Interactive Narrative Design beyond the Secret Art Status: A Method to Verify Design Conventions for Interactive Narrative

Abstract

In recent years, game narrative has emerged as an area for novel game concepts and as a strategy to distinguish a particular title. However, innovation in this area comes primarily from indie comp anies and individual efforts by noted designers. There is a lack of trained specialists ready to produce interactive narrative experiences. Many existing practitioners are self-trained and often rely on intuition in their design practice. A key element mis sing from the effort towards a more sustained development and improved professional training is a set of design conventions that fulfill a role compa-rable to cinematic conventions like continuity editing or montage. Therefore, our re-search focuses on ident ifying, verifying and collecting such design strategies. We de-scribe an empirical method to verify candidate design conventions through the evaluation of user reaction to A/B prototypes, which improves upon the trial-and-error process of old