Structures of interaction for creating dramatic agency in epistemic narratives: Return of the Obra Dinn and Telling Lies as design exemplars
Section snippets
Dramatic agency in epistemic narratives
In recent years, interactive narrative has been recognized as a distinct genre independent of, though often overlapping with, video games [1], [2]. As such it has its own aesthetics and can be assessed by how well the mechanics of interaction reinforce the narrative experience. To the extent that mechanics and narrative diverge, they display ludo-narrative dissonance [3]; to the extent that they converge, the interactor experiences dramatic agency, in which the mechanics of interaction map
Corpses as narrative gates in Return of the Obra Dinn
Return of the Obra Dinn is an adventure-style game in which the player is placed in the role of an insurance investigator tasked with discovering the fates of 60-odd ship passengers of a recently reappeared ghost ship. Present-tense exploration is anchored in the physical exploration of the ghost ship, which is filled with hidden corpses. Story revelations are significantly organized by an interactive object, a 135-page notebook (see Fig. 2) complete with “Table of Contents,” group portraits of
Keywords trails as narrative gates in Telling Lies
Since human experience is temporal, and there is usually something that happens last in any sequence of events, it is hard to write a story or to experience even the most labyrinthian story structure without imposing a temporal sequence of beginning-middle-end. A database or video archive, however, is the opposite of a temporally-ordered sequence. It exists in the misnamed “random” access present. That is, we can separate the sequence in which we call things up from their linear order (which is
The problem of closure in epistemic narratives
A key design challenge for epistemic interactive narrative is how to create a sense of an ending, the narrative “closure” that comes from feeling that the complete story has been witnessed and understood. Since both Obra Dinn and Telling Lies offer stories in fragments that can be navigated in multiple ways, and whose layered meanings may be overlooked on any single transversal, the interactor can be left with a feeling of dissatisfaction after leaving the experience. Many people never finish
Conclusion
In All Data Are Local Yanni Loukissas warns us that vast databases often decontextualize information, but data always belong to specific places and social structures and are influenced by how they were collected and by whom:
Data are useful precisely because they provide unfamiliar perspectives, from other times, places, and standpoints that we would not be able to access otherwise. The strangeness of data is its strength [21].
The strangeness of data is well-suited to fictional narrative.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center at Georgia Tech, and this research, are funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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