts of a game experience as linear, noninteractive and in the sole function of rewarding players.

Even after years of research and discussion, the coupling of narration and interaction can still spark provocative debates that require our attention. Therefore, the practical and ontological analogies and differences between interactivity and narration warrant further academic inquiry. Likewise, the relationship between static and procedurally generated narratives calls for more attention. In this respect, a more holistic view of IDN, foregrounding how digital means enable interactive forms of narrative, could also contribute to the ludological discussion.

2. A Diverse and Vibrant Field

This volume covers a diverse and vibrant field that has continually grown since the late 1970s, from the first text-based Interactive Fiction to such forms as Hypertext Fiction, Interactive Cinema, Interactive Installations, Interactive Drama and Video Game Narrative.

The book is structured in three parts. The first part is historical and addresses how forms of IDN emerged over the years as distinct phenomena and how the transformations of digital media shaped the current forms. Scott Rettberg examines hypertext novels and poems, offering an historical perspective on their technical development and literary fruition, while Chris Hales describes the historical development of interactive cinema with a focus on the impact of digital technology on this form of IDN. Finally, Udi Ben-Arie and Noam Knoller offer a diachronic perspective on the user-facing aspects in IDN, foregrounding the aesthetic, experiential and hermeneutic dimensions.

The book's second part is theoretical. Theoretical enquiry into IDN started with adaptations of established narratological perspectives, for example neo-Aristotelian poetics (Laurel 1986, 1991; Mateas, 2001), post-classical narratology (Ryan, 1999, 2001), African oral traditions (Jennings, 1996;...