Recent Publications by Noam Knoller
Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution , 2019
Narrative is faced with a triple crisis: (1) the world is a hypercomplex mess that defies attempt... more Narrative is faced with a triple crisis: (1) the world is a hypercomplex mess that defies attempts to describe it narratively; (2) both traditional and new media are struggling to mediate this crisis, and (3) reading habits and skills are changing. Faced with this triple crisis, it is sometimes suggested that interactive simulations or games can "address complexity", however there is no empirical evidence to support such a claim. This chapter proposes a formal model of interactive digital narrative - the Userly Text - as a scaffold for an embodied process of proceduralised narrative sensemaking - userly performance. It explores the potential of the userly performance of userly texts for a cognitive reduction of complexity, using the various affordances of the digital medium to foster a hermeneutic spiral - a progressive and iterative interpretive rereading through an interactive narrative system.
Book chapters by Noam Knoller
ICIDS 2018: 11th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Dublin, Ireland, December 5–8, Proceedings, 2018
Authoring tools are a crucial component in the practice and research of interactive digital narra... more Authoring tools are a crucial component in the practice and research of interactive digital narrative design, yet no recent meta-analysis or mapping of such tools exists that would make it possible to comparatively study their defining qualities and characteristics and their effects on the artefacts produced with them.
As a first step towards this goal, we created an online resource [1] in which we surveyed and classified over 300 tools.
This paper lays out our proposed categorisation and description framework for IDN authoring tools. After exploring our definition of authoring tools and research methodology, we describe 9 categories and 38 descriptors for tool analysis and comparison. We conclude with a sample analysis of Twine [2].
Interactive Digital Narrative - History, Theory and Practice, Apr 2015
This chapter re-examines human computer interaction in Interactive Digital Narratives through a s... more This chapter re-examines human computer interaction in Interactive Digital Narratives through a series of four Interface dispositifs. Centring on the relatively recent Post-PC dispositif, the chapter points out its shifting trends and effects, including the bodily and affective turns, ubiquitous, predictive and attentive interfaces, aligned with the urgent demands of an experience economy. These material and discursive shifts call for a critical re-examination of IDN's legacy of practice and theory in relation to userly performance, including an historicising of the primacy of intentional, cognitive agency premised on decisions and choices.
Much of the research and development effort in the Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) communi... more Much of the research and development effort in the Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) community is guided by a design approach, according to which user desires, expectations and agency are central. This approach may place unnecessary limitations on the design space. I argue for the validity and significance of an alternative, expressive approach, which may be more appealing to artists, and offer some formal parameters of IDS-as-Art. These open up for authors the ability to explore the creation of vastly complex and dynamic storyworlds that highlight contingency and probability; and the possibility of manipulating agency as subject matter to implicate users, through userly performance, in the storyworld’s meaning. IDS can thus offer users an opportunity to reflect upon various aspects of their performance, including un- and subintentional aspects.
Taking seriously Andrew Stern’s aspiration that IDS become a premier art form for the 21st centur... more Taking seriously Andrew Stern’s aspiration that IDS become a premier art form for the 21st century, this paper re-examines agency, understood as the ability to freely control the plot, as a key concept in IDS aesthetics. Tracing the origins of this notion in IDS theory, this paper suggests that “true” agency is a myth, and that even restricted agency is too constrained to serve as a desirable goal for IDS-as-art.
Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies, 2015
In iTV and online video, narrative interaction has long been a Holy Grail for both audiences and ... more In iTV and online video, narrative interaction has long been a Holy Grail for both audiences and creators of these digital audiovisual works. On the one hand, interactive digital narrative promises interactors some exciting opportunities: to enter the world of the story, to affect the story and perhaps even to control its outcome, and in the process to gain a transformative self-revelation. On the other hand, this new medium changes the role and craft of the author and entails a host of technological, conceptual, and institutional challenges. The authors describe these opportunities and challenges in detail, before examining various projects that have attempted to realize this vision and grapple with the challenges. Works discussed span several decades, from the late 1960s to 2015. They also span a variety of forms, including interactive cinema, online video, interactive television, and both video- and animation-based games. Particular emphasis is given to contemporary interactive documentaries (iDocs). The chapter further discusses current research directions, such as explorations of the increasing incorporation of the interactor’s body and affects as well as second-screen and cross-device integration, and concludes with a fresh look at the original vision in light of conceptual and design approaches, current technological developments, their implications on the changing landscape of audiovisual content creation and consumption, and the new creative space of opportunities that they open up.
ICIDS 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8230, 2013
The goal of this study was to gain insight into the user experience of a recent hypernarrative in... more The goal of this study was to gain insight into the user experience of a recent hypernarrative interactive movie. Turbulence is a feature-length interactive narrative video and emphasising low frequency interaction, simultaneous optional plotlines and seemingly counter-agency moves. Eight participants took part in a phenomenological study of their experience, from which several directions for further study emerge.
This paper outlines a roadmap for interactive narrative research that integrates disparate parts ... more This paper outlines a roadmap for interactive narrative research that integrates disparate parts while focusing on identifying and experimentally veri‐ fying IDN design conventions and on developing a pedagogy to further the devel‐ opment of a professional discipline of IDN creators. This effort connects several key areas, in which the authors have worked before and which are now brought together. These include a specific theory, an approach towards interactive narra‐ tive design and its evaluation, an expanded understanding of the manifestations constituting the field, the pedagogy of educating creators of IDN artifacts and a perspective on the cultural significance of these creative expressions as tools to represent complexity. Keywords: Interactive narrative models · Interactive narrative design · Interactive narrative art · Interactive narrative pedagogy · Narrative representations of complexity · Protostory · Protoprocess
Interactive Storytelling: 10th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, 2017
This paper reports on an aspect of a long-term project to create a body of evidence-based interac... more This paper reports on an aspect of a long-term project to create a body of evidence-based interactive narrative design methods. In this context, we discuss aspects of formal design descriptions as a basis for a quantitative approach to verify the effects of design choices on the experience of audiences. Specifically, we discuss the notion of 'design conventions' by acknowledging earlier usages of the term and the related discourse in video game studies.
