Sofia Kitromili and I presented our position paper “Beyond tools: We need to talk about the Author” at the Narrative and Hypertext Workshop during the conference HT ’22: 33rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, held in Barcelona.

Beyond Tools: We need to talk about the Author (Position Paper. PDF)

Sofia Kitromili (Bournemouth University, UK) and Maria Cecilia Reyes (Vilnius University, Lithuania)

Abstract: Ever since digital interactive authoring tools made creating IDNs (Interactive Digital Narratives) approachable to a wide audience of people beyond programmers and curious academics, we have not stopped talking about them. We have been inventing them, testing them, improving them, and re-inventing them tirelessly. As we should. However, if we take a step back and think about what we have really been talking about, whenever we meet to discuss interactive digital narratives, is tools, narrative forms, ‘the authoring problem’, and while all those are topics we should be discussing, and building knowledge on, we have forgotten to discuss about humans. Who are we building these tools for? Who is using them to make the stories? How are they using them? It is about time we take a break from talking about the myriads of our tools. In this article we are going to talk about the interactive author, or as we shall refer to them at the end of this article, the interactive creator.