This thesis deals with the design of
interactive narratives. Interactive narratives are software systems that
enable users to create stories when using the system. Interactive
narratives are used for many purposes and in many different contexts, e.g.
to facilitate children to tell stories in order to cope with their
illnesses. Interactive narratives challenge software design processes as
an emerging technology. Research indicates that interactive narratives
design is difficult, that most design processes are approached in an
ad-hoc manner, and that design processes and solutions are based on
intuition.
This thesis addresses three themes within
interactive narratives design: concepts, methods, and architectures. The
themes define three research questions that form the conducted research.
Five individual paper contributions try to answer and address different
aspects of the three research questions. Due to the vast amount of
different kinds of interactive narratives, this thesis presents a space
that characterises interactive narratives according to their level of
interaction and narration. The five paper contributions are mapped in this
space to signify similarities and differences between the five paper
contributions.
Three empirical sources contribute to the
results. Practice studies address the application and understanding of
concepts and identify challenges and architectures in interactive
narratives design. The primary sources to the practice studies are
interviews. Secondly, experiments provide the evaluation of
object-oriented design methods in attempts to evaluate their applicability
for interactive narratives design. The focus is on identification of
opportunities and limitations of the design methods. An intervention
driven study develops an agent-based architecture for new forms of
interaction and application of concepts.
The primary results of this thesis are: 1)
the concepts of interaction and narration define key properties of
interactive narratives. Different understandings of the two concepts are
applicable and signify different kinds of interactive narratives. This
thesis identifies temporal-oriented and spatial-oriented interactive
narratives primarily based on the definition of narration. 2) A key
challenge in interactive narratives design is the creation of the
narrative. During the creation of the narrative is not obvious how users
could be involved in determining functional requirements to the system.
This is partly explainable by the lack of definable future use situations.
Object-oriented design methods have a number of limitations in interactive
narratives design. More key activities in the design methods are of
limited value because the focus on work domain does not necessarily hold
for interactive narratives. 3) Two architectures are proposed to support
the design of either temporal-oriented or spatial-oriented interactive
narratives. The architectures identifies to different understandings of
narration and addresses interaction at two different levels.