Journal papers by Noam Knoller
Materialities of Literature, 2018
In recent years, game narrative has emerged as an area for novel game concepts and as a strategy ... more In recent years, game narrative has emerged as an area for novel game concepts and as a strategy to distinguish a particular title. However, innovation in this area comes primarily from indie companies and individual efforts by noted designers. There is a lack of trained specialists ready to produce interactive narrative experiences. Many existing practitioners are self-trained and often rely on intuition in their design practice. A key element missing from the effort towards a more sustained development and improved professional training is a set of design conventions that fulfill a role comparable to cinematic conventions like continuity editing or montage. Therefore, our research focuses on identifying, verifying and collecting such design strategies. We describe an empirical method to verify candidate design conventions through the evaluation of user reaction to A/B prototypes, which improves upon the trial-and-error process of old.
Conference Proceedings by Noam Knoller
In this paper, I introduce the notion of communicative-expressive interaction with a character's ... more In this paper, I introduce the notion of communicative-expressive interaction with a character's mind, within an interactive fiction video. It is an interaction model that allows a participant continuous interaction with a story as a way of increasing the participant's agency and immersion and consequently both the sense of engagement and the meaning of the interactive experience in its relation to the story. I describe a work-in-progress system called the InterFace Portrait Storyteller, in which participants use familiar gestures performed on a touch screen to explore the character's mind, which is constructed as a diegetic space. I also describe two interactive video installations, "One Measure of Happiness" and "Have I Lost My Plot?" within which the system interacts with either narrative or non-narrative approaches to the representation of diegtic space.
Book editor by Noam Knoller
Disclaimer/Klachtenregeling Meent u dat de digitale beschikbaarstelling van bepaald materiaal inb... more Disclaimer/Klachtenregeling Meent u dat de digitale beschikbaarstelling van bepaald materiaal inbreuk maakt op enig recht dat u toekomt of uw (privacy)belangen schaadt, dan kunt u dit onderbouwd aan de Universiteitsbibliotheek laten weten. Bij een gegronde klacht zal de Universiteitsbibliotheek het materiaal ontoegankelijk maken en/of van de website verwijderen, dan wel samen met u bekijken hoe op een andere manier aan uw klacht tegemoet kan worden gekomen.
Patent application by Noam Knoller
Talks by Noam Knoller
Cinematic videogames, theatrical interactive cinema, smartphone-based augmented reality experienc... more Cinematic videogames, theatrical interactive cinema, smartphone-based augmented reality experiences and fMRI-controlled video narratives – these are some of the forms of a post-cinematic dispositif expanding beyond the celluloid and cinema screen. The new dispositifs both break with and continue previous tendencies. Enlisting computer technologies offers new ways to deal with issues such as complexity, contingency, possibility and probability, which have already been foregrounded by complex cinematic narrative structures that have become ubiquitous in recent years. The new dispositif also gives rise to various forms of interactive spectatorship. I propose that what is central to this type of spectatorship is userly performance – a mode of experience in which spectators are required to be physically performative, to employ their own bodies in an interfaced enactment of the work. Userly performance may be voluntary, with the work responding to intentional aspects of userly performance such as decisions and choices performed through control interfaces; or it may be involuntary, with the work responding to biometric data and even brain activity. In this presentation, I will use examples from 45 years of interactive cinemas to discuss how userly performance, mediated through various interface apparatuses, relates to previous modes of cinematic spectatorship; and how it affects issues such as authoriality, trust and agency.
Conventions of interaction, certainly in common applications and machines, but all too often also... more Conventions of interaction, certainly in common applications and machines, but all too often also in the artistic context, usually reveal a preoccupation with "choice", often as a synecdoche for "democracy". Coupled with a popular fascination with "the death of the author", interactive works often purport to yield authorial power over to the spectator. However, interfaces remain invested with authorial power, through which they structure human action, and all the more so when they attempt to be invisible or intuitive. Drawing on Hubert Damisch and Jacques Ranciere, I will try to reposition human computer interfaces as (potential) aesthetic-theoretical objects. As a test case I will use my own art project, Interface Portrait, in which non-intuitive interaction with a human face is intended to elicit reflection on the (interacting) spectator's patterns of action and behaviour, through an encounter with a simulated character and its peculiar (simulated) agency.
Papers by Noam Knoller
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Inria, Jun 4, 2021
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Copyright
Uploads
Recent Publications by Noam Knoller
Book chapters by Noam Knoller
As a first step towards this goal, we created an online resource [1] in which we surveyed and classified over 300 tools.
This paper lays out our proposed categorisation and description framework for IDN authoring tools. After exploring our definition of authoring tools and research methodology, we describe 9 categories and 38 descriptors for tool analysis and comparison. We conclude with a sample analysis of Twine [2].
Journal papers by Noam Knoller
Conference Proceedings by Noam Knoller
Book editor by Noam Knoller
Patent application by Noam Knoller
Talks by Noam Knoller
Papers by Noam Knoller
As a first step towards this goal, we created an online resource [1] in which we surveyed and classified over 300 tools.
This paper lays out our proposed categorisation and description framework for IDN authoring tools. After exploring our definition of authoring tools and research methodology, we describe 9 categories and 38 descriptors for tool analysis and comparison. We conclude with a sample analysis of Twine [2].