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Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative
This remarkably clearly written and timely critical evaluation of core issues in the study and application of interactive digital narrative (IDN) untangles the range of theories and arguments that have developed around IDN over the past three decades. Looking back over the past 30 years of theorizing around interactivity, storytelling, and the digital across the fields of game design/game studies, media studies, and narratology, as well as interactive documentary and other emerging forms, this text offers important and insightful correctives to common misunderstandings that pervade the field. This book also changes the perspective on IDN by introducing a comprehensive conceptual framework influenced by cybernetics and cognitive narratology, addressing limitations of perspectives originally developed for legacy media forms. Applying its framework, the book analyzes successful works and lays out concrete design advice, providing instructors, students, and practitioners with a more precise and specific understanding of IDN. This will be essential reading for courses in interactive narrative, interactive storytelling, and game writing, as well as digital media more generally.
192 pages, Paperback
Published April 8, 2023
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December 26, 2025
The practical wisdom in this book is competently arranged and relatively useful, which is the main factor in my not rating this book any lower despite my problems with the theory behind it, which reads like it was written in 2012, at least from a videogame specialist's perspective.
The complex and uncomfortable truth of interactive narrative is that it is as old as humanity with all the baggage that entails, and the complex and uncomfortable paradoxes of interactive digital narrative are that (1) they often fail to draw from this aeons-old tradition, and (2) their medium, being the computer (which leverages software and audience inputs to create audiovisual presentation), makes that a more difficult proposition than it has historically been in other media.
These concerns are all treated with due consideration of their complexity and their discomfort in earlier works such as those by Galloway (2006), Mukherjee (2015) and even Murray (1997) and Bogost (2006, 2007, 2015), for all the philosophical failings of the latter two. In fact, this book treats Mukherjee's work at some length, but accuses him of having a simplified and "non-interactive" conception of videogame narrative that is contorted to fit into a humanities framework, which I find deeply unfair and reductive. As soon as someone like Mukherjee puts in the work to tie videogames to their roots and integrate them more organically into our human experience, scholars like the present author jump on him with the "gotcha" that he's being neglectful of this aspect or that consideration in pursuit of an agenda. Perhaps my opinion on this matter will also be criticized for having a "humanities agenda," to which I simply reply, no, I have a "human" agenda—what all humans should have if they want to make sense of anything as human beings, as Bogost's failed ontology reveals—, not a "humanities" one. Ontologically speaking videogames are inseparable from their reality as software, but to suggest this distinction markedly separates them into a different category from all previous human culture is a horrifically inhuman and thus useless point of view. There is no progress in such an academic mindset, only put-downs and endless circling. I can bring up other reductionisms, and cannot bring up some others due to lacking familiarity with them myself, but the point should be crystal clear just from this instance.
This point is also driven home by the author's criteria for distinguishing IDN from books, being the presence of computers with software, and participation/interaction. Never minding that there are many other criteria that can be squeezed in alongside these, the author also doesn't take these criteria to their logical conclusions, for if he did he would realize that such a separation is ontological, not epistemological, and that there is no need to separate IDNs from other forms so starkly in order to better understand them—in fact, such a separation limits our understanding. What the computer and software provide, at the end of the day, can be called by names such as prodecurality, algorithmicity, systemicity, conditionality etc., all of which are not only fully present in, say, oral storytelling, but very well simulated and leveraged in "non-interactive works" such as medieval/early modern romance works and postmodern/metamodern novels as well. The participation/interaction dimension, on the other hand, is just a medium-specific form of interpretation. I do not subscribe to the interactivity 1/2 distinction for this reason; it is only a matter of shifting agency towards the player by degrees, not by type/quality, and this shift is facilitated by technology, medium and design allowing audience action, like how film added sound and motion to photography, or added cuts, transportability and perspective shifts to theatre, via these same tools, changing the audience's role to a more active one. These arbitrary criteria by themselves reveal that books and IDN have more in common than they have differences; they also reveal that there is no need of a separate theory of IDNs to consolidate a grander vision of narrative theory—rather than integrating every new form of storytelling in sequence, we need to derive their commonalities and see what these reveal about the nature of storytelling, play, human culture, and other related fields. While the concerns of this book are worthy considerations for a practicioner, they are only temporarily and selectively applicable models that end up blocking access to the underlying reality.
