Interactive Storytelling

Interpretation of narrative can itself be considered a form of play that is psychologically engaging and effortful. Previous work has provided initial considerations of the cognitive psychology of narrative interpretation, particularly of how players derive pleasure from understanding story. This paper elaborates on the specific processes involved in the comprehension of narrative, providing a review of discourse comprehension theories that culminates in a synthesised summary model of inference and situation model construction. The applicability of this psychological model to players of digital games is considered through comparison to participant descriptions of playing Gone Home. Prevalent themes reflect the relevance-determination of inference and demonstrate the activation of long-term memory in recall of expectations from personal experiences, games, and other media. This is briefly considered in application to storytelling in games and IDN. Future work in this area will focus on the operationalisation of this psychological understanding in practice in game design and storytelling.

In this paper, we discuss how theories can fail us in analysis and design of interactive digital narrative (IDN) works. We demonstrate a range of theoretical failures using the milestone IDN work Façade. To this end, we demonstrate the effect of different theoretical lenses, treating Façade as an interactive drama, as a game, as a work of hypertext fiction, and as general IDN work. We identify different types of theory failures with regards to analysis, creation and audience reception: miscatogorization, blind transfer, bogus theory, semantic creep, analytical blur, out of date, lack of problematization, fallacy of universality, analysis-productive mistakes, inappropriate conventions, out of context, over-pragmatization, and setting the wrong expectations for audiences. Finally we propose a way to prevent theoretical failures and call for more work in this respective area.

This paper presents a model for comparing narratives in digital and non-digital escape games. The live-action escape room is a massive industry, but theoretical academic research on the games is lacking. Other forms of the escape game, including point-and-click games and portable escape boxes, are generally understudied. The cross-media genre of escape games has two parallel stories: the backstory embedded in the game’s setting, and the player narrative that unfolds during play. These stories can be individually refined to different levels, creating four categories of escape games: puzzle games, thematic games, narrative games, and the newly identified setting-agnostic games. The model demonstrates how existing interactive narrative models can be expanded to include non-digital games, revealing commonalities and differences between escape game formats and illuminating future directions for escape game narratives. This work lays the foundation for future research investigating the relationships between narrative and space in various game formats. Finally, the narrative model has additional applications outside of the escape game genre. It can be used to analyze any interactive narrative’s relationship with its fictional space, as well as the relationships between fictional and non-fictional space more broadly.

Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) literacy and authoring skills are being gained too late along a typical student’s educational journey and only by a niche subset of learners while such skills are crucial to consume modern day media communications reporting on complex phenomena from multiple perspectives. This paper acknowledges the impact of technology on teaching and learning methods as well as the current status of digital media in education and uses them to explain how IDN can be used to teach K-12 subjects with the aim of helping students attain IDN literacy skills. It also suggests ways to expand IDN literacy by adding authoring skills. The paper connects these overarching goals with current initiatives in establishing IDN literacy and authoring skills in the K-12 curriculum and presents short-, medium- and long-term objectives towards the above two aims.

This paper explores the application of chat-based Generative AI (GenAI) in the Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) authoring process, advocating for a human-centered approach rooted in a Digital Humanist perspective. It scrutinizes GenAI’s capacity to augment human narrative creation and unveils the complexities inherent in its integration into IDN authoring. The potential risks tied to GenAI’s incorporation, including data exploitation, displacement of human labor, and the potential diminishment of human agency and creativity, are thoroughly examined. Offering a precautionary viewpoint, this work outlines Digital Humanist principles to guide GenAI’s use in authoring, which includes elevating organic creativity and human agency. Further, emphasizing the need for transparency and accountability, the author underscores the importance of maintaining a harmonious, human-led creation process to serve the social good. The aim is to center the human elements of authoring while ethically leveraging GenAI’s capabilities, paving the way for a future where IDNs embody collective human values and uphold creative integrity.

