Congratulations to ELX Lab student Sarah Brown and Texas A&M collaborating student Niloofar Zarei for their papers being accepted to the 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling! More details on the papers can be found below.

Sarah’s paper is titled Capturing User Emotions in Interactive Stories: Comparing a Diegetic and a Non-Diegetic Approach to Self-Reporting Emotion, written alongside co-authors Cheryl Resch, Vanessa Han, Srividya Surampudi, Pratyusha Karanam, and Sharon Lynn Chu. Abstract:

Capturing the player’s emotions in an interactive story can serve many purposes, such as to understand player response to a story or to alter the story’s path. The concept of diegesis defines the boundary between the story world and the real world, and has been used to explore different ways of conceptualizing user interface (UI) elements in interactive media. This paper explores methods of capturing players’ emotions during an interactive story and the concept of diegesis. Specifically, we posit that whether emotion capture exists in a diegetic versus a non-diegetic space can affect its accuracy when capturing player emotion. We developed two interactive stories with two emotion capture methods, one using a diegetic approach, and the other using a non-diegetic approach. We conducted a study with 64 participants to compare the two emotion capture approaches. Our results show that a diegetic approach leads to a better story experience, but that a non-diegetic approach leads to the player’s emotion being captured more accurately. We discuss the implications of the study results for integrating emotion capture in the design of interactive stories.

Niloofar’s paper is titled Towards Design Strategies to Support Children’s Narrative Writing Through Enactment, written alongside co-authors Francis Quek, Sharon Lynn Chu, and Sarah Anne Brown. Abstract:

Free-form story enactment is a common way of encouraging creativity in children. As a result, many story authoring tools have been designed to support children’s creativity through various forms of story enactment. However, the enactment of the story is rarely the final outcome of the system. Usually, enactment acts as a scaffold for children to present the creative output in more abstract forms, such as writing. Unfortunately, children may not always translate their enacted story successfully into writing. The goal of this paper is to explore how children use body-based enactment to compose written stories. We conducted a study where 17 children use a digital story authoring tool to enact and record stories as videos, then write the stories on paper while viewing their acting videos. We analyzed the enactment videos and the written story essays to understand how they relate. We compared narrative structure, content, and coherence in story enactment videos and writings, and we found that the structure of children’s narrative in the enacted and written forms varies significantly in terms of the idea units count, organization and type of information, while the majority of the main content elements of the story, such as characters, have overlaps. We also found that for younger participants, there is a marginally significant decrease in the coherence ratings in the writing compared to enactment. We present our findings in terms of three learned lessons that can be applied in interactive narrative writing systems to support stronger written output from children.