Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative

This remarkably clearly written and timely critical evaluation of core issues in the study and application of interactive digital narrative (IDN) untangles the range of theories and arguments that have developed around IDN over the past three decades.

Looking back over the past 30 years of theorizing around interactivity, storytelling, and the digital across the fields of game design/game studies, media studies, and narratology, as well as interactive documentary and other emerging forms, this text offers important and insightful correctives to common misunderstandings that pervade the field. This book also changes the perspective on IDN by introducing a comprehensive conceptual framework influenced by cybernetics and cognitive narratology, addressing limitations of perspectives originally developed for legacy media forms. Applying its framework, the book analyzes successful works and lays out concrete design advice, providing instructors, students, and practitioners with a more precise and specific understanding of IDN.

This will be essential reading for courses in interactive narrative, interactive storytelling, and game writing, as well as digital media more generally.

Hartmut Koenitz is an associate professor at Sodertorn University in Stockholm, a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He has published over 60 scholarly publications including the co-edited volume Interactive Digital Narrative: History, theory and practice (Routledge 2015). Koenitz is the president of ARDIN, the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives (https:// ardin.onl ine). He is also the creator of the Advanced Stories Authoring and Presentation System authoring tool (ASAPS), which has been used to create more than 150 works, and a visual artist whose works have been shown in Atlanta, Paris, Istanbul, Seoul, Copenhagen, and Porto.