Structures of interaction for creating dramatic agency in epistemic narratives: Return of the Obra Dinn and Telling Lies as design exemplars

Abstract

Epistemic narratives, according to Marie-Laure Ryan, are driven by our need to know something. Interactive epistemic narratives raise the question of how to provoke and satisfy this need while hiding information from an active consumer, an interactor who is expecting the characteristic pleasure Janet Murray has defined as dramatic agency. In this paper we analyse two approaches to creating the experience of dramatic agency in epistemic interactive narratives, the spatial navigation of Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) and the video database of Sam Barlow’s Telling Lies (2019). For both interactive narratives we identify characteristic design strategies and the challenges and opportunities they offer for the development of the genre, and we discuss the light they shed on the problem of closure in epistemic narrative.