Story Arc Research Articles

What Matters to Patients: Community-Engaged Design for Healthcare-Related Serious Games

Narrative-based serious games are accessible, engaging technologies that connect users’ lived experiences to pedagogy. Despite having patient-centered goals, most narrative-based serious games are not designed alongside patients and communities, limiting their likelihood of acceptance, uptake, and impact. Literature reveals that many serious games intended for patients merely evaluate efficacy with end-users after game deployment and with a lack of consistent participatory design. This work aims to describe a patient-centered participatory approach to game development to teach self-advocacy skills to patients newly diagnosed with cancer. First, characters were developed based on panels that included patient advocates, cancer survivors, clinicians, and researchers. Second, storyline development created realistic story arcs, decision-points, and consequences based on qualitative interviews with patients, patient advocates, and cancer survivors. Third, game evaluation metrics (e.g., 1st vs. 3rd person perspective, game fail states that incentivize replaying the game, and provision of implicit or explicit feedback) were developed based on accessibility, usability, and patient preferences. Based on patients’ insights, we implemented changes accordingly to maximize the game’s efficacy and collected qualitative data on patients’ assessment of the game’s accessibility, relevance, and impact. During initial game development, patient and advocate feedback built relatable characters with a particular focus on providing sensitive information (e.g., palliative care) and inclusive storylines (e.g., diverse family situations). Following a prototype, patients and advocates suggested refinements to characters and additional storylines, including common and/or distressing experiences related to pain management, family dynamics, financial struggles, and disrespect from healthcare providers. Participants in a randomized trial of the game (N=34) found the scenarios relevant and realistic. Patients reported increased comfort speaking up, seeking support, and interacting with their families and healthcare team after playing the game. Our process demonstrates the essential role patients can inhabit in the development of narrative serious games, particularly in how patient input permeated every aspect of Strong Together's development, from initial design to evaluation. Such integration allows for adjustments to address patient concerns and refine patient-relevant metrics.

Women’s Empowerment in Local and Global Fiction: From Toba Beyond

This study explores women's empowerment in literature, focusing on the interplay between tradition and modernity across different cultural contexts. Employing comparative literary analysis, this research examines Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid and Mangalua by Idris Pasaribu. The methodology involves thematic and narrative analysis, where thematic analysis identifies key motifs related to empowerment, resistance, and gender roles, while narrative analysis examines how each character's story arc reflects broader societal norms. Through these analyses, the study highlights how each protagonist navigates societal expectations and challenges gender norms within traditional and modern frameworks. Findings indicate that both novels use women’s empowerment as a lens to critique and reshape cultural expectations, offering insights into gender roles across varied societies. The study concludes with recommendations for further research on cross-cultural gender narratives, acknowledges the limitations of focusing on only two novels, and suggests broader literary comparisons for future studies.

Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance

Points of Significance is an ongoing series of short articles about statistics in Nature Methods that started in 2013. Its aim is to provide clear explanations of essential concepts in statistics for a nonspecialist audience. The articles favor heuristic explanations and make extensive use of simulated examples and graphical explanations, while maintaining mathematical rigor. Topics range from basic, but often misunderstood, such as uncertainty and p-values, to relatively advanced, but often neglected, such as the error-in-variables problem and the curse of dimensionality. More recent articles have focused on timely topics such as modeling of epidemics, machine learning, and neural networks. In this article, we discuss the evolution of topics and details behind some of the story arcs, our approach to crafting statistical explanations and narratives, and our use of figures and numerical simulations as props for building understanding.

"Isn't that what you want, to be accepted?": Critical analysis of LGBTI+ characters on television series in the United States

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the number of LGTBIQ+ characters and storylines appearing in serialized fiction in the United States. This has gained importance due to the effects of media discourses on social imaginaries with regard to the sexual diversity of a community that suffers a high degree of social, political and labor discrimination. The objective is to critically analyze which are the general trends in recent years. Hence, this research is based on a critical discourse analysis of fictional series from the last decade, from two levels: first, the macro-level, in which the discourse around which the storylines are based is analyzed; and a second micro-level, which addresses the issues of lexicalization, focus and conceptual polarization. The results suggest the existence of a dual pattern in these characters, whereby they are based within the construction of a homonormative narrative and/or otherwise placed in marginal or socially excluded settings. Moreover, many traditionally common stereotypes are maintained, and sexual identity and orientation continue to feature prominently among the main story arcs of these characters. It is thus concluded that quantitative growth is insufficient if it is not accompanied by greater normalization.