Women have found in communities a safe space to learn and develop skills in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). These groups bring together specific operational and communicational characteristics related to feminist, design and interaction aspects. They share common goals of inclusion, empowerment and education. They are formed by leaders and founders, work team and target audience. One of the strategies for increasing members is the use of narratives by female role models in technology, successful people such as researchers, entrepreneurs or occupants of jobs in technology companies in face-to-face and online events. Testimonials are also present on the digital platforms used by these collectives.This work aims to present results obtained in a focus group carried out with people impacted by the female community in IT (Information Technology), São Paulo WiMLDS. It was verified that the use of narratives and storytelling strategies in digital environments can become an important catalyst for the achievements of these collectives. This case study, inserted in a context of digital ethnography in online platforms and interviews carried out in this community for two years, in addition to two other case studies (Minas Programam and Geek Girls Portugal), integrates a broad empirical work of an ongoing doctoral research which involved more than 100 female IT communities in Brazil and Portugal. This work will present preliminary results of the potential of digital storytelling in initiatives already formed in the communication and interaction of these groups.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest among researchers in the field of virtual reality (VR) storytelling. There is a lack of studies on using VR storytelling to prime culture-related content. The cultural aspects, particularly the tendency to avoid uncertainty, have yet to be thoroughly examined within VR. Therefore, we developed VR storytelling intending to prime individuals’ uncertainty avoidance values. An experiment was conducted to assess the efficacy of VR storytelling in priming individuals’ uncertainty avoidance values. The participants’ encounter with VR storytelling was assessed through various parameters, including but not limited to their experience of presence and engagement in the virtual environment. The study provides evidence that VR storytelling has the capacity to influence individuals’ cultural values, particularly their inclination to uncertainty avoidance. Furthermore, the feedback provided by the participants revealed that they had positive emotions, a feeling of being present, engagement, and immersion while engaging with such VR storytelling.

As the concept of the Metaverse becomes a reality, storytelling tools sharpen their teeth to include Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality as prominent enabling features. While digitally savvy and privileged populations are well-positioned to use technology, marginalized groups risk being left behind and excluded from societal progress, deepening the digital divide. In this paper, we describe MEMEX, an interactive digital storytelling tool where Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality play enabling roles in support of the cultural integration of communities at risk of exclusion. The tool was developed in the context of 3 years EU-funded project, and in this paper, we focus on describing its final working prototype with its pilot study.

This paper presents a pedagogical activity with 120 students from two higher education institutions, one in the Global South and the other in the Global North. The objective was to incorporate decolonial thinking into analysing IDN artifacts through cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration. To achieve this, students were randomly divided into 20 groups comprising individuals from both countries and were assigned to work together across different time zones and geography. Students were prepared with an introduction to decolonial thinking and interactive digital narratives (IDNs). For the cross-cultural analysis, students used a methodology that merges the SPP model, the transformation aspect of IDN user experience, and the decoding position to reflect on how the artifacts perpetuate coloniality. Our results indicate that cross-cultural dialogue enabled students to counter colonial norms of universalism and Eurocentrism in IDNs through collaboration and interaction across the globe.

This paper delves into the pressing issue of hate speech (HS) by examining the potential of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) to develop Interactive Digital Counter-Narratives (IDCN), highlighting the limited research in this area. Drawing inspiration from two cases studies and other examples from the literature, the article explores the unique ways digital media have been used to address HS through counter-narratives. By incorporating principles of decolonial thinking and Critical Race Theory, IDCNs can leverage emerging formats like video games and VR/AR/XR to counter hate speech effectively. Pointing out the inadequacy of hate-speech laws in combating covert hate speech, the paper argues that interactive counter-narratives offer a powerful means to challenge this complex societal phenomenon. According to several studies on HS, counter-narratives may preserve freedom of speech, debunk stereotypes, encourage mutual understanding, and facilitate dialogue to de-escalate conversations.

This paper gives an overview of the research project VR for Diversity that focused on the impact of interaction in VR on the user. For this purpose, a distinction is made between physical interaction, that can be achieved by using controllers, and para-social interaction, that refers to interacting with characters that inhabit the virtual world. In line with the perceived affordance of VR to serve as a perspective shifter, the topic of diversity was chosen as the theme for the narratives that were to be created for this the research project. The paper describes a number of different projects that all evolved around this theme and concludes by presenting insights on the impact of interactive VR.

Emergent Narrative (EN) affords extensive agency to participants but conflicts with the desire to guarantee compelling narrative. Recent work presents story sifting, an approach that curates simulation output, believing that intervention compromises the aesthetics of EN. However, this type of retrospective story sifting cannot improve narrative in participatory storyworlds, where the story emerges through play. We propose a new form of prospective story sifting intervention, that uses an incremental story sifter to identify possible stories during play, and passes these to a drama manager that intervenes in the simulation to make those stories more likely to complete. Our approach is incorporated into Awash, a pirate-themed EN game, and through qualitative analysis we find that the intervention increases narrative completeness and does not appear to compromise key EN aesthetics. Our work thus demonstrates a new technique that mixes generative and emergent approaches, and shows that intervention can be compatible with the aesthetics of emergent narrative.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently revolutionized performance on a variety of natural language generation tasks, but have yet to be studied in terms of their potential for generating reasonable character choices as well as subsequent decisions and consequences given a narrative context. We use recent (not yet available for LLM training) film plot excerpts as an example initial narrative context and explore how different prompt formats might affect narrative choice generation by open-source LLMs. The results provide a first step toward understanding effective prompt engineering for future human-AI collaborative development of interactive narratives.

