Digital Fictions: Towards Designing Narrative Driven Games as Therapy

Abstract

This paper introduces the benefits and possibilities of using digital fiction for narrative-driven games, especially its usage in the project "Writing New Bodies: Critical Co-design for 21st Century Digital-born Bibliotherapy". It addresses body image concerns and consequent psychological problems young women and women identified individuals are facing every day. The goal of "Writing New Bodies" is to develop a narrative-based, interactive story game application that can be used as an intervention method in therapy for body image issues. Digital fiction is an interactive form of storytelling and it only exists in its digital form (Bell et al. 2018, Ensslin et al. 2019, Bell et al. 2010). While some digital fictions are text-based, such as Depression Quest, there are 3D digital fictions such as Wallpaper or Inkubus that are multimodal in their nature (Ensslin et al. 2019). Overall, digital fictions are highly suitable for game developers who want to design narrative-driven projects. This is because they can provide a platform to deal with difficult topics (depression, suicide, body image issues) in an artistically appropriate and matter sensitive way. "Writing New Bodies" is a digital fiction app built in cooperative co-design iterations dealing with such a sensitive topic. First, the author explains what digital fictions are. Second, to point out how digital fiction games can be used in therapy, she introduces the methodology of the "Writing New Bodies" project and bibliotherapy as one of its intended usage options. Finally, she concludes by giving an outlook for further research.