PhD Candidate: Pedro Silva

Date & Time: August 15, 2025 @ 10am

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Title: Once More, With Insight: Designing Interactive Replay Stories to Reveal Complexity

Committee:

Janet Murray (Chair)

Michael Nitsche

Ryan Scheiding

Hartmut Koenitz (External)

Anne Sullivan (External)

Abstract:

Once More, With Insight: Designing Interactive Replay Stories to Reveal Complexity situates interactive replay stories as distinct narrative artifacts at the intersection of replay stories as a narrative genre and interactive digital narratives (IDNs) as a media genre. This work introduce a framework that defines interactive replay stories in terms of the depth and breadth of their parameters, and identify two dominant structural approaches--branching and gated architectures--that shape how these stories unfold. Three research questions guide this inquiry. First, I identify the design challenges unique to interactive replay stories, including narrative dead-ends, managing levels of abstraction, translating interactor inputs into dramatic actions, and fostering meaningful repetition across replays. Second, I propose a set of design principles--granularity, discourse play, and parallelism--and a toolkit of building blocks to guide future creators, each supporting narrative variation while preserving coherence and navigability. Employing a Research through Design (RtD) approach, I developed the Timeline Player and Creator, which explore branching structures with seven fellow authors, and refined the design considerations that inform these principles and building blocks. Finally, I ask how new platforms like virtual reality (VR) can enrich the aesthetics of replay stories; VR leverages the affordances of presence, virtual body ownership, and perspective-taking, enabling interactors to engage with storyworlds through shifting contexts and identities. Continuing the RtD approach, I prototyped Sunshine Express, a gated VR experience that examines how virtual reality affordances can support replay aesthetics; an exploratory user study followed, surfacing design considerations for iconic gestures in VR. Together, these contributions hope to guide the design of future interactive replay stories, offering new expressive possibilities for a still narrative form.