Distractions from this reality are, however, built into our modern conceptions of storytelling. The commodification of art under capitalism, the audiovisual allures of cinema, as well as the patriarchically-driven authorial idealism created by centuries of literary criticism that enforces an idea of "art as artifact" delegitimizing constructive and interpretive engagement with stories, are the main factors creating these issues of interpreting and categorizing IDNs. Game studies have been taking steps to add a touch of postmodern deconstructivism to these ideas, as though taking an axe to a forest, but that has necessitated that we now start regrowing the forest in the organic, healthy way that it demanded all along, via getting IDNs back in touch with their prehistoric roots. Unfortunately, we are in need of a very unconventional perspective to be able to achieve this, being that of someone versed in both folklore and play—someone like Brian Sutton-Smith (as unfortunately deconstructive and disinterested in storytelling in general as he was), Italo Calvino, Pertev Naili Boratav, Marie-Louise von Franz, or Alan Dundes (who is pleasantly referenced in the book, but not exactly in the most useful way). We need a perspective that is deeply in touch with the open-ended, ever-changing nature of storytelling at its core. Hartmut Koenitz is, sadly, not that person, and despite showing some awareness, he doesn't even really get close to being that person.
All in all, this book resembles an academic treadmill of sorts, failing to build meaningfully on the decades of study that precede it and framing long-solved problems as ongoing, when it should have taken a bold move forward. Perhaps the greatest indictment on the book, and the one which best illustrates my point, is how the author accuses current perspectives on IDN as "Eurocentric", while also failing to even mention a single non-European or non-American videogame in the entire book (other than a single activistic/serious game and a throwaway mention of the gacha game Genshin Impact, for some reason, neither of which provide any additional insight). My point isn't to accuse him of lacking diversity—the appearance of games like The Path and Wildermyth were a pleasant surprise—, but rather to make the point that the author lacks self-awareness and fails to engage critically with his own ideas to the extent that he engages with others' writings, this latter engagement being excessively and destructively critical, in my opinion. This is the mentality that leads this book to proclaiming Dear Esther and Detroit: Become Human as "good" cases of IDN (they are, in some ways, but calling them stand-outs shows a worrying lack of media literacy) without so much as mentioning works like Metal Gear Solid 3, Bloodborne or Pathologic. There are simply too many other such cases to go over, so I will leave the specific criticisms at that.
I hope future studies in the field pause their wrestling with the form itself for a while and start actually considering whether the form is actually being leveraged for great storytelling, and how. That way we can perhaps stop talking about bloated spectacle pieces like Quantic Dream games as though they are competently told and effective stories that stand up to great works in other narrative forms, and actually realize what it is that the medium is best equipped to deliver, as well as why it succeeds/fails when it does. With some luck and with proper focus, this kind of shift will in turn point the way forward for the true nature of the medium—the nature that its great practitioners are already in touch with, but academics keep circling but never seem to reach.
The complex and uncomfortable truth of interactive narrative is that it is as old as humanity with all the baggage that entails, and the complex and uncomfortable paradoxes of interactive digital narrative are that (1) they often fail to draw from this aeons-old tradition, and (2) their medium, being the computer (which leverages software and audience inputs to create audiovisual presentation), makes that a more difficult proposition than it has historically been in other media.
These concerns are all treated with due consideration of their complexity and their discomfort in earlier works such as those by Galloway (2006), Mukherjee (2015) and even Murray (1997) and Bogost (2006, 2007, 2015), for all the philosophical failings of the latter two. In fact, this book treats Mukherjee's work at some length, but accuses him of having a simplified and "non-interactive" conception of videogame narrative that is contorted to fit into a humanities framework, which I find deeply unfair and reductive. As soon as someone like Mukherjee puts in the work to tie videogames to their roots and integrate them more organically into our human experience, scholars like the present author jump on him with the "gotcha" that he's being neglectful of this aspect or that consideration in pursuit of an agenda. Perhaps my opinion on this matter will also be criticized for having a "humanities agenda," to which I simply reply, no, I have a "human" agenda—what all humans should have if they want to make sense of anything as human beings, as Bogost's failed ontology reveals—, not a "humanities" one. Ontologically speaking videogames are inseparable from their reality as software, but to suggest this distinction markedly separates them into a different category from all previous human culture is a horrifically inhuman and thus useless point of view. There is no progress in such an academic mindset, only put-downs and endless circling. I can bring up other reductionisms, and cannot bring up some others due to lacking familiarity with them myself, but the point should be crystal clear just from this instance.