In this work we present the Narralive Unity Tool, a tool for the Unity Engine that supports the development of branching narrative experiences with multiple endings through a node-based graph and a set of automation features. The tool was designed with the objective to bridge the gap between intuitive branching narrative design and multimedia rich interactive visual novel development, allowing the developer to import in Unity story graphs created with interactive narrative authoring tools that are addressed to authors with no technical expertise. We briefly present the motivation for the implementation of this tool, describe its features and the outcomes of its evaluation, concluding with a discussion about its use and future directions for further development.

Shifting from narrating in everyday life and culture to designing an IDN is a major challenge. It requires rethinking the goals and elements of narrating, with a focus on the player’s perspective. Yet, we know little about student designers’ IDN composing processes, such as how they use digital techniques (like branching) and develop narrative qualities, like character, to create multiple story trajectories for player engagement. Novices’ uptake of devices and narrative elements, such as character and choice poetics, is a process that can inform IDN theory and practice about the shift to this new genre. This paper presents a secondary analysis of interactive digital narrative (IDN) designs and player reflections created during a 2.5-h online workshop. Detailed analyses of narrative elements and digital devices in hundreds of design and reflection sequences trace uses and developments of novice authoring strategies. Four strands of analysis (narrative elements, choice poetics, player reflection, and Twine tree structure) offer a complementary picture of the IDN design learning process. Findings of our analysis show that, over time, student designers developed characters with increasing literary quality and with sophisticated choice options (socio-emotional and moral dilemmas) as pivots for narrative trajectories. Different character and choice development patterns related to player feedback suggest the importance of integrating these multiple dimensions into IDN research and pedagogy. Discussion highlights how the analysis captures the complexity of the IDN genre, provides a foundation for ongoing research into IDN designing as a developmental process, and offers a foundation for IDN pedagogy.

Narrative puzzles feature prominently in story-based open world video games where they form part of the progression of a narrative and require exploration and logical and creative thinking to solve. Open world games use navigation aids to help players solve narrative puzzles located across the vast worlds they provide. Narrative puzzles offer designers one of the most interactive methods of conveying a game’s narrative, particularly in the action-adventure focused genre of open-world games. In this paper we discuss the interaction between narrative puzzles and navigation aids in open world games, highlighting in case studies of three different games how the amount of information a navigation aid provides impacts the intricacy and expansiveness of puzzles. Finally, we discuss the design implications of these interactions and suggest potential future analytical uses of the discussed framework.

Cosmic horror, or Lovecraftian horror, is an important subgenre in horror fiction, which is concerned with the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible. In cosmic horror, the thin veil of human sense-making through which we ordinarily perceive the world is inevitably destroyed through a confrontation with a deep and terrible truth about the universe. For the story protagonists, the encounter with the true nature of things practically always results in madness or death, or at least denial of the events that took place. While cosmic horror originates in literature, significant works exist also in films, graphic novels and games. However, while many games include elements from cosmic horror, the themes and genre conventions of cosmic horror mean that it is far from trivial for games to engage genuinely with the genre. This paper explores the potential for games to capture the feelings of experience of a Lovecraft story authentically via their mechanics and design. We give an overview of the genre conventions of literary cosmic horror and identify six narrative design “challenges” where the genre conventions of narrative-driven games appear to be directly incompatible with those of literary cosmic horror. For each challenge, we discuss the depth and nature of the seemingly irreconcilable differences and use examples from narrative horror games (Lovecraftian and otherwise) to identify potential solutions. Can games and cosmic horror really be mixed? And, if so, how?

