The Authoring Problem

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.

Introduction.- Part I. Authors and Processes.- Understanding the Process of Authoring.- Interactive Digital Narrative: The Genealogy of a Field.- Authorial Burden.- We Make How We Learn: The role of Community in Authoring Tool Longevity.- The Authoring Problem is a Publishing Problem.- Part II. Content.- Getting Creative with Actions.- Authoring Interactive Narrative Meets Narrative Interaction Design.- Writing for Replay: Supporting the Authoring of Kaleidoscopic Interactive Narratives.- Strange Patterns: Structure and Post-structure in Interactive Digital Narratives.- Mapping the Unmappable: Reimagining Visual Representations of Interactive Narrative.- On Story.- Part III. Form.- Authoring for Story Sifters.- Authoring Locative Narratives - Lessons Learned and Future Visions.- Shower Curtains of the Mind.- Game Mechanics as Narrative Mode.- Working with Intelligent Narrative Technologies.- Part IV. Research Issues.-  Authoring Issues in Interdisciplinary Research Teams.- The Authoring Tool Evaluation Problem.- Quantitative Analysis of Emergent Narratives.- An Ethics Framework for Interactive Digital Narrative Authoring.