🤖 AI Summary
Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) creation faces persistent challenges in harmonizing narrative structure, aesthetic design, and interactive mechanics. Method: This study proposes a collaborative, open-source sandbox framework centered on the “narrative engineer,” introducing a novel “human–environment co-creation” paradigm that dynamically adapts technical capabilities to creators’ goals and expertise. The framework integrates a modular narrative engine, prototype-based content-space modeling, and interactive asset classification and mapping tools to support end-to-end adaptive development—from asset organization to engine customization. Contribution/Results: It significantly enhances creators’ controllability and expressive freedom in designing multi-objective, multi-layered interactive narratives. By providing a systematic, extensible, and reusable architecture, the framework advances IDN authoring tool development and establishes a foundation for scalable, practice-informed narrative engineering.
📝 Abstract
In this text, we consider the authoring of interactive digital narratives (IDNs) as a system of interwoven creative processes and look at it as a design process. The aim is to better understand the structural, aesthetic and interactive concepts authoring has to address, how authors think about those and what that means regarding the tools required to support authoring for IDNs. The paper concludes with a detailed vision of an authoring environment that is considered an open-source sandbox system, which provides the technical means to build a functional IDN but adapts the availability of technology based on the narrative engineer's aims, goals and skills. The environment establishes a collaboration between itself and the narrative engineer, who's interaction on one side focusses on the collection of material and its classification and on the other side covers the design of the engine that facilitates the aimed for audience to establish the stories for their information need out of the provided proto-narrative content space.