The Authoring Problem: Challenges in Supporting Authoring for Interactive Digital Narratives

Authoring, its tools, processes, and design challenges are key issues for the Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) research community. The complexity of IDN authoring, often involving stories co-created by procedures and user interaction, creates confusion for tool developers and raises barriers for new authors.

This book examines these issues from both the tool designer and the author’s perspective, discusses the poetics of IDN and how that can be used to design authoring tools, explores diverse forms of IDN and their demands, and investigates the challenges around conducting research on IDN authoring.

To address these challenges, the chapter authors incorporate a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on ’The Authoring Problem’ in IDN. While existing texts provide ’how-to’ guidance for authors, this book is a primer for research and practice-based investigations into the authoring problem, collecting the latest thoughts about this area from key researchers and practitioners.

Dr. Charlie Hargood is an academic in games technology in the department of creative technology at Bournemouth University. He is an internationally recognised expert in interactive narrative and Hypertext. He has long been a contributor to the ACM Hypertext conference where he runs the Narrative and Hypertext workshop, and has twice won the Englebert prize for Hypertext research. His recent research has focused on locative narrative and the UX of authoring tools and he was the technical lead of the StoryPlaces project.
Dr. David Millard is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. A leading figure in the Hypertext community, he has over 240 publications in international conferences and journals, was Vice-Chair of ACM SIGWEB from 2015-2019, and is the current chair of the ACM Hypertext steering committee. He has won awards for his work on hypertext structures and authoring, and his current research interests are focused on hypertextual structures in games, locative literature, and digital narratives.
Dr. Alex Mitchell teaches game and UX design and interactive storytelling in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. His research investigates various aspects of computer-based art and entertainment. His recent work has explored the role of defamiliarization in gameplay, and motivations for replaying interactive stories. He is a founding executive board member of ARDIN (Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narrative).
Dr. Ulrike Spierling is a professor of Media Design at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany. She has been leading research groups in Interactive Storytelling since 1998, with applied research and development projects tackling interactions with virtual characters, conversational user interfaces, chatbot-based storytelling, as well as location-based interactive drama in Augmented Reality. She has organized several international workshops on Authoring for Interactive Narrative since 2006, and co-founded the annual conference series ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling) in 2008.