Interfacing the Narrative Experience

Abstract

I have a research interest in interfaces to games that are played, not on computers, but in the physical environment and that ultimately transform the world into a game board for computer games. Of specific interest to this agenda are activities that are narrative and social in their nature, not only in the interaction between people, but also in people’s interaction with the physical world. Having spent time role-playing in online environments, in awe of their mechanisms for story generation and interactive game worlds, I still have to argue their failure to provide convincing and truly interactive environments for narrative experiences. Put differently, the unmistakable division between character and player, and between character environment and player environment in online role-playing, characteristically fail to induce a desirable level of suspension of disbelief. In contrast, live role-playing games offer particularly relevant examples of games where the physical world is adapted as a mature interface to an engaging and creative immersion in an interactive, social, and narrative context. They support social and collective exercises in emergent narrative creation where every participant, is part of the design effort. These narratives take place in a magical and imaginary domain in the cross-section between physical reality and fantastic fiction offering the kind of immersion that most interactive narratives promise as a technical goal, but have yet to deliver, where there is no physical division between player, character, and narrative. Some might argue that this level of immersion is the holy grail of interactive fiction and indeed entertainment, where the narrative thread, or content if you will, is embedded in physical locations and in objects around us, creating a tangible, ubiquitous, and even context-sensitive interface for the participants or players to unleash at.