Physicians' lifelong learning journeys: A narrative analysis of continuing professional development struggles.

Despite tenacious efforts of continuing professional development (CPD) developers and educators, physician engagement in CPD is fraught with challenges. Research suggests that these educational interventions and the maintenance of professional competence systems that mandate them are often seen as impractical, decontextualized and check-box activities by participants. This study explores physicians' learning post graduate medical education (GME) training across their CPD journey to understand how they (a) conceive of themselves as learners and (b) engage in lifelong learning across the course of their professional careers. Using narrative inquiry and holistic narrative analysis situated within a social constructivist orientation, we carried out individual interviews with physicians from across a large children's hospital network including academic hospitals, community hospitals and primary care practices. Timelines and story arcs were used to support the narrative analysis's re-storying. Twelve physicians from six different sub-specialties were interviewed. We identified three noteworthy challenges as particularly salient across participants' re-storied narratives: (i) train-on-a-track to treading water, (ii) learning takes a backseat, and (iii) learning through foraging or hunting and gathering. Participants described significant change when transitioning from GME to CPD learning. While participants identified as learners, they described the disorienting impact of losing GME's formal supports and structures. They articulated that patient care trumped learning as their top priority. They lamented having limited insight into their learning needs (e.g. little feedback data) and so resorted to engaging in CPD activities that were readily at hand-but not necessarily relevant-and to finding learning resources that might not be formally recognised for CPD credit. Physicians' learning journeys post-GME are challenging, and the systems created to support that learning are ill equipped to meet the needs of physicians transitioning from GME to CPD. To encourage meaningful learning, the complex interplay of factors impeding CPD engagement should inform future innovations.

“Moving with the story”: the haptics of reader experience and response to digital comics

ABSTRACT The experience of reading digital comics differs from that of other reading in that it involves the interplay between text and art, both “on the page”, for example, as with the traditional comic book format, or “off the page” in interaction with devices, apps and “extras” the Alt Text in the webcomic, xkcd. This interplay and placement can communicate movement, stillness, suspense, bringing the reader along not only through content or story arc but also through the material affordances, the physical reality of the comic in combination with the technology. The findings of this exploratory study reveal both the varied reading experiences of digital comics as well as the shared experiences of haptic interactions and emotional perception and reaction through the use of devices, comics platforms and apps, and social media. Although webcomics, one type of digital comics, have long been a part of the evolution of hypertext, their place has not always been acknowledged in the scholarship. This research not only contributes towards an empirical, qualitative understanding of reader response to and experience of a range of digital comics including webcomics, but also addresses their role as an example of the haptics of hypertext fiction.

Linguistic Personality of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Character Nebula: Narrative and LIWC Analyses

Blockbuster films intended for an international audience often depict universally recognisable psychological motivations and limitations, presenting characters whose verbal expressions create distinct psychological impressions. This paper focused on the relationship between language use, including narratives and psychological categories of words, and the psychological traits of cinematic personalities. The study aimed to investigate how a character's language usage exposed their personality, psychological attributes, and transformations throughout their story arc and archetype. To achieve this, in the research a connection between Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, Jung's concept of archetypes, and Schmidt's typology of master characters in fiction was drawn, which expanded the understanding of the heroine Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy verbal behavior. The research further defined the character's psychological image and arc by analysing their speech patterns. It identified the character's archetypes, namely the Backstabber and the Father's Daughter, and explored the progression between these archetypes. Additionally, the article employed the narrative analysis to construct the character's story. The narrative analysis was concluded with the implementation of the LIWC-22 psycholinguistic analysis in order to validate the findings derived from the psycholinguistics and cinematic studies. This method allowed for a comprehensive examination of the language used by cinematic characters, providing insights into their psychological traits and development. Ultimately, this research has contributed to the comprehension of how people's psychological characteristics are depicted and communicated through language in mass cinematography.

