Abstract
Reflective rereading in print literature involves a critical or meditative re-examination of a work for deeper meanings. In this paper I argue that, in interactive stories, reflective rereading can involve examining the surface of an interactive work with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of and appreciation for how the underlying computational system functions, and how this internal structure relates to the surface experience of the work as a story. I explore this through close readings of four interactive stories: The Walking Dead (Season 1), Façade, Prom Week, and Blood and Laurels. Through this analysis, I make connections between this form of reflective rereading and Wardrip-Fruin’s “SimCity Effect”, suggesting a correspondence between works that afford reflective rereading and those that exhibit the SimCity effect. Further, I suggest that the abstractions used to represent the underlying system will impact whether or not an interactive story affords reflective rereading.
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This work is funded under the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore grant “Authoring Paradigms and Representation in Interactive Storytelling Tools”.
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Mitchell, A. (2015). Reflective Rereading and the SimCity Effect in Interactive Stories. In: Schoenau-Fog, H., Bruni, L., Louchart, S., Baceviciute, S. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9445. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27036-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27036-4_3
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