Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative

Immersive Expressions for a Complex time

Understanding
Interactive Digital Narrative

By Hartmut Koenitz

Cover art by Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari

E-book, paperback and hardback editions available

Interactive Digital Narrative is a compelling expression for the 21st century. It combines narrative, the age-old human way of communication, with the power of computation, to create representations that can make complex 21st century topics understandable.

This book provides an introduction for those new to IDN, but is also aimed at more seasoned professionals and scholars. It is the result of several years of work on Interactive Digital Narrative, both on developing theory and design. It was written with the intent to help in creating more awareness of this exciting expression and even more fascinating IDN works.

Hartmut Koenitz

Endorsements

" In this comprehensive and synthetic survey of the diverse practices and evolving critical frameworks of Interactive Digital Narrative, Koenitz does a masterful job of establishing the social and cultural imperative for moving beyond legacy formats to capture the complexity of our moment with more richly interactive complex modes of digital storytelling. He also offers his own groundbreaking theoretical analysis of digital narrative, moving us past the structures of print-oriented narratology, cinema studies, and game studies, with new vocabulary and design guidance that offer deeper understanding and exciting new expressive possibilities for this crucial genre of the 21st century. "

Janet Murray

Professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology

" Hartmut Koenitz has written an important and ambitious book. Not only does he take on the plethora of misunderstandings around interactive digital narratives and arrives at a way in which we can think and talk about them without getting bogged down in irrelevant ideas from other narrative forms, but he also presents a model for how we can go about designing interactive digital narratives that does justice to the medium and its unique characteristics. Koentiz’s passion for the topic is rivaled only by his deep understanding of it. This book is one of the biggest steps forward in the theory and design of interactive digital narratives in a long time and a milestone towards the maturation of this new way of telling stories. "

Mads Haahr

CEO Haunted Planet Studio and Associate Professor Trinity College Dublin