Rereading in Interactive Stories: Constraints on Agency and Procedural Variation

A central problem for interactive storytelling research is how to create a story which procedurally varies as the result of a user’s actions, while still feeling like a story. Research has largely concentrated on how to provide coherent variations each time a user experiences an interactive story, without consideration for the relationship between subsequent experiences. This paper examines the issues that arise when designing an interactive story system which is intended to be reread as the result of a reframing. Through a discussion of several types of reframing drawn from non-interactive films, we argue that, when an interactive story makes use of a reframing to encourage rereading, the requirements for narrative coherence, selection and ordering extend across reading sessions. This introduces constraints in terms of what can be varied procedurally in response to user actions which do not occur in interactive stories which are not explicitly designed to be reread.