The Portrayal and Representation of Mythological Stories in Chinese Cinema in the Digital Age

This scholarly article delves into the dynamic interplay between mythological narratives and digital innovation in Chinese cinema. By scrutinizing the amalgamation of traditional story arcs with modern cinematic techniques, it casts light on how digital advancements enrich narrative complexity and enhance visual allure. The methodology merges traditional film critique with digital analytic tools, underscoring the profound influence of digital technology on storytelling. Central to this discourse are case studies like "Ne Zha," which exemplify the modern reinterpretation of mythological themes. The paper contrasts how mythology is depicted in mainstream versus independent films, shedding light on their distinct narrative approaches. Additionally, the analysis extends to understanding the diverse reception of these mythological stories among domestic and international audiences, with particular attention to motifs of nostalgia and youth. In its concluding section, the article contemplates the wider ramifications for the film industry, explores challenges in audience engagement, and discusses the intricacies of copyright in the digital era.

Unicorns, rainbows, and unicorn magic: Storying new knowledge of black masculinities within the WWE

This paper examines the story arc of a trio of Black male wrestlers called the New Day within the World Wrestling Entertainment industry (WWE) who go from militant nationalists, stereotypical singing/dancing preachers, and finally to self-described unicorns bringing magic back to the WWE. Wrestling is used to explore anti-Blackness, Black masculinity, and conceptions of the human/humanity. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick's Black methodological intervention of textual accumulation to interrogate issues of race, masculinity, and sexuality within their performances, I argue the group's unique position as wrestlers allows us to conceptualize the trio as “writers” of fiction; a position that when read through Kevin Young's concept of storying provides insight into a Black creative practice engaging in alternative worldmaking and rewriting understandings of the human outside of a Western European framework. I advocate that the stories of the New Day not only provide glimpses into new genres of being human, but also forms of Black manhood(s) outside of a patriarchal framework.

Ghostface Needs a Hug – Self-care and the Return of the Repressed in Scream (2022)

How does the combination of remake and sequel (requel) affect narrations of trauma and grief in the 2022 movie Scream? The film’s positioning as an inter-generational transition with the goal of targeting new horror audiences highlights the need for developing complex and yet gripping story arcs in a media climate marked by serialization. In my analysis, I examine how the 2022 instalment revolves around explorations of an unresolved past, which re-erupts in violent ways. In particular, I focus on the movie’s investment in a modified cyclical narrative, which offers detailed insights into how the requel formula builds on the engagement with traumatic memory and combines it with strategies aimed at reviewing and reframing the past. Robin Wood’s concept of the “return of the repressed” offers key anchoring points for this analysis through its focus on the mutually reinforcing dynamic between social oppression and deadly energy. By highlighting the personal dramas visited upon the key protagonist of the film, Sam Carpenter, I embed her struggles with the past in a broader societal context, showcasing how engaging traumatic memory is also nested within a larger communal consciousness. The strategies employed by the protagonist connect with the requel format in significant ways, as they offer avenues for modulating and emulating the past. Through this analysis, it is shown that the repressed can itself be channeled toward self-affirming strategies, which revolve around the renegotiation of gendered concepts of authority and agency. A further takeaway are the limitations of neoliberal self-care, which is shown to be an inadequate approach in the film, as the monstrous resides in the communal and cannot be fully evaded through strategies aimed at individualization.

The Transgressive Bodies of Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens Line

This article explores the strategies employed by Dark Horse Comics to develop the Xenomorph creature and its associated universe across the publisher's Aliens line of titles. Through analysis of three Aliens miniseries’ story arcs that are representative of the line's narrative and structural innovation, my contribution explores how this corpus transgresses the parameters of the movie franchise's Science Fiction and action-horror genres in the following three ways. Firstly, I investigate the Aliens comics’ introduction of dreams and psychological trauma associated with the literary Gothic past in Aliens: Sacrifice (March–June 1993). Secondly, in keeping with the Gothic's comic turn, I examine the humorous, parodic, and self-referential elements of comics in Aliens: Stronghold (May–September 1994). Thirdly, I explore Dark Horse Comics’ critical understanding of negative nostalgia in preserving and transgressing the narrative structure and aesthetics of Alien (1979) in Aliens: Dead Orbit (April–December 2017). Ultimately, this article considers these three themes as examples of the paradoxically transgressive and restorative elements of Gothic that are apparent throughout Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens line. It argues that the ways in which the Aliens line innovatively reworks these aesthetic and narrative features of the film franchise's visual and thematic origins provide a critical understanding of the productive interactions between comics and literary Gothic traditions.

