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“How Do I Restart This Thing?” Repeat Experience and Resistance to Closure in Rewind Storygames

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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12497))

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Abstract

Interactive stories are a kaleidoscopic form that both encourages and rewards repeat experience, allowing players to try out different variations of a story or see the story from different perspectives. This may be one reason for the increasing use of rewind game mechanics, where players are required to repeatedly play a storygame before eventually reaching some form of conclusion. While this seems to be playing to the strengths of the medium, what is not clear is how rewind structures can be explained by current models of repeat experience in interactive stories. Through a close reading of the storygame Elsinore, we explore the impact of rewind game mechanics on repeat play, in terms of the player’s ability both to determine when the end has been reached, and to subsequently replay beyond closure. Our observations suggest that rewind mechanics may frustrate, rather than support, closure and repeat experience of storygames, and may require a revision of current theories of rereading and repeat experience.

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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

    Alex Mitchell & Liting Kway

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  1. Alex Mitchell
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  2. Liting Kway
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Correspondence to Alex Mitchell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Brest, Brest, France

    Anne-Gwenn Bosser

  2. University of Southampton, Southhampton, UK

    David E. Millard

  3. Creative Technology, Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, UK

    Charlie Hargood

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Mitchell, A., Kway, L. (2020). “How Do I Restart This Thing?” Repeat Experience and Resistance to Closure in Rewind Storygames. In: Bosser, AG., Millard, D.E., Hargood, C. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12497. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62516-0

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