Argax Project:: Dissertation: A Rough Draft Node

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Placement of User Interaction

In an interactive drama, where the user assumes the role of a character, the level in the model at which user action occurs is clearly meant to be that of the story-world. The player interacts by affecting the setting and other characters. The story-world provides the material for what interactions are possible; the user's actions should then become part of the action. However, other kinds of interactive narratives have user interaction at levels other than the story-world.

At its most basic level, most recorded narratives offer some control over their medium--particularly its timing. For example, the reader of a book can skim parts of the text, reread others, or put the book down and come back to it later. A museum-goer can glance at a painting as they walk by or study it for half an hour.

Some narratives offer the user control over the details of their discourse or presentation. For instance, the user might be able to control the camera viewpoint or might select different hypertext links, changing the order in which the underlying story is experienced.

Or the user might be able to specify the kind of high-order action she would like to see, either as an interactive "director" or as input to a story generator, which would then determine the details of the characters and setting.

So it could be argued be that a DVD player, a hypertext novella, an interactive drama game, and a story generator are all interactive narratives. They differ only at the level at which user action is intended to occur. If this is the only sort of interaction afforded and supported by the narrative, the user may still feel some sense of agency as long as those affordances and constraints are balanced. However, the user's interactions become more significant--that is, they have a greater impact on the action of the story--the higher the level at which those interactions occur.

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ToDo

Revisit: ludologists' argument against narrative. (Does model still work for non-narrative games, only Action is simply not well-formed? Tetris, Warcraft, Minesweeper. Seems applicable, though perhaps not terribly useful.) No, let's not muddy the waters here, though it may be interesting as later work.
Non-interaction:
--participatory/audience effects (Rocky Horror, dancing to the music): Certainly participation in the telling can increase enjoyment and investment of a narrative. It requires closer attention to participate at the right times. It involves the user emotionally, since the experience as a whole changes depending on their response. However, the narrative itself is largely unaffected. Participation is, at best, only a poor man's interaction.
--indirect? (affecting presenter): Particularly with live performances, such as theatre or storytelling, the audience's response can affect the actors or storyteller. The presenter of the tale can slow down or speed up, skip over parts, or linger over other parts. Yet these changes remain in the hands of the teller. The audience's control is only indirect.
Let's just talk about direct interaction here.
Where exactly is ID in all this? Interaction (affordances) at world level, but agency/effects intended to be at action level. I think confusion comes from the fact that interacting with a world object takes time, and so itself produces an event. (And those world-level actions actually require verb/action affordances.) Question is whether event has any impact on the story structure. It is when we begin differentiating between such "simple" world events and the events that make up a story that we can differentiate ID from just a simulation. Both ID and simulation would have interaction at the world level, but simulation has an impoverished story level (not modelled by system, but only projected by user).
There are other examples of affordances/interaction at one level leading to effects at another, such as in Skellern: interacting in world having effect on discourse, which in turn affects our interpretation of the characters and story (apparent sarcasm/irony or not).