Creating and Sharing Interactive Narrative Design Knowledge – A Multipronged Approach

When it comes to interactive digital narrative design, there is both a lack of formal training and formal knowledge. Yet, at the same time, the job title of “narrative designer” exists in many places, and many critically and commercially successful interactive digital narratives (IDN) have been realized during the past three decades. This means that interactive narrative design knowledge is mostly private, earned “the hard way” through trial, error, and intuition. The problem with this state of affairs is that design knowledge can be shared only with great difficulty, due to its use of private – and therefore inaccessible – vocabulary. In this paper, we describe a multipronged approach to the creation and sharing of formal design knowledge. We reference our empirically-based method to identify and verify design conventions, outline a formal vocabulary (an ontology), describe an online platform for the collection of convention candidates and associated events to foster collaboration between scholars and practitioners.