The Potential of Interactive Digital Narratives. Agency and Multiple Perspectives in Last Hijack Interactive

摘要

Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) have the capacity to represent multiple, even competing perspectives and to allow audiences to change between them. Such meaningful changes have been defined as agency by Murray [1] transforming the audience into interactors. These experiential qualities of interactive digital narrative (IDN) define the potential of the form to improve the representation and understanding of complex topics. In this paper, we present an initial study designed to evaluate this potential of IDN by means of the complex topic of piracy in the region of Somalia. To this end, we ran an experiment comparing interactive and non-interactive versions of Last Hijack Interactive, an award-winning Dutch interactive documentary. With this study, we contribute to the establishment of an evaluation framework that can be used to more clearly identify the potential of IDN in terms of representing and understanding complexity. We discuss the results and propose next steps.