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Narrative support for young game designers’ writing

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conference contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 20:57 authored by Kate HowlandKate Howland, Judith Good, Benedict du Boulay
Creating narrative-based computer games is a complex and challenging task. Narrative Threads is a suite of software tools designed to aid young people (aged 11-15) in creating their own narrative-based games as a writing development activity. A participatory design process highlighted the areas where additional support was required, and informed the iterative design of Narrative Threads. The tools are implemented as a plugin to a commercial game creation toolset, and constitute character and object design tools, a branching narrative diagramming tool and an augmented story map view. In this paper, we provide an overview of the design of the tools and describe an evaluation carried out with 14 children over a four-day workshop. The study examined tool usage patterns, and compared games created with Narrative Threads to those created using the standard toolset. The results suggest a number of ways in which dynamic external representations of story elements can support writing activities in narrative-based game creation. Young designers using Narrative Threads wrote more character dialogue, made stronger links between the conversations they wrote and wider game events, and designed more complex characters, compared to those using the standard toolset. In addition to showing how Narrative Threads can support young games designers, the results have broader implications for anyone looking to support storytelling and writing through game creation activities and tools.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

IDC '15 Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Page range

178-187

Event name

14th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Event location

Boston

Event type

conference

Event date

June 21-24 2015

ISBN

9781450335904

Department affiliated with

  • Informatics Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2015-06-29

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-08-09

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2015-06-29

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