Being There: Participants and Spectators in Interactive Narrative

This paper considers the problem of evaluating interactive narrative and discusses the storification process through which a narrative is internalised. It establishes the range of roles that a user may take, and argues that the participant/non-participant distinction has a key role in storification. An experiment carried out as part of a larger test of a double appraisal approach to the creation of more dramatic characters is discussed. The results show that spectators and participants mark different stories as the most interesting, showing that this role difference does indeed impact their assessment of a narrative experience. The implications for story evaluation are discussed.