Writing for Replay: Supporting the Authoring of Kaleidoscopic Interactive Narratives

Abstract

1 Introduction One of the fundamental properties of interactive stories is the ability for players to go back and try out variations, either to see how their choices impact the outcome, or to see the story from a different perspective, something Murray [1, 2] refers to as kaleido-scopic form. While this notion of interactive stories as replay stories has long been acknowledged as important from the perspective of the player's experience [3-5], and as part of the underlying structural patterns of forms such as hypertext fiction [6], little attention has been paid to how an author can attend to and consciously and deliberately design for this during the writing process. In the proposed chapter, I aim to reconsider the authoring problem through the lens of repeat experience and suggest what it means to design tools to support authoring kaleidoscopic interactive stories. 2 Challenges for writing replayable interactive stories Authoring any type interactive story is inherently challenging, as it potentially requires a wide range of skills, including both algorithmic design, programming, artistic design, and making [7]. A key issue is that authors of interactive stories are not able to directly design an experience. Authoring an interactive story is akin to what Salen and Zimmer-man call "second-order design" [8, 9]-the author creates the computational systems that a player eventually encounters, and through that encounter an experience emerges [10]. In addition to designing the computational system, the author also needs to consider how the player will interact with this system. When the player encounters both the playable system and the units of narrative [11], the resulting experience emerges through the process of interpretation of both the instantiated narrative being encountered , and the player's interaction with and process of making sense of the underlying system [12, 13]. The author's intention is to influence the player's experience, but the author can only do this one step removed. Much of the work done to develop authoring tools for interactive stories has focused on the problem of supporting this complex range of skillsets, as can be seen in recent surveys of authoring tools [14] and discussions of the ways that the authoring problem have been addressed [15]. If, in addition to trying to help authors address the problem of creating an interactive story we also want to specifically help authors create kaleido-scopic interactive stories, we need to consider how this changes the authoring problem.