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66 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
Research on IDNs began at the turn of the millennium. A symposium on
the potential of artificial intelligence for narrative structure creation was held
in 1999, followed by an annual International Conference on Interactive Digital
Storytelling (ICIDS) (Young, 2018). The international association ARDIN
(Association in Research in Digital Interactive Narratives), which has been
active since 2018, aims to support research into all forms of IDNs, including
interactive documentary or feature films, video games, augmented or virtual
reality narratives, or transmedia storytelling that supports interactivity.
The narrative and technological conventions of IDNs have taken decades to
emerge. Even before the Internet, there were examples of computer-generated
narratives that responded to user interactions. Murray (2018) considers
the first interactive computer-assisted narrative to be Joseph Weizenbaum’s
program Elisa, the Automated Psychotherapist from 1966 and an early
predecessor to today’s chatbots. In the 1970s, by combining the role-playing
game Dungeon and Dragons with artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers
created the first interactive fiction computer game, Zork, three versions of
which became available on personal computers in the 1980s. In the 2000s,
the first game in the Divinity series, Devine Divinity, was released.
In terms of the branching structure of IDNs, Murray sees hypertextuality,
developed for educational purposes before the world wide web, as an important
precursor. Storyspace software, which was developed in 1987, was able to
facilitate hypertextual branching, associative thinking, and storytelling. But the
turning point for IDNs came at the turn of the millennium, when hypertextual
representation of texts on the Internet became a matter of course and a new
generation of computer games was launched. In addition to simulation and
win/lose individual games, The Sims appeared in which the player could
create virtual human communities whose members interacted with each
other in various ways. In addition, the player could endow the characters
with external and internal characteristics and generate different situations and
living conditions for them. The novelty of the game was that the player could
actively shape the gameplay rather than simply following the paths intended
by the game makers. Another major breakthrough in interactive storytelling
was the game Facade, in which the player could engage in dialogue with the
characters in the game who invited the player into their home and into the
games storyworld; the dialogue taking place in the games guest room could
be shaped by the player. Since the responses generated by the AI could shape
the dialogue in a myriad of ways, the player was also able to influence the
fictional narrative (i.e., the story of the couple’s relationship). It was in these
games that players first experienced agency, functioning as active controllers
of the game (Murray, 2018).
Today, in the world of media convergence, the person on the other side of
the screen is interactive and is thus no longer called the user or the receiver,
but the interactor, as it is he or she who receives, experiences, and shapes the
story by making choices and carrying out procedural interventions. Narrative