Full Body Gestures Enhancing a Game Book for Interactive Story Telling

Game Books can offer a well-written, but non-linear story, as readers always have to decide, how to continue after reading a text passage. It seems very logical to adopt such a book to investigate interaction paradigms for an interactive storytelling scenario. Nevertheless, it is not easy to keep the player motivated during a long-winded narrated story until the next point of intervention is reached. In this paper we tested different methods of implementing the decision process in such a scenario using speech input and tested it with 26 participants during a two player scenario. This revealed that with an omitted on-screen prompt the application was less easy to use, but caused considerably more user interaction. We further added additional interactivity with so-called Quick Time Events (QTEs). In these events, the player has a limited amount of time to perform a specific action after a corresponding prompt appeares on screen. Different versions of QTEs were implemented using Full Body Tracking with Microsoft Kinect, and were tested with another 18 participants during a two player scenario. We found that Full Body Gestures were easier to perform and, in general, preferred to controlling a cursor with one hand and hitting buttons with it.