The paper considers the recent academic struggle between the "narratologists" and the "ludologists", and argues that it was exacerbated by two sources of confusion. The first confusion was differing concepts of immersion as an outcome of mediated experience. "Suspension of disbelief" and "flow" are both immersive states, but they grow out of fundamentally different processes of engagement. The ...

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture, one of the fundamental frameworks by which people view the world and comprehend their experiences. As computers and the Internet play an ever-increasing role in social interaction, education, and entertainment, they introduce novel opportunities for sharing, creating, and understanding stories. The last several years have seen growing interest a...

Objectives: It has been suggested that mental illness threatens identity and sense of self when one’s personal story is displaced by dominant illness narratives focussing on deficit and dysfunction. One role of therapy, therefore, is to allow individuals to re-story their life in a more positive way which facilitates the reconstruction of a meaningful identity and sense of self. This research e...

Although narratives often contain detailed descriptions of space and setting and readers frequently report vividly imagining these story worlds, evidence for the construction of spatial representations during narrative processing is currently mixed. In the present study, we investigated 7 year old children’s ability to construct spatial representations of narrative spaces and compared this to t...

In this two-year longitudinal study, we sought to examine the developmental relationships among early narrative listening comprehension and language skills (i.e., vocabulary knowledge, sentence memory, and phonological awareness) and the roles of these factors in predicting narrative listening comprehension at the age of 6 years. We also sought to examine the role of inference-making skills as ...

A growing body of work in games research, both generative and analytic, seeks to characterize the relationship between a player’s understanding of an interactive narrative and her options for action within it. This paper provides several definitions that collectively serve as a basis for a model of the user’s comprehension of an unfolding story in a game. Central to this approach, we define the...

This paper describes an approach for the elicitation and application of authorial goals for interactive narrative. A framework is presented for using author input to elaborate descriptions of planning problems and domains. The authors describe a mixed-initiative graphical user interface that exploits this framework to allow authors to express narrative goals and understand how these goals affec...