Imposter syndrome (IS) is a mental state that can severely inhibit a person's productivity and well-being. Although IS is extremely common (especially in high achievers, e.g., academics), few studies offer effective modes of support and recovery. In response, we introduce the application of relatable narrative as a way to help people overcome IS. We present a randomized group comparison study exploring the impact of various design factors -- specifically, choice-based interactivity and character relatability -- on our story's capacity to engage and impact 107 STEM undergraduates. Almost all participants enthusiastically endorsed the story as a valuable learning experience, and a majority reported positive impacts to mood and feelings of relatedness to peers. We discuss 1) how our specific digital story design can support positive changes in mental health at both individual and institutional levels and 2) how our findings can inform efficient design of interactive narrative content for educational applications.

To date, the theatricality of videogames has been examined primarily through the lens of performance, a perspective that centers the liveness of theater and identifies the player with the role of the actor. However, another key facet of theatricality—the process of continuous reflective reinterpretation that characterizes theatrical production—has received less attention, despite its apparent applicability to the cyclical nature of many games. We conduct a reading of the narrative roguelike videogame Hades that emphasizes this reinterpretive process, and find that Hades is essentially structured around a sort of “diegetic backstage” that deliberately invites the player into the process of dramatic reinterpretation—leveraging the power of computation to prompt reflection on the game’s core themes and repeated remotivation of the game’s core gameplay. Our reading suggests that videogames, by shortening the reinterpretive loop that characterizes theatrical production and enabling players to experience many iterations of this loop within the comfort of their own home, can unlock a form of the pleasure that the members of a theater production derive from gradually bringing an initially flawed and disharmonious production into harmony.

Concepts utilizing applied ethics, such as responsible conduct of research (RCR), can prove difficult to teach due to the complexity of problems faced by researchers and the many underlying perspectives involved in such dilemmas. To address this issue, we created Academical, a choice-based interactive storytelling game for RCR education that enables players to experience a story from multiple perspectives. In this paper, we describe the design rationale of Academical, and present results from an initial study comparing it with traditional web-based educational materials from an existing university RCR course. The results highlight that utilizing a choice-based interactive story game is more effective for RCR education, with learners developing significantly higher engagement, stronger overall moral reasoning skills, and better knowledge scores for certain RCR topics.

While there has been work in interactive narrative built using theory and practice from theater, it has mostly focused on the structure of narrative and how a player's interaction with the plot alters that structure. How a player interacts has usually been tied to common game interaction paradigms. There is an understanding that a videogame player exists somewhere between an audience member and a stage actor---but rarely are players allowed to express themselves in a manner similar to an actor. This paper argues that the acting and directing knowledge of theater is a potentially bountiful resource for designing player and NPC interactions. To illustrate this, the paper presents a literature review of theatrical methodology, its existing relationship to games, and a survey of projects in the interactive narrative and character interaction spaces. The chosen theater practices provide a useful basis for a new type of interaction between players and non-player characters. Additionally, particularly when looking at acting practices, their major concerns with the relationship between character and actor provide useful language to describe and further explore the relationship between the player and their avatar. Finally, this paper proposes one possible way of building systems to encourage new modes of play and alter the relationship between designers, systems, and players.

This paper presents a case study in the experience-first prototyping of a generative game. Our goal in this process was to create a PCG-based mystery story construction game ncentered on a social simulation of characters and their motivations, and driven by a set of core themes and experiences we wanted players to encounter. In pursuit of this goal, we created a series of prototypes to test how a variety of generative and AI-based techniques---including character generation, character action suggestion based on game state, story sifting, and social simulation---may be used in support of collaborative storytelling. In this paper we catalogue these prototypes and what we have learned by creating them, detailing design elements we found to be successful in supporting player creativity and that may be useful to the developers of similar games and experiences going forward.