This point is also driven home by the author's criteria for distinguishing IDN from books, being the presence of computers with software, and participation/interaction. Never minding that there are many other criteria that can be squeezed in alongside these, the author also doesn't take these criteria to their logical conclusions, for if he did he would realize that such a separation is ontological, not epistemological, and that there is no need to separate IDNs from other forms so starkly in order to better understand them—in fact, such a separation limits our understanding. What the computer and software provide, at the end of the day, can be called by names such as prodecurality, algorithmicity, systemicity, conditionality etc., all of which are not only fully present in, say, oral storytelling, but very well simulated and leveraged in "non-interactive works" such as medieval/early modern romance works and postmodern/metamodern novels as well. The participation/interaction dimension, on the other hand, is just a medium-specific form of interpretation. I do not subscribe to the interactivity 1/2 distinction for this reason; it is only a matter of shifting agency towards the player by degrees, not by type/quality, and this shift is facilitated by technology, medium and design allowing audience action, like how film added sound and motion to photography, or added cuts, transportability and perspective shifts to theatre, via these same tools, changing the audience's role to a more active one. These arbitrary criteria by themselves reveal that books and IDN have more in common than they have differences; they also reveal that there is no need of a separate theory of IDNs to consolidate a grander vision of narrative theory—rather than integrating every new form of storytelling in sequence, we need to derive their commonalities and see what these reveal about the nature of storytelling, play, human culture, and other related fields. While the concerns of this book are worthy considerations for a practicioner, they are only temporarily and selectively applicable models that end up blocking access to the underlying reality.
Distractions from this reality are, however, built into our modern conceptions of storytelling. The commodification of art under capitalism, the audiovisual allures of cinema, as well as the patriarchically-driven authorial idealism created by centuries of literary criticism that enforces an idea of "art as artifact" delegitimizing constructive and interpretive engagement with stories, are the main factors creating these issues of interpreting and categorizing IDNs. Game studies have been taking steps to add a touch of postmodern deconstructivism to these ideas, as though taking an axe to a forest, but that has necessitated that we now start regrowing the forest in the organic, healthy way that it demanded all along, via getting IDNs back in touch with their prehistoric roots. Unfortunately, we are in need of a very unconventional perspective to be able to achieve this, being that of someone versed in both folklore and play—someone like Brian Sutton-Smith (as unfortunately deconstructive and disinterested in storytelling in general as he was), Italo Calvino, Pertev Naili Boratav, Marie-Louise von Franz, or Alan Dundes (who is pleasantly referenced in the book, but not exactly in the most useful way). We need a perspective that is deeply in touch with the open-ended, ever-changing nature of storytelling at its core. Hartmut Koenitz is, sadly, not that person, and despite showing some awareness, he doesn't even really get close to being that person.
All in all, this book resembles an academic treadmill of sorts, failing to build meaningfully on the decades of study that precede it and framing long-solved problems as ongoing, when it should have taken a bold move forward. Perhaps the greatest indictment on the book, and the one which best illustrates my point, is how the author accuses current perspectives on IDN as "Eurocentric", while also failing to even mention a single non-European or non-American videogame in the entire book (other than a single activistic/serious game and a throwaway mention of the gacha game Genshin Impact, for some reason, neither of which provide any additional insight). My point isn't to accuse him of lacking diversity—the appearance of games like The Path and Wildermyth were a pleasant surprise—, but rather to make the point that the author lacks self-awareness and fails to engage critically with his own ideas to the extent that he engages with others' writings, this latter engagement being excessively and destructively critical, in my opinion. This is the mentality that leads this book to proclaiming Dear Esther and Detroit: Become Human as "good" cases of IDN (they are, in some ways, but calling them stand-outs shows a worrying lack of media literacy) without so much as mentioning works like Metal Gear Solid 3, Bloodborne or Pathologic. There are simply too many other such cases to go over, so I will leave the specific criticisms at that.
I hope future studies in the field pause their wrestling with the form itself for a while and start actually considering whether the form is actually being leveraged for great storytelling, and how. That way we can perhaps stop talking about bloated spectacle pieces like Quantic Dream games as though they are competently told and effective stories that stand up to great works in other narrative forms, and actually realize what it is that the medium is best equipped to deliver, as well as why it succeeds/fails when it does. With some luck and with proper focus, this kind of shift will in turn point the way forward for the true nature of the medium—the nature that its great practitioners are already in touch with, but academics keep circling but never seem to reach.
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