Högskolan i Skövde

In our current research project we develop a critical framework to facilitate the design and the critique of audio-based interactive narrative experiences. We foreground deep material connections to sound and affect as well as to the rhetorical and narrative properties of story/voice as a vehicle for storytelling. We draw inspiration for our framework from a range of philosophical, theoretical and aesthetic influences including posthumanism, new material feminism, affect studies, interaction design, as well as sound design and interactive and traditional narrative research. Our framework is intended to aid in the design of such audio-based artifacts to support embodied user experiences where affect is a key principle to support innovative material storytelling/deep listening with sound as the primary vehicle for delivery. To facilitate deeper understanding of the framework, we apply it to three original audio-based narratives we created to assess them preliminarily in terms of the four key areas we identify to understand affective narrative audio-based media: Temporality, Mediation, Interaction, and Embodiment/Material Experience. In future research we hope to expand and apply our model to other sound based works and to undergo more intensive user-testing. 

In this paper, we reflect on the design of an interactive audio-based digital narrative experience called Sisters. This work is designed for a single interactor, constructed as a mobile AR experience using graphic illustrations on a deck of player cards in connection with abstract audio activated by trigger images on the cards. An interactor is asked to cluster series of cards together into different abstract environments, based on sounds associated with each card, meant to represent spaces in an interior/exterior domestic site, a house and its immediate surroundings. The work conveys experiences of 4 family members in a complex abusive household, mediating between scenes of normalcy, love, companionship, and violence. The core focus of the work is to explore fragmented and very personal states of being and memories derived from an outsider’s perspective (the interactor), who co-experiences the complexities of the domestic spaces at a ‘safe’ distance, while also gaining empathy and affective connections to the characters. Connecting the content of the work and its fragmentary and elusive material audio and narrative design to our design model, the New Material/Spectral Morphology Model, we share how it may be used for aesthetic composition. Our model is based on feminist new material perspectives and foundational work from electroacoustic production and audio experimentation. Sisters extends our previous work with sound-based narrative, and we demonstrate how this work affirms our design strategies for novel interactive audio experiences. 

This two-volume set LNCS 14383 and LNCS 14384 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2023, held in Kobe, Japan, during November 11–15, 2023.

The 30 full papers presented in this book together with 11 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. Additionally, the proceedings includes 22 Late Breaking Works. 

The papers focus on topics such as: theory, history and foundations; social and cultural contexts; tools and systems; interactive narrative design; virtual worlds, performance, games and play; applications and case studies; and late breaking works.

This two-volume set LNCS 14383 and LNCS 14384 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2023, held in Kobe, Japan, during November 11–15, 2023.

The 30 full papers presented in this book together with 11 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. Additionally, the proceedings includes 22 Late Breaking Works. 

The papers focus on topics such as: theory, history and foundations; social and cultural contexts; tools and systems; interactive narrative design; virtual worlds, performance, games and play; applications and case studies; and late breaking works.

In this article we share Simmer (2019), an entirely handmade two-sided artist book and MR (mixed reality) application created in collaboration with composer Brendan Padgett, and excerpts from our related scholarship on movable books, active readership, digital media, and design. Simmer explores and expands John Cheever’s classic short story, “The Swimmer” (1964), and won the Excellence in Innovation jury award at the International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) Art Exhibition inSalt Lake City, Utah in November 2019. While Cheever’s landmark story crafts an expert portrayal of its narcissistic protagonist Ned Merrill, Ned’s wife (Lucinda) and four unnamed daughters are left unexplored. This untold fe- male side of the story was the focus of Simmer, where we bring to life a host of underdeveloped characters and engage the reader through both interactive paper and digital structures that work in combination to tell a new side of the story. 

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2022). ICIDS is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners concerned with studying digital interactive forms of narrative from avariety of perspectives, including theoretical, technological, and applied design lenses.The annual conference is an interdisciplinary gathering that combines technology focused approaches with humanities-inspired theoretical inquiry, empirical research, and artistic expression. This year’s conference was built around the central theme of ‘Speculative Horizons’. With this theme we were motivated to consider the future and its relationship to interactive digital storytelling.

In this article, we reflect on the design and implementation of an interactive transhistorical and transmedial web-based digital narrative audio experience, PATTER(n)INGS: Apt 3B, 2020 that we developed in 2020. This work is an immersive audio-only application, and it focuses on the complex, material living conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing inspiration from PATTER(n)INGS and its complex, material audio and narrative design, we propose a model for creating the content and delivery for similar sound-based interactive digital narratives. Our proposed model focuses primarily on the creative process for designing such sound-based work. To construct our analytical model, the New Material/Spectral Morphology Design Model (or NM/SM Design Model), we draw on theoretical influences from critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism and non-human narrative that critique notions of stable subjectivity as sites for power and authority over semiotic meaning-making. We combine these views with foundational theoretical research in electroacoustic musical composition notation, and audio experimentation that complicate notions of sound, sound making, spatial perception, psychoacoustic phenomena, and listening practices. Together, this theoretical/compositional framework provides a unique method to consider how one can sustain and maximize sonic agents as core phenomena to create anti-cognitive worlds and stories.

In this paper we look at examples of creative, emergent and performative practices in readership. Starting with the history of the book, and including a discussion of a range of reader practices we make connections with our own creative practice as designers of interactive mixed reality movable books today. A theoretical frame for characterizing the reader today as postdigital is presented to push back against commonly held beliefs about the act of reading as passive or somehow less creative or enacted compared with digital technologies. Finally, our own interactive movable book project Simmer is discussed as a means to bridge historical methods and materials with the digital, and a set of design strategies are provided in support of postdigital readership.

Games are trouble. As faculty members in a Game Development program we are aware of the troubles. As inside–outsiders, given our status as queer women in the male-dominated Games field, both with interdisciplinary art-tech-humanities backgrounds as opposed to STEM, we are the ones commonly tasked with ‘fixing’ these troubles. This tasking comes to us in the form of both assumptions and requests about our providing particular types of education to others, both faculty and students, as fixes to Game-troubles: teaching the gender module; sitting on an LGBTQ+ committee; advising a particular student who is also outside the more comfortable purview of Games; and so forth. While our labor is often assumed, it is not fully valued, evidenced by the ways in which it is chronically under-resourced. And, given this lack of sustainability, our labor is not effective in the ways we intend. Often, our fixes only serve to a fix ourselves, further cementing us as outsiders. Our fixes are diluted until they become performative gestures, absolving others of the need to act, but changing little else. Acting ‘in a fix’ is something we no longer wish to do. Instead we untangle and re-tangle in a new way, drawing on the work of Feminist New Materialists (Ahmed, 2008; Alaimo, 2016; Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2011; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Coole and Frost, 2010; Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012; Grosz, 1994; Kirby, 1997) to develop imaginative new models for a more just and joyful future Games pedagogy. We share not only our research on this topic, but also invite you into our own intimate experiences of play-making, foregrounding this as knowledge-making too. We offer these crossings between text and context, history and future Ahmed, 2008, memory and fiction as a speculative fabulation for future Games pedagogies.