Loominary: Crafting Tangible Artifacts from Player Narrative

While game narrative provides a story for the player to experience, the moment-to-moment decisions made by the player are just as important to the experience. These decisions make up a personal narrative that the player creates through their choices and actions within the game. These stories describe the player's experience, and are the stories that often get shared and retold by the player. However, these narratives are rarely captured by the game and instead rely on the player to memorize and retell them. In response to this, we designed Loominary, a game platform that plays Twine games using a rigid heddle table-top loom as a controller. Not only does this provide a new method of interacting with a game, but also records each of the player's choices into a tangible object that is created by interacting with the game. Loominary is a working prototype and in this paper, we discuss the design considerations and areas for improvement.