The Authoring Problem

The process of authoring an interactive digital narrative has been one of the main issues in our field of studies. Throughout the history of the field, considerable attention has been given to the development and usage of authoring tools, very often disregarding the authoring process as a creative activity. In this chapter, we transcend the discussion around authoring tools, to delve into several models that describe the authoring process of different kinds of interactive digital narrative artifacts from ideation to publishing, identifying common practices across them. Subsequently, we propose an iterative and inclusive authoring process that is open to any form of interactive digital narrative artifact. The process consists of four stages: ideation, pre-production, production, and post-production. Finally, we discuss our thoughts on the understanding and acknowledgment of the interactive digital narratives’ creator and their role.

A gifted young storyteller, orphaned at birth, has traced their origins to the city of knowledge. Fascinated by the youth’s potential, the scholars each lay claim. The cinematographer maps their filmic features, a vocabulary of edits and frames; the actor cites their own history of interactivity and dynamic audiences; the author notes the storyteller’s obvious place in the illustrious family of narrative convention; the computer scientist, present at the birth, is keen to ensure their place is recognised; the ludographer, youngest of the scholars, denies such reliance on any family history, instead seeing them as the start of a new, illustrious line—and encouraging the storyteller to define a new way of thinking. This chapter charts the intertwining, dynamic and interdisciplinary history of interactive digital narrative. Drawing on the breadth of scholarship, it provides a convenient primer for the convoluted, often-contradictory genealogy of the field and its complex relationship with authorship, along with open questions to consider.

Limits that emerge out of the interactive nature of interactive digital narrative make authoring it challenging. These limits include exponential branching, where branches in the narrative increase the amount of content needed to be written progressively throughout the work; combinatorial explosion, where increasing combinations of possible game states makes writing additional content complex, as well as programming scope problems that are seen in any digital project, wherein the range of features or game interactions that could be implemented is infinite but development time finite. These limits place on the authors of interactive digital narrative an authorial burden, increasing the amount of content needed to be written, states managed or features programmed. Multiple strategies exist for tackling the burden, from reducing or reusing content, to decontextualising and generating content.

Since 1979, hundreds of authoring tools have been created. While many factors contribute to the survival of a tool beyond its initial introduction, the largest factor for an authoring tool lasting more than a publication or initial experiment is the active involvement of a community. Authoring tools survive by those who use them. Active community involvement in projects extends their lives, and the resources created by communities around a tool help new users learn to use it. This chapter examines three different open-source projects, authoring tools, Bitsy and Twine, and scripting language, ink, with a focus on how their communities have played a role in their perception and longevity.

Publishers connect readers and writers. The literary economy with its diverse currencies—cash, attention, academic tenure—is not an inescapable natural phenomenon, but is continually reshaped by editors, manufacturers, booksellers, and critics. Central aspects of today’s literary economy would have been unexpected and even astonishing a few decades back, while customs and practices that we take for granted arose from temporary policies adopted almost a century ago. Fashion, talent, and critical success all enter into the story, but so, too, do details of the accounting practices of booksellers and the real-estate expenses of local pharmacies and neighborhood newsstands. This chapter examines how the literary economy and the practices of the book trade have shaped interactive media through the course of 35 years and considers what aspects of that economy are now most liable to transformation.

The goal of this chapter is to help refine and broaden how authors think about actions in the context of Interactive Digital Narrative. An action is generally something that a player can do to affect the progression of an interactive story, but the elements that actions can change are often limited to the state of the narrative world. Examples include moving the player’s avatar through the narrative world because they typed “go north”, or recording that the player has accepted a given quest. While a rich and diverse set of interactive stories has been made using only actions of this kind, we will see in this chapter how using other kinds of action can broaden the author’s repertoire and enable new opportunities for player interaction.

Authoring stories and designing interactions are often discussed separately, within differing communities. At the same time, it would be useful to regard these two tasks as actually one integrated process for the creation of interactive narratives. With a focus on non-standardized interaction styles, this chapter discusses the authoring challenges involved in conceiving IDNs for location-based and immersive experiences with novel technologies, one example being Augmented Reality. These challenges include the necessity to understand technologies and their users, as well as potential gaps between the platforms and circumstances of creation and experience. This chapter suggests approaches to these authoring problems, placing an emphasis on the integration of the story with repeatable interaction patterns.

