Data Visualizations For Complex Computational Narratives

Computational storytelling, in both games and the larger field of interactive media, offers a wide range of new narratological forms that are otherwise impractical–or impossible–to create. A variety of systems push at these possibilities, but largely the potential narratological complexity outpaces our human ability to effectively author for them. Because of this, authors are limited not so much by the technology, but the daunting task of content creation that leverages the full affordances of the system. We posit a critical component of authoring for these systems involves visualizations of the work’s emerging shape and dynamic state, and offer an illustrative case study of a viz for a dynamic choice-based narrative system currently under development.