Exploration of Emotion Perception in Serious Interactive Digital Narrative

Abstract

The procedural process of children’s emotional involvement in the interactive digital narrative conforms to children’s emotional attachment to the story and enhances the mediating nature of learning through forced interactivity. This study explores how compelling arcs influence learners’ preference for serious story content by using a combination of natural language processing methods and statistical analysis methods. By analyzing 474 Chinese short serious stories, the emotional trajectory of each story is generated. Then, the obtained trajectories are combined into clusters of serious story emotional groupings through supervised learning. The study results found that the emotional arc in serious stories can be divided into six basic shapes, and the serious story with the highest preference is the “N”-shaped emotional arc. Emotional ups and downs characterize the emotional narrative aspect of this type of serious story as the story progresses but with an apparent emotional uptick towards the end of the story. Based on experimentally derived emotional topology and narrative generation methods, this paper proposes the design strategies for future emotional arcs to apply to serious interactive digital narratives.