The ability for players to go back and replay, either to see the impact of their choices or to experience the story from a different perspective, is one of the fundamental properties of interactive narratives. In this chapter, I focus on replay stories, a form of interactive narrative that is deliberately designed to encourage, or even require, repeat encounters. I begin by providing an overview of what we know about repeat experience of interactive narratives, and the challenges authors face when deliberately designing this type of work. I then explore the question of how authoring tools can provide support for authoring replay stories, suggesting both ways that tools can support this type of authoring, and the possible limitations on tool support for authoring replay stories. The chapter ends with some open questions for future research in this area.

Structure is key to interactive narrative authoring. It can be perceived at the micro, meso, and macro levels of navigation, and when presented as common patterns creates a toolbox from which authors can build their stories. This structuralist approach to authoring appeals to the engineer’s mindset, but post-structuralists would argue that no patterns are fundamental or universal. As Interactive Digital Narratives become more gamelike they turn into Strange Hypertexts, with playful mechanics deeply aligned with their narrative goals. This ludonarrative aspect of IDNs is exactly the sort of shift in perspective that post-structuralism warned us about and suggests that patterns might limit authors rather than empowering them. This chapter reviews the reported patterns in hypertext and interactive narrative and explores how patterns could continue to be important for authoring in a strange and post-structural world.

The complexity of interactive narratives inspired a variety of visual aids and graphical interfaces that support authoring tasks. This chapter analyzes the visual interface of popular IDN authoring tools that include an explicit visual interface for creating content, including Twine, Storyspace 3, inklewriter, Inform 7, and Adventure Game Studio. We employ a simple proto-IDN consisting of a set of passages that represent locations spatially linked together to compare the interactive and non-interactive visual aids across the five tools. We also identify several organizing metaphors that underly the visual logic, including Spatial Mapping, Scene-driven Structure, Nodal Mapping, and Traversal Mapping. Authors use the graphical interfaces in each of these tools to predict and manage the set of possible traversals that players may take. There identify key features in the interfaces by their function as a visual aid to specific authoring tasks. The interface techniques represented have evolved with these shared features, though they also represent the current limits of a paradigm of interactive narrative authoring where an author has explicit control over the structure and paths of the work.

Category fiction—mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and horror among others—arose as a way to sell magazines and books to an audience that was eager to explore specific serious, storyable questions about the nature of the world and its woes. Understanding the frameworks on which these categories rest can inform the craft of interactive fiction while reminding us (and our readers) of the questions these stories address.

We discuss the issues of authoring for story sifters: systems that search for compelling emergent narrative content within the vast chronicles of events generated by interactive emergent narrative simulations. We describe several different approaches to the authoring of sifting patterns that specify how to locate particular kinds of narratively potent situations; address the relationship between sifters and the simulations they operate over from an authoring perspective; and sketch several possible approaches to the authoring of sifting heuristics, or high-level encodings of what makes for a compelling story that could be used to guide a sifter’s behavior.

New narrative technologies build on previous languages and aesthetics until they reach their own maturity and disappear from the foreground, leaving us totally immersed in the emotional journey that a story proposes. Locative technologies are no different. Space and place, as location, started to fascinate philosophers and content creators, even before digital technologies came around, but with the advent of GPS in the ‘90s, locative media exploded. Academic investigations match artistic explorations within the locative media umbrella. Visual artists, writers, animators, filmmakers, and locative technologies inspire each other in the pursuit of the unique language and aesthetics of this new genre. In this chapter, we will reflect on the role of locative narrative authors through seminal and cutting-edge locative narrative authored works, with special attention to examine the challenges and lessons learned from these projects. With this chapter, we envisage benefiting creatives and technologists with a repertoire of examples, insights, and wisdom for locative narrative authors.

Among certain veteran hypertext experimentalists, the words shower curtain stand as shorthand for what may be the most profound problem in multi-cursal authoring: visualizing and mapping the work. The reference is to Deena Larsen’s Marble Springs, a sprawling, densely intertwined labyrinth of poems and stories originally developed on Apple’s HyperCard platform. To keep track of the project’s burgeoning complexity, Larsen built a physical network with notecards and string, taped to the most capacious household surface she could find. (The object now resides in the Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.) Larsen’s famous curtain calls to mind the evidence boards endemic to police procedural fiction, and perhaps also the densely inscribed dens of the mad criminals in those stories. These associations remind us that “non-linear writing,” as Ted Nelson famously defined hypertext, breaks the existing laws of discourse, bringing unique problems for authors and designers of authoring systems. This chapter will review some of the solutions the writer has encountered in three and a half decades, including the directed graphs of early hypertext systems such as Intermedia, NoteCards, and Storyspace, the revolutionary but unrealized 3D innovation of Apple’s HotSauce experiment, and the current vernacular of Twine. The chapter will draw on work in information science from Halasz, Horn, Marshall, Bernstein, and others, as well as discussions with hypertext authors and Chris Klimas, the main developer of Twine.

