Designing User-Character Dialog in Interactive Narratives: An Exploratory Experiment

Abstract

Through interaction with the virtual environment and virtual characters, users are able to influence the storyline of many games. The design choice for the style of interactivity can thereby have a crucial influence on the user's experience. However, only a few approaches evaluate different interaction modalities for one system to investigate the impact of design choice on the users' experience. In this paper, we present an experimental approach in which we first reflect on design alternatives concerning a specific element of interactive narratives-user-character dialog-and then investigate user responses to different design options (round-based dialog versus continuous dialog). Results of an experimental evaluation study show that users tend to prefer continuous interaction in a soap-opera-like game environment using typed text input to communicate with virtual characters that act and react using speech output, although the recognition rate of user utterances of the continuous version was slightly worse compared to the round-based version.