Digital Tools and Personal Engagement in Interactive Narrative Design

This paper presents an approach to interactive narrative design that utilizes the programming capabilities of Macromedia Flash to create web-based “storytelling edit systems” that allow the user to select and construct a narrative experience from a set of provided data ingredients. In creating such an interactive system, designers must delineate audience engagement in traditional narrative, where the creator has control over all aspects of the story, from interactive narrative, where the designer willingly relinquishes control over narrative development in order to engage its user, providing only the conceptual environment, visual interface and thematically related data ingredients in the form of animated clips that can be manipulated in Flash. This design approach incorporates elements of traditional montage theory as the foundation for transforming data into narrative components that create an emotionally fulfilling experience for the user. Through juxtaposition or association, the user assembles these fragments into a conceptual whole, thereby deriving a unique, individual meaning from the narrative sequence they construct. In this interactive paradigm, the designer must connect the objective realities of the design environment with the subjective realities of the user—their thoughts, memories, and emotions.