The Role of Gender and Age on User Preferences in Narrative Experiences

Storytelling is interactive storytellers seldom recite the same content, instead, they adapt the narrative to their audience. Storytellers both introduce new topics from time to time, and elaborate on the topics the audience has previously shown interest on. In our previous work, we created a digital storytelling system that simulates this process. The goal of this work is to investigate what is a good balance between the novel topics and the audience’s existing interests. We conducted an empirical evaluation using our digital storytelling system. Distinct preferences were observed in relation to both age and gender, with women in general enjoying a more gradual shift in the presentation of novel material.