The Authoring Problem

Authoring, its tools, processes, and design challenges are key issues for the Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) research community. The complexity of IDN authoring, often involving stories co-created by procedures and user interaction, creates confusion for tool developers and raises barriers for new authors.

This book examines these issues from both the tool designer and the author's perspective, discusses the poetics of IDN and how that can be used to design authoring tools, explores diverse forms of IDN and their demands, and investigates the challenges around conducting research on IDN authoring.

To address these challenges, the chapter authors incorporate a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on 'The Authoring Problem' in IDN. While existing texts provide 'how-to' guidance for authors, this book is a primer for research and practice-based investigations into the authoring problem, collecting the latest thoughts about this area from key researchers and practitioners.

Dr. Charlie Hargood is an academic in games technology in the department of creative technology at Bournemouth University. He is an internationally recognised expert in interactive narrative and Hypertext. He has long been a contributor to the ACM Hypertext conference where he runs the Narrative and Hypertext workshop, and has twice won the Englebert prize for Hypertext research. His recent research has focused on locative narrative and the UX of authoring tools and he was the technical lead of the StoryPlaces project.