David Millard

This week I co-ran the 10th Narrative and Hypertext Workshop at ACM Hypertext 2022 (in Barcelona, although I attended remotely). The workshop is an event I founded with Charlie Hargood back in 2011, focused on bringing together the worlds of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) and Hypertext research.

This year’s workshop was focused on a new book that I am co-editing on ‘The Authoring Problem in Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs)’, my own chapter in the book is on Patterns in IDN, especially structural patterns, and gives an overview of patterns in the literature over the last few decades, as well as the structural roots of the pattern approach, and what a post-structural view might mean for IDN patterns. For the workshop I presented a short paper (PDF) that gave an overview of how structural patterns might be used within IDN authoring tools, and what benefits they might bring.

You can watch a recorded version below:

The full Abstract of the paper is: IDN Structural Patterns are a type of Design Pattern that offer three potential benefits to IDN Authors: they can inform them of common solutions to problems, they can provide ways to create complex structure quickly, and they can provide a lens to reflect on existing work. But how might they be successfully integrated into an au- thoring tool? In this paper I set out a design space for patterns in IDN Authoring, looking at cookbooks, patterns by design, domain specific languages, and structural parsers, and exploring whether they deliver those benefits, and also whether they support uncom- mon as well as common patterns. I show that no single approach delivers all of the benefits, but that combinations of methods could potentially do so, at the risk of increased cognitive load for authors. This initial work shows that there is significant potential in using patterns for authoring, but that more empirical work is needed to understand their affordances and interaction effects.