SceneCraft: Automating Interactive Narrative Scene Generation in Digital Games with Large Language Models

Creating engaging interactive story-based experiences dynamically responding to individual player choices poses significant challenges for narrative-centered games. Recent advances in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize procedural content generation for narrative-centered games. Historically, interactive narrative generation has specified pivotal events in the storyline, often utilizing planning-based approaches toward achieving narrative coherence and maintaining the story arc. However, manual authorship is typically used to create detail and variety in non-player character (NPC) interaction to specify and instantiate plot events. This paper proposes SCENECRAFT, a narrative scene generation framework that automates NPC interaction crucial to unfolding plot events. SCENECRAFT interprets natural language instructions about scene objectives, NPC traits, location, and narrative variations. It then employs large language models to generate game scenes aligned with authorial intent. It generates branching conversation paths that adapt to player choices while adhering to the author’s interaction goals. LLMs generate interaction scripts, semantically extract character emotions and gestures to align with the script, and convert dialogues into a game scripting language. The generated script can then be played utilizing an existing narrative-centered game framework. Through empirical evaluation using automated and human assessments, we demonstrate SCENECRAFT’s effectiveness in creating narrative experiences based on creativity, adaptability, and alignment with intended author instructions.

The Power of Chaos

The Power of Chaos

Kishōtenketsu as Leitmotif

Final Fantasy VII (1997) is perhaps best known for its compelling story and memorable soundtrack. Like many of the other games within the franchise, storytelling within FF7 is heavily rooted in the Kishōtenketsu storytelling format. This four-part structure favors character development over conflict and establishes strong psychological connections between the characters. Nobuo Uematsu’s penchant for leitmotivic scoring strengthens these bonds further, creating a tripartite connection between story, music, and the audience. And while his compositional styles draw heavily from Western traditions found in film and opera throughout much of his oeuvre, it is apparent that Kishōtenketsu bears tremendous influence on his treatment of FF7’s score, especially as it pertains to the game’s main theme. This article addresses the musico-dramatic influences that Kishōtenketsu has on Uematsu’s compositional strategies regarding FF7’s main theme, its various transformations, and their strategic deployment over the course of the game. After discussing FF7 through the principles of Kishōtenketsu, I provide a thorough leitmotivic analysis of the self-titled “Main Theme to Final Fantasy VII,” identifying the Tarnhelm progression within its opening phrase as Cloud’s leitmotif. I suggest that the harmonic and tonal ambiguity inherent within the infamous progression symbolizes Cloud’s own struggles with identity and memory. Uematsu musically depicts the entire game’s story arc within the “Main Theme” through his use of musical allusion to other characters, as well as his subtle approach to harmonic and motivic development. As Cloud’s leitmotif is only found in a handful of the main theme’s transformations, I conduct leitmotivic analyses on these themes, emphasizing their strategic deployment within scenes that depict his struggles with his trauma. Moreover, these different transformations are all paired together at key moments in the game, suggesting a wider leitmotivic network surrounding the “Main Theme.” Ultimately, the symbiotic relationship between Uematsu’s leitmotivic language and the story’s Kishōtenketsu structure help us to identify new symbolic meaning within the game, its story, and the soundtrack.

