User Interaction in Game Narrative and User Engagement

Kevin Murphy – B00187491

User Interaction in Game Narrative and User

Engagement

Introduction

• What is Interactive Storytelling?– From: Dialogue choices to change events– To: Procedurally generated story based on player

actions

• What is the aim of the project?– Linear storytelling or interactive, which is more

engaging to the user?

Chris Crawford• ‘Interactive storytelling’ is a medium which

transcends computer games

• Storytelling is a ‘long-winded’ but necessary system for teaching morals

• True interactivity requires listening, thinking and speaking.

Façade

• Designed by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. Released in 2005.

Primary Research

• Research Question – Is an interactive story more engaging than a non-interactive (linear) story?

• How? – Two different types of story being compared using the Narrative Engagement Scale (Busselle and Bilandzic, 2009)

• Who? – 40 game players

Investigation• Story was chosen using four criteria defined by

Tomin and Liu (2008) to investigate interactive storytelling in existing media.– Degree of freedom– Variety of goals– Level of immersion– Wealth of story

• The Walking Dead by Telltale Games was selected

Experiment Results

• From the data collected in the experiment, the results support the hypothesis that interactive stories are more engaging.

Interactive story Non-interactive story

Average 5.29 4.74

Median 6 5

Mode 7 7

Standard Deviation 0.583 1.809

What Next?

• Write-up of Experiment and Analysis

• Format Dissertation

• Recommendations/Conclusion

Questions

• Do you have any?