CAREER: Theory-driven methods for designing more representative, inclusive interactive narratives

This proposal's goal is to improve the inclusiveness of interactive narratives such as educational games, virtual reality (VR) simulations, and branching stories where people interact as, and with, characters in a designed world. Inclusiveness is an important issue in these interactive narratives because on balance, their users are much more diverse than the people who design them. Although there are methods that encourage designers to consider a wide range of potential users who are different from them, these methods often fail to account for deeper aspects of identity and representation. This can lead to designs where both the content and form of the narrative use stereotypical, surface-level representations of people's differences, which in turn can degrade many people's experiences during use. This project will use social theories that connect people's experiences and identities in order to develop new design methods that help narrative designers, users, and companies more deeply account for differences and create more inclusive and successful interactive narrative designs. The project will start by identifying appropriate social science theories that provide useful context and guidelines for deeply engaging with identity and its effects on experience in the real world. These theories will be used to critique and expand existing design methods used by professional interactive narrative designers, working closely with these designers through focus groups and co-design workshops to do the needed translation work from theoretical framework to design methodology. Once candidate methods are developed, the project team will develop new pedagogical approaches and materials that will be used to teach and iterate on the methods. This second activity will take place through a series of workshops and narrative design activities, working closely with both novice and expert designers. Finally, the team will use content analysis and ludography to assess the results, comparing narratives designed with and without the methodology in terms of both expert-assessed quality and their potential impact on a wide range of users. Together, the project will develop novel methods, guidelines, and frameworks for more representative narrative designs, as well as insights into how to better-use social science theories in technology design processes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.