Focusing on game mechanics as a narrative mode, rather than considering story and game as two separate but related experiences, allows narrative designers to take a more integrated approach to authoring interactive digital narratives. In this chapter, I explore two ways of doing this: by making use of game mechanics as an experiential metaphor and by using poetic gameplay. I provide a survey of work that has explored each of these approaches and then suggest ways of making use of both techniques together. I then argue that both the metaphoric possibilities of game mechanics for storytelling and careful undermining of players’ expectations for gameplay, provide powerful tools for authors to create compelling interactive digital narratives.

Artificial Intelligence systems have been used to generate narrative structures and simulate virtual story characters at a variety of different scales, across both academia and industry. Such systems are often built from specialized components known as intelligent narrative technologies. The goal of this chapter is to highlight some of the challenges that can arise when such technologies are used as part of authoring or executing an interactive story. Authoring in a way that works with these technologies often requires a host of technical skills, such as writing computer code, building mathematical models, or predicting the effect of a simple change on a large, complex system. In addition to explaining why these skills are needed and the problems that they help to solve, this chapter will highlight recent and ongoing efforts to make authoring for intelligent narrative technologies more accessible to those with fewer technical skills.

The field of Interactive Digital Narration (IDN) is inherently interdisciplinary—since its inception, it has struggled to unite artistic and technical expertise. In this chapter, therefore, we reflect on the extent to which the interdisciplinarity at play in IDN is specific to the field and the implications this has for authoring research. To this end, we consider several issues related to the collaboration of tool engineers with storytellers and designers on a team. We group these challenges into four main categories and suggest recommendations to address them: dealing with change, sharing a vision, dealing with a range of data representations, and fighting opacity.

Authoring tools, the software used to create, edit, and develop Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), are a critical part of both IDN authorship and research. These tools, their features, interface paradigms, visualisations, and user experience (UX) can impact the authoring process and the resulting works, and consequently must inform our wider understanding of IDN context. While IDN research has widely explored data models for authoring tools, feature sets, and demonstrated a variety of developed tools for a range of IDN forms, it has done comparatively very little to evaluate and study the UX of these tools and their impact on authors and their works. In this chapter, we survey the existing work on authoring tools and explore the scale of this problem, the reasons for it, how the community has documented this issue, and how we might begin to tackle it. We conclude that the existing methods for the study of UX are poorly suited for the study of authoring tools, and that as well as making the study of tool UX a priority, we must also develop new methods of evaluation.

Emergent narratives model the process of storytelling through the use of simulation. The complexity and breadth of possible outcomes from a playthrough of an emergent narrative pose a number of unique challenges to authors. In this chapter, we survey the application of quantitative evaluations of emergent and narrativistic behaviours, examining how they may be used to provide feedback throughout the development process of an emergent narrative work. Four analysis techniques are also presented, which make use of quantitative analysis, benchmarking, comparisons, verification and classification.

Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) provides expressive opportunities that can be applied to many serious and non-fiction topics. Such applications, in particular, but also fictional IDN, have an ethical dimension, an aspect in need of increased attention as IDN matures and is more widely deployed. In this chapter, we identify aspects of IDN ethics with a particular concern for IDN authoring, taking into account earlier efforts in related areas, such as more generalized perspectives on ethics in computer sciences and considerations pertaining to video games. We use IDN for cultural heritage as a frame for discussing ethical aspects in IDN, since this application area is particularly prone to issues in this regard. Furthermore, we put a focus on VR, as a topic that most fully divorces audiences from the outside world during the IDN experience and thus poses particular ethical challenges for authoring. Throughout the discussion, we identify questions that an IDN ethics framework needs to address. Then, we introduce such a framework with 12 rules and briefly discuss their application. The IDN ethics framework is meant to be as a first edition, to be further developed by the community.