Character-Driven Narrative Engine: Storytelling System for Building Interactive Narrative Experiences

Key insights

6 takeaways

01
The research program at Politecnico di Milano (2015–2017, with a fourth edition in progress) involved roughly 150 MSc design students developing interactive, character-driven narratives, with findings drawn from qualitative ethnographic observation rather than quantitative audience measurement.
02
Standard character-development tools such as Vogler's archetypes, the Storyworld Canvas, and the Character Wheel helped build characters but proved insufficient for designing interactive narrative structures, prompting the authors to move beyond them.
03
Beginning from existing literary sources, such as Calvino's Invisible Cities, improved the completeness and consistency of storyworlds compared with starting from Tarot-archetype characters, which students found hard to make credible.
04
Requiring students to outline an Interactive Narrative Architecture at mid-term substantially improved audience interaction, and the existing Story Map was inadequate once branching complexity grew, leading to a decision-tree-based planning tool.
05
Transmedia projects spread across platforms: Théodora – Outside the Walls ran on Facebook across six events, while 404 Found, built from migrants' testimonies, spanned four digital chapters and two in-person events.
06
Student projects clustered into three categories: social media and situated storytelling, interactive ludic storyworlds, and real-world interactive narratives.

Summary

This document presents a practice-based research program conducted at Politecnico di Milano between 2015 and 2017, with a fourth edition in progress, in which roughly 150 MSc design students developed interactive, character-driven narratives. Its central argument is that narrative is often underused in game design compared with mechanics and aesthetics, and that the affordances of media should be treated as generative design drivers rather than constraints. The work draws on ethnographic observation of student prototypes and analysis of university evaluation reports, and it situates its contribution in the design studio rather than in quantitative audience measurement.

The research unfolded across three successive design experiments. In the first year, students used Tarot archetypes to create characters inspired by statues of Milan's Cathedral, producing nine projects, including the location-based game Dome Crime. Students struggled to make these characters credible and to build deep interactive structures, prompting a shift in the second year to Calvino's Invisible Cities as a storyworld source, which yielded eight projects such as the RPG Théodora – Outside the Walls. The authors concluded that established character-development tools, including Vogler's archetypes, the Storyworld Canvas, and the Character Wheel, were useful for building characters but insufficient for designing interactive narrative structures.

Subsequent studios pursued a transmedia approach. Théodora – Outside the Walls ran on Facebook across six events, while 404 Found, built from migrants' testimonies, spanned four digital chapters and two in-person events. As branching complexity grew, the existing Story Map proved inadequate, which led to the development of an "Interactive Narrative Architecture" tree-diagram tool for planning story structure, media distribution, and audience touch-points. These findings are qualitative, and the work reports no quantitative engagement data.

Over three years of the course, the authors found that beginning from existing narratives rather than archetypal characters improved the completeness and consistency of storyworlds, and that mid-term requirements to outline an Interactive Narrative Architecture substantially improved audience interaction. Student projects clustered into social media and situated storytelling, interactive ludic storyworlds, and real-world interactive narratives. The authors conclude with a toolkit combining Vogler's archetypes, the Storyworld Canvas and Story Map, and decision-tree-based Interactive Narrative Architectures.