Narrative affordance: towards a model of the foreseeability and perceivability of story elements in an interactive narrative

Abstract

This paper discusses a research direction which focuses on a framework intended to help solve the problem of user-interaction versus story coherency in interactive narratives. The framework revolves around a concept named "narrative affordance," which draws from work in visual psychology and human-computer interaction and involves a declarative notion of afforded actions and a model of perceivable actions by a user of an interactive narrative. The paper also discusses motivation for the importance of the work and a future research plan.