Time to Lay the Man to Rest: On Gender, Trauma and Father Figure in Spider-Verse

‘Being Spider-Man is sacrifice.’ said Miguel O’Hara in the latest Spider-Man movie Across the Spider-Verse. As the theme of trauma and loss was revealed in this Spider-Verse film, the film has also brought up the pattern that was shown in every Spider character’s story arc across the spider-verse: they all have to go through certain trauma to become independent beings and discover their nature as a ‘hero’. In the original Spider-Man story, it is through the death of his uncle Ben that Peter Parker discovers that “with great power comes great responsibility.” In the spider-verse narratives, it is revealed that all variants of Spider-Man have a similar traumatic moment of origin. The pattern that through every trauma there will be character growth, however, is problematic when applied to the female characters in the Spider-Verse story. Although they do go through traumatic events, their voices echo the sounds of patriarchal ideology ---- Instead of following their own pathway of character development often substituting their own desires in order to repeat the pattern of the classic Peter Parker storyline; supplanting their own values ideas, beliefs and identities and replicating a spider-man made ideological trope. Moreover, these Spider-women are often operating in the shadow of patriarchy, with no strong female role models to guide them into an alternative way of being. In the 2014 Amazing Spiderman#08, Mayday Parker, daughter of Peter Parker forcefully goes through the trauma of the death of her father. Similarly in Spider-Woman, Gwen Stacy faced the trauma of the death of Peter Parker. But both of their development was influenced by society and father figures, which lead their development to an unsatisfying result ---- the repeat of Peter Parker. This paper will begin with the use of Helvie's trauma theory to examine the pattern of the classic Peter Parker storyline, followed by the close focus on female characters (Mayday Parker, Gwen Stacy) in the Spider-Verse comic line, and to see how they will eventually become the vessel that withholds nothing but patriarchal ideology under the influence of father figures.

“Something has to change”

“Something has to change”

The lack and unfulfilment of daredevil: born again

ABSTRACT Serial narratives promote continuous storytelling across entertainment mediums, especially in comic books. These narratives are seemingly reflective of the never-ending plight of the superheroes and villains and their inability to ever find definitive resolutions of their struggles. Although many critics bemoan the repetition of these approaches to storytelling, seriality in comics performs a crucial function of providing readers the opportunity to connect with and reinforce the very human experience of our lives’ conflicts never really being resolved. The Lacanian concept of lack is the clearest formulation of this psychic drive. Applying this concept to a canonical comic book story arc, Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again, this article demonstrates just how pervasive is the characters’ inability to truly find a sense of completion in their lives even when possessing superhuman abilities and/or access to resources, and how that absence of completion is what fuels the very nature of the serial narrative format of storytelling. The result is a richer understanding of how conflict operates in comics and how their seriality performs a conciliatory role in relationship to the human condition.

Making the Fantastic Real

This study - Making the Fantastic Real - provides research into the subject of design fiction, science fiction fandom, sharable digital media content on the one hand, and the design of real-life engineering artifacts on the other. This study has selected the case of The Hacksmith to understand the space of meaning (science, fiction, co-creation, and design) created by the production of “the fantastic” by this specific acknowledged Canadian Youtuber.
 
 The Hacksmith Industries is the trademark name of the YouTube channel The Hacksmith (https://www.youtube.com/c/theHacksmith/featured) created by Canadian engineer James Hobson in 2006. One of the signature elements of Hobson’s interests is the lightsaber and the Star Wars franchise. But Hobson explores many other dimensions of popular culture, ranging from nerf wars shooters to superhero artifacts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His focus is on how to make elements or objects of the fantastic real, as his slogan goes, not to change any storyline, story arc or franchise world, but to see how far the innate human capability of play and creation can be taken from the fictional realm to reality.

Leopoldstadt

Leopoldstadt

"I'm not a sporting man, Fräulein”: The Tragedy and Farce of James Bond’s Heroic Prowess

This article revolves around conceptualising temporality and drama, with the example of how the broken time sequestered by Karl Marx’s notion of historical repetition and the struggles relating to this, in his supplement to Hegel, is displayed in James Bond films. A focus of the inquiry is an hauntological analysis (in the Derridean sense) of how the connection between heroism and tragedy in films evokes haunting presences of older versions of Bond, between actors, between films, and within the specific story arcs. While the heroism of Bond is exemplified by his sportive endeavours, time and temporality are understood as repetition, and foremost in relation to the phenomenon of the reboot—a specialty of our protagonist. In his battles with various villains, Bond becomes embroiled in action sequences that are curiously spiced up with extreme sporting activities. Such sports are often transformed in the cinematic context: sometimes they are emphasised for stylisations of prowess and violence; sometimes they are distorted into parody and comic relief, in an oftentimes ironic fashion. Fulfilling Marx’s adage about how history repeats itself (“first as tragedy, then as farce”), Bond’s personage not only reappears in different incarnations, portrayed by different actors over time; each actor also repeats a similar pattern in their respective Bond biographies enacting a sustained heroism emanating from the extreme athletic displays in the agonal theatre of sports.