Imagining the Other for Interactive Digital Narrative Design Learning in Real Time in Sherlock

Abstract

Collaboration is at the heart of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), yet IDN designers and players rarely encounter one another’s subjective experiences around an IDN. Making that communication explicit can enhance beginning IDN design students’ understanding of the inherently collaborative quality of IDN and the importance of digital tools. Researching such collaboration presents many challenges, ranging from ensuring participants have tools to facilitate sharing and feedback to providing researchers data for relevant analysis. We describe our design for a real-time collaborative IDN education design workshop, “Imagining the Other.” The workshop protocol involves students learning the basics of Twine authoring, designing IDNs, playing a peer’s IDN, and sharing comments for the ongoing design process in real-time. To run the workshop in a scalable way, we extended an existing web-based research platform, Sherlock, to support synchronous editing and data collection from novice authors exchanging feedback. The platform modifications support practice-based research by surfacing the numerous interactions in this social learning process for analysis. We evaluated the system feasibility by an initial pilot study with undergraduates new to IDN and analyzing the comments and content produced using an existing narrative coding scheme, showing preliminary evidence of the intended insight. The primary contribution is an integrated methodology and guidelines for subsequent large-scale studies exploring the social-relational merits of IDN education within an innovative research platform.