Interactive Digital Storytelling: Towards a Hybrid Conceptual Approach

Interactive Digital Storytelling: Towards a Hybrid Conceptual Approach argues that interactive storytelling is best understood not as a single concept but as a hybrid of game design and cinematic narrative, shaped by influences from computer animation, human-computer interaction, game design, and artificial intelligence. Its central thesis is that the meaning and quality of interactive storytelling depend on how, where, and to what degree user input shapes the narrative, and that authors must negotiate a persistent tension between predefined story structure and user agency. The author maintains that this balance can be refined only through play-testing rather than resolved in theory alone.

To make this tension tractable, the work proposes a four-level conceptual model covering Plot/Outline, Scene, Dialogue/Action, and Animation/Presentation. Adapted from a linear animation production pipeline and extended with rules and autonomous agents, the model assigns an "autonomy slider" to each level, allowing interactive storytelling forms to be classified by where and how much agency users are granted. The Geist project serves as an illustrative case, offering users agency only at the lowest level while the overarching plot remains fixed. The author presents this framework as an accessible entry point for creators arriving from linear media and education, while acknowledging that it classifies only certain game forms and does not comprehensively map the field.

The practical grounding for these ideas comes from experiments such as art-E-fact, Scenejo, and Geist, which combine scripted narrative structures with emergent, chatbot-driven conversation. These prototypes rely on graph-based dialogue authoring and AIML pattern matching to couple authored content with responsive character interaction. The surrounding scholarship, drawn from a bibliography spanning roughly 2001 to 2005 and including works such as Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck, Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, and Mateas and Stern's Façade, situates the study within ongoing debates about emergent authorship and natural-language interaction with AI agents.