What is interactive digital narrative (IDN)

The term interactive digital narrative settled into the research literature once it became clear that “interactive story” and “interactive fiction” drag along either too much or too little. IDN is broader than a game and more precise than “interactive cinema”: the circle covers text environments, VR, and a filmed video with choices alike. What matters is not the carrier but the division of labour: the author designs a system of possibilities, the participant’s action actualises one of the stories, and every showing is a separate, unrepeatable work.

The classic example outside film is Façade (2005) by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern: a guest at a marital argument who intervenes in natural language; there is no branch tree in the usual sense — a drama manager assembles the response from the participant’s behaviour. That is the useful boundary: everything we in cinema call branching is, to IDN researchers, only one of several ways to build a system.

Hartmut Koenitz proposed SPP as a media-specific framework for analysing IDN — it is laid out in chapter three of his book Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative (Routledge, 2023), and the model had appeared in his articles earlier. In a paper for New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia he puts it this way: a dynamic system is the central element, and the interactive process results in instantiated narrative products. Word by word:

System

The system is everything made before the showing: structures, material, transition logic, rules. In an encyclopedic article for ELMCIP, Koenitz and co-authors say the system contains the protostory — the space of potential narratives. For a director this is a native language: the script with its nodes, the shot material, the edit transitions — all of it is the system. Until the showing begins, the film does not yet exist; there is only the system.

Process

The process is one act of unfolding: a concrete showing with concrete decisions. In a cinema Late Shift the process is the evening when the hall voted by app while a server edited the next clip. Two showings of the same film are two different processes with different stories on screen. That is why the basic unit of IDN analysis is not “the film as a whole” but the completed showing.

Product

The product is the narrative that got instantiated: the 72–94 minute cut this hall saw this evening. There are as many products as showings, and none is “more complete” than another. This is the hardest part for cinematic intuition: we are taught that the work is a fixed copy. SPP says: in the interactive form only the system is fixed — the work is assembled every time.

The three terms describe different slices of one field. Interactive cinema is a historical-artistic category: from Kinoautomat to Netflix, with attention to film language. An FMV game is a carrier-and-material category: live video inside a game. IDN is a theoretical frame that can approach any of these works and ask how the system is built and what the participant does in it. The table below is a practical way to put the terms on shelves.

A worked example: Late Shift. System: about four hours of shot material, roughly 180 choice points, server-side edit logic. Process: an evening at a Vue cinema in March 2017 — the hall taps on phones, the timer runs, clips change without a pause. Product: one of the seven endings, cut to 72–94 minutes, that this hall made its own that evening. The model simplifies nothing — it only lets you talk about all three layers without confusing them, the way reviews confuse them when they judge “the film” by one product seen.

The field’s main conference is ICIDS, the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling; the first joint conference ran 26–29 November 2008 in Erfurt, merging two earlier workshop series (TIDSE and Virtual Storytelling). The practitioner-researcher community works around the INDCOR network; its site interactivenarrative.org opens over http only — a dated but live trace of the field. The starting book is Koenitz, Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative (Routledge, 2023); the earlier foundation is Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997).