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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.
