Further on down the digital road: Narrative design and reading pleasure in five New Media Writing Prize narratives

Abstract

In 2006 and 2010, I published papers in Convergence, which analysed readers’ responses to several interactive narratives: From this research, I formed a set of ‘assessment’ criteria for such narratives, intended to be of use to writers, academics and teachers, looking for ways to understand how readers might react to the very new and changing forms of digital storytelling, which continue to surprise, delight and puzzle readers. Despite huge technical advances, and although some recent examples are doing well commercially, digital interactive narrative remains largely unknown to the general reading public (who nonetheless love their novels, films and games). This article reviews a very specific set of interactive narratives – those which have been shortlisted for the international New Media Writing Prize – against the criteria I established in the 2010 paper. These are cutting edge, exemplar works, which one might suppose demonstrate the best of everything that new-media storytelling can offer. I revisit my criteria in the light of technical and creative developments over the past 5 years, using the responses of volunteer readers to aid my own evaluation of the pieces under discussion. Overall, I argue that many of the issues I previously found to be a barrier to readers have been overcome, but that there are still problems for readers, which writers/developers need to consider.

Interactive digital narrative (IDN)—a complexity case

“…They address the mental relations between perceiver and the narrator and character, for example via point of view, dialogue, description of action and body language and conveyance of emotion. Empirical studies on these cognitive processes have been conducted by [73,74]. In relation to authoring see for example [75].…”

Conectividad, hipermedialidad y multimodalidad: de la cultura digital al espacio escolar

“…En el campo de la literatura hipermedial, "la era digital no solo está ampliando los medios y métodos de cómo leemos y escribimos, sino también la noción de lo 'literario'" (Gorman, 2017, p. 1). En este contexto se encuentran múltiples propuestas de narrativa hipertextual o hyper-literature 7 , que, tal como lo expone Pope (2017), han superado muchas de las barreras implícitas para los lectores de estas narrativas, aunque tales impedimentos no hayan desaparecido totalmente: "A pesar de los grandes avances técnicos y, aunque algunos ejemplos recientes están funcionando bien comercialmente, la narrativa digital interactiva sigue siendo en gran parte desconocida para el público lector general" (p. 1).…”

Percepción social del periodismo en España

“…La evolución de las narrativas multimedia (Pope, 2020), de las narrativas inmersivas (Kukkakorpi y Pantti, 2020), del transmedia (Javanshir, Carroll y Millard, 2020) y el impacto de la inteligencia artificial en la comunicación (Broussard et al, 2019) advertían de importantes cambios en el escenario digital en la recta final de la segunda década del tercer milenio. En este contexto algunas de las innovaciones llegaban desde los entornos periodísticos y desde el paraperiodismo o periodismo emergente en redes sociales en los últimos años (Hermida y Mellado, 2020), así como desde la respuesta a los nuevos desafíos a los que se deben enfrentan los medios de comunicación para entrar en redes sociales de última generación (Vázquez-Herrero, Negreira-Rey & López-García, 2020).…”