Abstract
Authoring tools are a crucial component in the practice and research of interactive digital narrative design, yet there is no contemporary knowledge base to evaluate and comparatively analyze the great many tools that currently exist. This paper takes on the tasks of constructing a framework for the description and comparison of IDN authoring tools and their defining characteristics and affordances, and of developing this framework into a community resource. We propose a descriptive framework and an online resource meant to facilitate the development of a tool database and curate its properties.
Our framework is composed of 30 tool descriptors, addressing (among other factors) the tools’ basic identify, business model, use context, technical information, interface affordances and unique design elements. Values were additionally created to define the answer range for most descriptors and streamline the process of tool-logging via the online form we created. In this paper, we explain and demonstrate our framework and present the online database and examples of the sort of meta-analysis it can generate, testifying to the potential usefulness of our framework to the research and practice community.
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Notes
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An “easier”/“more effective” IDN creative process could mean different things: a workflow that is more directed and integrated, less time-consuming or demanding fewer technical skills; improved accessibility and tangibility of design strategies and representation structures in the tool’s UI; improved narrative abstraction/conceptualization in the work environment, and/or making narrative structures and concepts more ready-to-hand.
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Acknowledgements
We are exceedingly grateful to Alex Mitchell, Mattia Bellini, Fanny Bernabe and Noam Knoller, for their active and productive participation in the taskforce and focus group process. Additional help was provided by Hartmut Koenitz, Nicolas Szilas, and Christian Roth. The first author would like to thank Hartmut Koenitz and Noam Knoller also for their supervision of the initial research project that helped shape this framework. Our thanks goes to INDCOR Cost action 18230 and Workgroup 1, in particular, for inspiring this work and hosting the prototype resource and the tag cloud.
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Shibolet, Y., Lombardo, V. (2022). Resources for Comparative Analysis of IDN Authoring Tools. In: Vosmeer, M., Holloway-Attaway, L. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_33
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