In this paper, we reflect on the design of an interactive audio-based digital narrative experience called Sisters. This work is designed for a single interactor, constructed as a mobile AR experience using graphic illustrations on a deck of player cards in connection with abstract audio activated by trigger images on the cards. An interactor is asked to cluster series of cards together into different abstract environments, based on sounds associated with each card, meant to represent spaces in an interior/exterior domestic site, a house and its immediate surroundings. The work conveys experiences of 4 family members in a complex abusive household, mediating between scenes of normalcy, love, companionship, and violence. The core focus of the work is to explore fragmented and very personal states of being and memories derived from an outsider’s perspective (the interactor), who co-experiences the complexities of the domestic spaces at a ‘safe’ distance, while also gaining empathy and affective connections to the characters. Connecting the content of the work and its fragmentary and elusive material audio and narrative design to our design model, the New Material/Spectral Morphology Model, we share how it may be used for aesthetic composition. Our model is based on feminist new material perspectives and foundational work from electroacoustic production and audio experimentation. Sisters extends our previous work with sound-based narrative, and we demonstrate how this work affirms our design strategies for novel interactive audio experiences.

This paper explores the transformation of traditional written fiction into an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience. By combining VR technology with specific design methods, the paper proposes creating an adaptable environment that prioritises the text over other perceptible stimuli. The paper introduces Bookwander, an experimental VR reading experience which incorporates four unique design approaches, namely, The Power of Text, Selective Imagery, Scenic Reading, and Playful Reading. Each approach contributes to immersion, interpretation, visualisation, and interaction in distinct ways. The preliminary results from a qualitative pilot study indicate that providing spatial-based content in a reactive environment to the text strikes a suitable balance between traditional reading and a VR experience. Participants felt immersed without compromising the reading experience, and the various visual representations did not hinder interpretation or imagination. The paper concludes with recommendations for further developments in immersive reading and future research directions in this field.

This article briefs a PhD project in creative arts in which the practices were shaped by research on Gilles Deleuze articulation of cinematic narrative in the books Cinema1: movement-image (1986) and Cinema2: time-image (1989). The project intends to develop a narrative structure for interactive storytelling that is specific to the properties of Virtual Reality (VR) as a cinematic medium. The research focuses on developing a method for designing and integrating pre-recorded content into an interactive VR application. The outcome is an open-world Cinematic VR in which individuals can influence the VR system by wandering freely within the immersive setting of the movie.Three different research projects are conducted to investigate the conventions for interactive storytelling that are compatible with the means of communication provided by VR technologies. The results utilise the principles of constructing a story-world and generating cinematic narratives through reciprocal acts of a “wanderer audience”, a term used originally in this project, in exploring an original narrative structure, “story-without-end”. The project also concludes to a design of interactive cinematic VR, Déjà vu that examine the feasibility of constructing a virtual story-world without any specific ending.This article describes a standpoint over the terms of cinematic narrative and replicates Deleuzian ontology on relationship of time and space in an immersive cinematic experience to determine conventions for open-world cinematic VR. The project states perception condition for a “wanderer audience”, and the principle of designing tools for a “virtual body”, the avatar, who explore an “open story-world” and generate a “virtual duration” as the cinematic time that confirm a comprehensive story experience.

The Transformation Maps, developed and maintained by the World Economic Forum's Strategic Intelligence Platform, serve as a systems thinking tool aimed at visualizing and analyzing complex global challenges and interconnected factors. While the tool’s information curation is impressive, there is still potential to further enhance the tool’s effectiveness in facilitating a deeper comprehension of complex systems. To explore the potential of interactive narrative design applied to the maps, we conducted a workshop with the Forum and the INDCOR COST Action group [1]. This paper gives an overview of the workshop methods and outcomes. We propose the integration of narrative into the Transformation Maps on the SI platform to improve agency, immersion and transformation, Janet Murray’s three pillars of experiential aesthetic qualities [2]. This is particularly relevant when considering improvements in UX/UI, content, and complexity comprehension within the Transformation Maps tool. By focusing on these areas, IDN design can foster meaningful and immersive experiences that catalyze transformative understandings of complex systems, helping individuals transcend existing knowledge boundaries. We provide concrete examples about how IDN design can improve understanding, specifically through the integration of personas for multipersperspictivity and personalization. Also, the insights and recommendations derived from this workshop emphasize the power of collaborative efforts among stakeholders, in this case industry and academic professionals, in continuously advancing knowledge and fostering meaningful product reflection and growth.

The 1980s saw full-motion video (FMV) titles inaugurate design patterns for a new genre of interactive digital narrative (IDN). Recently, this genre made a resurgence in popularity. Despite the intervening years, FMV’s design conventions remain tightly coupled to the affordances of laserdisc technology thanks to streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube. This paper: (1) employs IDN affordances and aesthetics as a lens to examine modern FMV games, namely the recent works of Wales Interactive; (2) offers a distinction between two story structures commonly employed in FMV design, i.e. event-driven and branching narratives; and (3) leverages research on the emerging conventions of Timeline–an authoring platform for tightly parallel, parameterized stories–to address the challenges of FMV design.

