Acting, Playing, or Talking about the Story: An Annotation Scheme for Communication during Interactive Digital Storytelling

In this paper we investigate the communication of children playing with an interactive digital storytelling system. What users say during their interaction with a digital storytelling system can tell us much about how they relate to the characters and how engrossed they are in the storytelling activity. We propose a communication annotation scheme that combines ideas about framing from research on pretend play and role-playing games, and use it to analyse children’s utterances gathered in a small-scale user experiment. Our results show that certain kinds of communication are prevalent among the children’s interactions. We conclude that this can be attributed to the design of our system, and we envisage future use of the annotation scheme to inform the design of other interactive storytelling systems.