Interactive audiobooks: Combining narratives with game elements

Abstract

The authoring and the design of immersive, non-linear plots remains one of the main challenges in interactive digital storytelling. This paper introduces the concept of interactive audiobooks, which combines the potential of complex (non-)linear narratives (e.g. books and radio plays) with interactive elements from computer games. The design concentrates on a flexible degree of interaction, in a way that the listener’s experience ranges between a passive listening to an interactive audio-only computer game. In this paper we discuss the story-engine used in interactive audiobooks, as well as present an authoring framework along several design guidelines to create them. Finally, we demonstrate the capabilities of our system with an adaptation of a short story from Edgar Allen Poe.