This research involves the development of a cinematic VR experience that exhibits narrative engagement and the investigation of possible measurement tools to evaluate that engagement. This is accomplished by the implementation and analysis of standardized self-reporting measures and observational data. The efficacy of these measurement tools is discussed as well as their possible modifications and limitations for storytelling in VR.

A distinctive aspect of interactive stories is how they enable players to impact the story based on their choices, with repeated playthroughs potentially yielding different stories. While some work has been done to investigate repeat experiences of interactive stories, the focus has mainly been on simpler linear and branching narrative systems. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) systems such as ChatGPT have sparked renewed interest in how users engage with artificial intelligence systems, and how LLM systems could be used in works of entertainment such as games and interactive stories. In this paper, we detail the findings of a qualitative observational study of 10 participants playing and replaying the interactive text adventure game AI Dungeon which is based upon the natural-language-generating LLMs GPT-3 and GPT-J. The study provides insights into how the player’s mental model of the system shifts from assuming the system is a linear or branching narrative to one with seemingly limitless narrative possibilities. This study also uncovers three related sources of motivations for repeat engagement with an LLM-based interactive story, which are impacted by the player’s shifting mental model of the system: narrative closure, narrative incoherence, and expectations for variation between playthroughs. Finally, this study highlights how uncertainty in terms of both how the system works and what objectives the player has could impact the player’s choice of actions when engaging with an LLM-based interactive story such as AI Dungeon.

This paper introduces Hootopia, a tangible interactive board game, aimed at exploring the potential effectiveness of interactive digital storytelling in enhancing children’s comprehension of biodiversity and species protection. The game objective is to cultivate a profound connection between players and the imperative of safeguarding animal habitats, aiming for a deeper, experiential understanding rather than the dissemination of specific academic content. In the game, players assume the dual roles of environmental transformers and animal protectors and have a unique opportunity to experience various interests and conflicts among different factions. By immersing players in an enjoyable and engaging narrative, the game seeks to enrich biodiversity education. The study investigates the integration of board game narratives and education, the feasibility of merging gaming and tangible interactive storytelling, and the impact of Hootopia on children’s engagement, interest, learning outcomes, and attitudes toward biodiversity and species protection.

This paper investigates the effects of volumetrically filmed 3D characters on the audience’s sense of their presence in immersive interactive augmented reality (AR) narratives. After developing an interactive story with live actors and integrating the volumetrically filmed result into a HoloLens 2 application, we hypothesized that the perceived presence of these virtual characters in real space should be higher than 2D video holograms. In an AB/BA crossover design with 10 participants in each group, we compared the presence effects of the two alternatives in the designed AR play. We used the validated TPI questionnaire, observations, and post-experience interviews. Results show a rejection of the hypothesis that volumetric characters lead to better presence in general. While spatial presence was rated slightly better for 3D characters, social presence was superior for 2D videos. We discuss the results and limitations of the study and discuss lessons for future work.

This paper reports upon a preliminary investigation of narrative structures embedded within The Under Presents (2019), a pioneering VR game produced by independent Los Angeles-based studio, Tender Claws. The narrative experience of the game involves a blend of open-world exploration and quest-based experiences that actively encourage the player's bodily engagement in story creation. With reference to Ryan’s notions of emotional and strategic space in digital narratives (2015a), I explore the player’s manipulation of space in the game world as an embodied activity that generates narrative, mediated through the VR headset and hand controllers. The malleability of space emerges not only as a central theme within the project but also profoundly influences how players interact with the story world. Further to identifying overlapping emotional or strategic spaces within the game world, I propose the notion of ‘corporeal space’ to address the constituting role of the player's body in the 360-degree VR environment and in the generation of story. Considering this interplay between space, story and the body, I propose that The Under Presents serves as a valuable resource for exploring the potential of narrative experiences within the realm of VR gaming.

