Narrative Structures in IDN authoring and analysis

Abstract

This chapter focuses on contextualising some specific features of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) within a broader semiotic theory. It discusses three general elements shared by IDNs and unilinear narrations without proposing a reductionist thesis, as the many technological and ontological differences between digital and nondigital narratives remain crucial. Starting from formalist studies of folktales, the constant repetition in the same order of three specific phases: first a qualifying test, then a decisive one and finally a glorifying test, across many narrative texts suggested to Greimas and his colleagues the existence of a narrative schema that is pervasive and universal. This internal structure which assigns a general form to the action and which distributes a limited number of general roles to be played by the protagonists constitutes the core of narration within the structuralist framework: the Canonical Narrative Schema (CNS), a cultural grid of narrative organisation sedimented in the collective memory by tradition as a primitive.