Measuring User Responses to Interactive Stories: Towards a Standardized Assessment Tool

With the increasing number of prototypes and market applications of interactive storytelling, the understanding and optimization of how end users respond to computer-mediated interactive narratives is of growing importance. Based on a conceptual model of user experiences in interactive storytelling, a measurement instrument for empirical user-based research was developed. We report findings from an initial test of the self-report scales that was conducted with N=80 players of the adventure game “Fahrenheit”. Interactivity was manipulated experimentally in order to validate the measures. Results suggest that the scales will be useful for comparing user responses to ‘real’ interactive storytelling systems.