This study investigates the experiences of various stakeholders in What We Take With Us (WWTWU), a wellbeing-focused pervasive game comprised of an alternate reality game (ARG), a room-based game, and game-based workshops. Utilising narrative inquiry, the research explores the perspectives of the game’s designer, developer, ARG players, room players, and workshop participants, offering a holistic understanding of a multifaceted game. These narratives highlight unique player experiences including the duality of being both player and creator, how games can catalyse lifechanging decisions, the importance of communities to wellbeing, the benefits of physical play spaces, and questions surrounding the nature of games. Findings align with existing pervasive game design principles, emphasising their ability to generate emergent narratives and benefits, their transformative potential, and their effective community utilisation. However, the findings also underscore challenges faced by creators, such as the need to accommodate diverse player types within such communities, difficulties navigating preconceived notions of game experiences, as well as the need for further research into notions of “space and place” in games. Although insightful, the study’s limited sample size and specific geographical context may impact the generalisability of its findings. Future research into WWTWU and pervasive games more generally could therefore benefit from diverse sample sizes and deployment in a myriad of broad cultural contexts. Finally, the study underscores that, in the end, games’ success relies on the individual experiences of all their stakeholders, what they take with them, and what they leave behind.

Storytelling has always been a communal activity and video games are no different, yet, work on designing story experiences that emphasize the communal elements of storytelling have typically focused on the creation of stories, not communal interpretation of existing ones. This paper draws on communal storytelling rituals from theater and mythology to explore how games and interactive narrative can utilize narrative through communal interactions. From this, several design patterns can be extrapolated from existing games that create communal storytelling rituals. We use Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elden Ring as primary examples to discuss three narrative design patterns for online communal ritual storytelling. These three design patterns are 1) giving players incomplete information, encouraging repetition, 2) not helping players, encouraging community, and 3) building for player expression, encouraging player-stories. All three patterns utilize aspects of rituals and theater to encourage storytelling of their respective games, through encouraging repetition and communal aspects. Games are often repetitive in nature, and harnessing community to strengthen the narrative through this repetition can be a powerful tool to create engaging narratives for players while still relying on repetitive gameplay loops. Designing for communal ritual play is thus a strong way to utilize the advantages of repetitive games and communal narrative.

Throughout the history of tabletop role playing games (TTRPG), the image most associated with playing are people sitting around a table with notebooks, pencils, and occasionally map grids and miniatures. The Internet, however, especially in the post COVID-19 era, has enabled new ways of distance play and the emergence of virtual tabletop applications. In this work we explore the potential of immersive VR to support remote TTRPG play through a user study based on an immersive VR virtual tabletop application prototype. Using this virtual tabletop as an incentive, we invited 11 TTRPG players to offer their views and perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of VR to support gameplay. We focus on key TTRPG characteristics and motivations, including shared imagination, creativity and sociality, to inform the design of immersive VR tabletop applications tailored to the needs of remote TTRPG play.

Taking the notion of narrative space as a point of departure, this paper looks into possibilities of ‘spatializing narrative’ in virtual environments based on natural walking. One way to approach the workings of narrative space in virtual environments is through the lens of circulation. In ‘real-world’ architectural environments, the circulation space consists of multiple elements that program movement through space, connect spaces in a sequence, and direct the gaze. These circulation elements carry an expressive potential that can be brought into use in the design of narrative spaces. Circulation principles from ‘real-world’ architecture, however, do not readily translate to virtual environments. In a virtual environment, the notion of circulation itself needs revisiting. This paper examines to what extent, and how circulation principles come into play in an immersive narrative game called Lavrynthos. It examines the tactics that were used to create a continuous circulation space and assesses how circulation is brought into use in the narrative of the game. It identifies several ways in which the circulation space is deployed as a narrative device. The paper, finally, describes a dynamic wherein the circulation space changes as the player moves through the environment, opening up in the direction of movement. This spatial dynamic produces a range of creative possibilities for designing immersive narrative spaces based on natural walking.

Players are often considered to be static in their preferred play styles, but this has been shown to be untrue. While this is not an issue in games that only attempt to craft a singular experience for the player, this can become a problem for games that use an Experience Manager (ExpM) to adapt the game to the player. As an ExpM observes the player’s actions within the game environment, it makes changes to the environment to bias it towards the player’s preferences, but if a player were to shift their preferences then any further ExpM observations are now based on this biased environment. These biased observations may not be able to show the player’s true preferences and cause the ExpM to form an incorrect player model. In this situation the ExpM should be able to detect these player preference shifts. In this paper we show that such a shift can be detected using only the observations of the player without further intervention. To evaluate these claims we use a text-based interactive fiction environment created to exhibit this bias caused by an ExpM. We compare our own method to detect such shifts to existing outlier detection methods and find that our method can detect shifts in player preferences.