David Millard

Over a decade ago I co-founded the Narrative and Hypertext workshop at ACM Hypertext with Charlie Hargood, and it’s run almost every year since. The workshop is a highlight of the conference for me, as it’s somewhere where you can discuss ideas and viewpoints (whereas the main tracks tend to be reserved for completed research). When Charlie and I started attending ICIDS we helped to establish a sister workshop with a similar philosophy, the Authoring for Interactive Storytelling workshop founded with Alex Mitchell and Ulrike Spierling, focussed on one of the reoccurring topics at NHT: how can we create systems that help people author complex interactive narrative?

It’s not a simple question. All narrative requires a grasp of character, plot, and a mastery of prose, but interactive narrative demands more. It needs the author to simultaneously hold multiple paths in their head at once, it requires a careful management of agency, it needs multiple overlapping states to be set up and managed. Doing all of this whilst building an imaginative world is tremendously demanding, and draws on skills that might otherwise be found in game design or programming. How can we understand this process, how can we support it, and how can we open it up to a wider group of people so that more diverse stories can be told?

In 2020 we decided to focus the AIS workshop on a potential book on The Authoring Problem. Our aim was to try to capture the state of the art in this critical aspect of Interactive Digital Narratives, involving contributors from Hypertext, ICIDS, and the worlds of Game Design. This year, those efforts can to fruition with the publication of that book with Springer. The book is aimed at researchers, developers, scholars, and reflective practitioners.

The final text has surpassed our expectations. It comes in four sections:

1. Authors and Processes. Contains chapters about the experience of authoring, from a deconstruction of the processes and burdens encountered by interactive authors, to the broader history of the field, and the current reality in terms on online communities and publishing.
2. Content. Covers issues around writing for interactivity and replay, explores non-linear patterns and visual maps, and discusses category fiction.
3. Form. Goes into issues around the different types of interactive fiction, looking at story sifting in emergent narratives, mapping in navigational hypertexts, and exploring the relationships that are possible with AI, location and play.
4. Research Issues. Explores some of the outstanding questions about conducting research into authoring. From dealing with interdisciplinary and ethics, to evaluation challenges, and quantitative analysis.

My own contribution was ‘Strange Patterns: Structure and Post-structure in Interactive Digital Narratives‘, in which I explain the tradition in Hypertext and IDN of identifying common patterns in the interactive structure, present a compendium of more than 100 patterns at the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis, and discuss the implications of taking such a structuralist stance to analysis and authoring. In particular I present Uncommon Patterns (an idea I published a few years ago with my PhD student Callum Spawforth) as a potential solution to any post-structural challenge to patterns.

While the chapter is founded on the idea that patterns can be applied to authoring, I did not have the space in the chapter to outline exactly how, and so in last years NHT workshop I published a paper outlining some of the possibilities, including cookbooks, patterns by design, domain specific languages, and structural parsers. You can find details on the workshop and my presentation online here.

We are very proud of the book that our authors have produced. It contains some of the best state-of-the-art accounts of issues around IDN and authoring that currently exist, and I very much hope it is of use to you in your own work and research.