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Part II. Storytelling in the Information Age ] 65
CHAPTER 4.
INTERACTIVE DIGITAL NARRATIVES
Interactive digital narratives (hereinafter referred to as IDNS) are guided
television films and video games that also allow viewers to make interactive
choices. If the category of interactive digital storytelling were to be interpreted
broadly, it would include any narrative presented on a digital interface that
enables audience interaction. Such an approach would lead to a discussion
of the micro-narratives of social media and content-sharing portals, as well
as the individual or collaborative creative processes of users on different
digital platforms, which would be impossible. Researchers in the field face
definitional and terminological challenges in this regard, as the theoretical
background and research methods of media and film theory, narratology,
and cognitive psychology can be used to approach studies on the creation
and impact of interactive narratives.
In this chapter, IDNs are discussed that support user manipulation such
as interactive television shows and interactive narrative video games. In
these narratives, the audience actively shapes the sequence of episodes and
navigates between them in a non-linear way. Murray (2018) identifies agency
as the most important feature of IDNs that influences their dramaturgy. The
agent of the 21 century is a recipient and an actor at the same time, who is
a voyeur, user, participant, and manipulator — also called an interactor. The
agency of the interactor is the pleasure of using an interface (which can be a
computer or a television) that responds dynamically to his or her participatory
and action-shaping behavior.
IDNs tell stories through optional pathways, with countless plot variations
from the beginning to the end of the story, based on the choices made by the
interactor. A possible definition of this phenomenon is:
Interactive Digital Narrative is an expressive form in the digital medium,
implemented as a computational system containing a protostory of potential
narratives that is experienced through a process in which participants influence
the continuation of the unfolding experience that results in products representing
instantiated stories. (Koenitz, Di Pastena, Jansen, Lint & Moss, 2018, p. 108)
According to the authors, this definition implies that (1) the author/scriptwriter
of an interactive digital narrative must create a dynamically malleable system at
the design stage; (2) the audience has an impact on the course of the narrative
by interacting with this system and (3) IDNs require the presence of additional
elements that allow for an alternative, branching structure of storytelling. In
the case of complex and dynamically changing narrative structures such as
those of adventure game books, the linear or non-linear nature of the narrative
is not necessarily the cardinal issue. Murray (2018) has called these products
multi-sequential, referring to their modular structure.