Further on down the digital road: Narrative design and reading pleasure in five New Media Writing Prize narratives

Abstract

In 2006 and 2010, I published papers in Convergence, which analysed readers’ responses to several interactive narratives: From this research, I formed a set of ‘assessment’ criteria for such narratives, intended to be of use to writers, academics and teachers, looking for ways to understand how readers might react to the very new and changing forms of digital storytelling, which continue to surprise, delight and puzzle readers. Despite huge technical advances, and although some recent examples are doing well commercially, digital interactive narrative remains largely unknown to the general reading public (who nonetheless love their novels, films and games). This article reviews a very specific set of interactive narratives – those which have been shortlisted for the international New Media Writing Prize – against the criteria I established in the 2010 paper. These are cutting edge, exemplar works, which one might suppose demonstrate the best of everything that new-media storytelling can offer. I revisit my criteria in the light of technical and creative developments over the past 5 years, using the responses of volunteer readers to aid my own evaluation of the pieces under discussion. Overall, I argue that many of the issues I previously found to be a barrier to readers have been overcome, but that there are still problems for readers, which writers/developers need to consider.