The 18 full papers and 17 short papers, presented together with 17 posters and demos, were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. The papers are categorized into the following topical sub-headings: Narrative Systems; Interactive Narrative Theory; Interactive Narrative Impact and Application; and the Interactive Narrative Research Discipline and Contemporary Practice
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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2022, held in Santa Cruz, CA, USA, in December 2022.The 30 full papers and 10 short papers, presented together with 17 posters and demos, were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions.
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Over the past decade, journalists have created in-depth interactive narratives to provide an alternative to the relentless 24-hour news cycle. Combining different media forms, such as text, audio, video, and data visualisation with the interactive possibilities of digital media, these narratives involve users in the narrative in new ways. In journalism studies, the convergence of different media forms in this manner has gained significant attention. However, interactivity as part of this form has been left underappreciated. In this study, we scrutinise how navigational structure, expressed as navigational cues, shapes user agency in their individual explorations of the narrative. By approaching interactive narratives as story spaces with unique interactive architectures, in this article, we reconstruct the architecture of five Dutch interactive narratives using the walkthrough method. We find that the extensiveness of the interactive architectures can be described on a continuum between closed and open navigational structures that predetermine and thus shape users’ trajectories in diverse ways.
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This Professional Doctorate (PD) project explores the intersection of artistic research, digital heritage, and interactive media, focusing on the reimagining of medieval Persian bestiaries through high dark fantasy and game-making. The research investigates how the process of creation with interactive 3D media can function as a memory practice. At its core, the project treats bestiaries—pre-modern collections of real and imaginary classifications of the world—as a window into West and Central Asian flora, fauna, and the landscape of memory, serving as both repositories of knowledge and imaginative, cosmological accounts of the more-than-human world. As tools for exploring non-human pre-modern agency, bestiaries offer a medium of speculative storytelling, and explicate the unstable nature of memory in diasporic contexts. By integrating these themes into an interactive digital world, the research develops new methodologies for artistic research, treating world-building as a technique of attunement to heritage. Using a practice-based approach, the project aligns with MERIAN’s emphasis on "research in the wild," where artistic and scientific inquiries merge in experimental ways. It engages with hard-core game mechanics, mythopoetic decompressed environmental storytelling, and hand-crafted detailed intentional world-building to offer new ways of interacting with the past that challenges nostalgia and monumentalization. How can a cultural practice do justice to other, more experimental forms of remembering and encountering cultural pasts, particularly those that embrace the interconnections between human and non-human entities? Specifically, how can artistic practice, through the medium of a virtual, bestiary-inspired dark fantasy interactive media, allow for new modes of remembering that resist idealized and monumentalized histories? What forms of inquiry can emerge when technology (3D media, open-world interactive digital media) becomes a tool of attention and a site of experimental attunement to cosmological heritage?
Inside Out is an innovative research project that translates cutting-edge microbiome science into immersive, multisensory experiences aimed at long-term behavioral and mental health transformation. Combining extended reality (XR), speculative gastronomy, and narrative therapy, the project enables participants to explore their inner microbiome landscape through taste, smell, touch, and interactive storytelling. This pioneering methodology connects gut-brain science with emotional and sensory engagement. Participants experience their bodies from the inside out, cultivating a visceral understanding of the symbiotic microbial worlds within us. The project includes AI-generated "drinkable memories," microbiome-inspired food designs, haptic-olfactory VR environments, and robotic interactions that choreograph the body as terrain. Developed in collaboration with designers from Polymorf, producer Studio Biarritz, psychiatrist-researcher Anja Lok, and microbiome scientists from Amsterdam UMC and the Amsterdam Microbiome Expertise Center, Inside Out bridges scientific rigor with artistic expression. The project seeks to: • Increase embodied understanding of the microbiome’s role in health and well-being • Shift public perception from hygiene-based fear to ecological thinking • Inspire behavioral change related to food, gut health, and mental resilience The outcomes are designed to reach a large audience and implementation in science museums, art-science festivals, and educational programs, with a view toward future clinical applications in preventive healthcare and mental well-being. By making the invisible microbiome tangible, Inside Out aims not only to inform, but to transform—redefining how we relate to the ecosystems within us.
We had been involved in the redesign of the 4 Period Rooms of the Marquise Palace, also called the Palace of Secrets, in Bergen op Zoom. This design was based on the biography of a historical figure: Marie Anne van Arenberg, whose dramatic life was marked by secrets. Each of the 4 rooms represents a turning moment in Marie Anne’s story: the official marriage, the secret marriage and the betrayal, the dilemma and choice, with, in a final room, the epilogue. These different episodes are reflected in the way the rooms are furnished: the ballroom, the bedroom, the dining room. The Secret Marquise as design and exhibition has brought more visitors to the museum. As designers and researchers, however, we were interested in understanding more about this success, and, in particular, in understanding the visitors experience, both emotionally and sensorially at different moments/situations during the story-driven experience.In the fall of 2021, the visitors’ lived experience was evaluated using different approaches: a quantitative approach using biometric measurements to register people’s emotions during their visit, and a qualitative one consisting of a combination of observations, visual imagery, and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).Qualitatively, our aim was to understand how respondents made sense of Marie Anne’s story in the way in which this was presented throughout the exhibition. We specifically looked at the personal context and frame of reference (e.g., previous experiences, connection to the visitor’s own life story, associations with other stories from other sources). In the design of the rooms, we used a combination of digital/interactive elements (such as a talking portrait, an interactive dinner table, an interactive family painting), and traditional physical objects (some 17th century original objects, some reproductions from that time). The second focal point of the study is to understand how these different elements lead the visitors experience.
