Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Interactivity refers to the degree to which users of a medium can influence the form
or content of the mediated environment. While, agency refers to the empowerment of
the user to take meaningful actions in the world which effect relate to her intention
[10]. The motivation for a user to act in an interactive narrative may be very different
from common interaction with a product or in gaming. In interactive storytelling,
source for agency may be the ability to navigate and to influence the environment, to
interact with characters or to have an effect on the course of events and outcome of
the narrative. Feedback and feedforward are one of the most common used design
principles in interaction design. Through feedback the user receives information about
the effectiveness of her action, whereas feedforward communicates what kind of
action is possible and how it can be carried out.
We use the third stage “Eat me, drink me” from the ALICE project [2], to explore the
challenges in designing an interactive narrative. The ALICE installation consists of six
consecutive stages, creating an experience based on selected parts from the novel
“Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” by L. Carroll [3]. The user takes the role of the
character Alice and experiences the sequence of emotional and behavioral states as
Alice did in the narrative. In this paper we present the technical and storytelling
mechanisms and we study the effects of interactivity on the user experience. A between
subjects experiment was conducted to explore potential differences in sense of presence,
agency and satisfaction with different levels of interactivity. The independent variable
was the interaction environment. We hypothesize that an interactive setting should lead
to higher levels of presence, agency and satisfaction.
After reviewing relevant research, we present the experimental setup and results
regarding the relation between these variables of interactivity, presence and agency,
resulting in several conclusions in the last paragraph.
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Related Work
Existing physically interactive spaces usually implement full body interaction,
augmentation of a physical space or manipulation of real, physical objects. The MIT
Media Lab created several physically interactive story environments, that used a
“less-choice, more responsiveness” approach to engage physically the users as
characters in a story; concluding that “compelling interactive narrative story systems
can be perceived as highly responsive, engaging and interactive” [8]. Dow et. al.,
present results of a qualitative, empirical study by using augmented reality(AR)
interactive drama AR Facade [5], which showed that “immersive AR can create an
increased sense of presence”, and “increased presence does not necessarily lead to
more engagement” [4]. The multimodal mixed reality installation, Synthetic Oracle, is
used for an empirical research that indicates the importance of the choice of
interaction mode and shows that “the activity level and behavior of users modulates
their experience, and that in turn, the interaction mode modulates their behavior” [1].
This empirical research suggests that the interactivity and interaction type can have an
impact on the behavior and the personal experience of the user. It is important to
further evaluate and quantify the experiences from empirical perspective. In the next
section we describe the setup of the “Eat me, drink me” stage and the results from the
experiment that involved 41 participants.
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