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International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling

ICIDS 2019: Interactive Storytelling pp 148–157Cite as

Choose Your Permanent Adventure: Towards a Framework for Irreversible Storygames

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11869))

Abstract

The majority of interactive narrative games allow the player to save their progress as the game unfolds. These save game options are either automatically enforced or manual. However, there is an increasing trend for interactive narrative games to be ‘irreversible’. In such cases, this makes it difficult for the player to load or access previous save games. As a result, the player’s sense of agency changes within the game, as the stakes and consequences of their story decisions are more difficult to reverse, and thus take on a feeling of permanence. Through close readings of The Walking Dead: Season One, Sorcery! and Undertale, this paper aims to provide an initial framework for irreversible storygames by (i) defining the different types of irreversibility by analyzing three games in which the form of irreversibility differs, and (ii) exploring subjective factors of the user experience that may be impacted by the different types of irreversibility.

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Acknowledgments

This research is funded in part under the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 grant FY2018-FRC2-003, “Understanding Repeat Engagement with Dynamically Changing Computational Media”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kenneth Tan & Alex Mitchell

  2. Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore, Singapore

    Kenneth Tan

Authors
  1. Kenneth Tan
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  2. Alex Mitchell
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Correspondence to Alex Mitchell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera

  2. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Anne Sullivan

  3. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    R. Michael Young

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Tan, K., Mitchell, A. (2019). Choose Your Permanent Adventure: Towards a Framework for Irreversible Storygames. In: Cardona-Rivera, R., Sullivan, A., Young, R. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11869. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33893-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33894-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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