Métamorphoses du chapitre dans la scénarisation interactive

Abstract

Since their creation, interactive fictions have proposed “campaigns” based on chains of episodes, more or less explicitly divided. On the one hand, the chaptering of these games follows concerns inherited from literary storytelling: introducing pauses or ellipsis, announcing a change of voice and/or focus, notifying disruptions in the representation of the diegesis, etc. On the other hand, it satisfies new requirements linked to the promise of interactivity: facilitating backup and mental recall of actions, managing phases of preparation for tabletop games or memory space for digital system, ensuring comparability between gamers’ performances, organizing the modularity of episodes which have no implied sequence and can be mutually exclusive, etc. Chapters in interactive fiction also present specific characteristics in terms of “permeability” to the following and previous narrative steps. Indeed, interactivity requires the recording and the circulation of the players’ actions from chapter to chapter, thanks to different tools: gauges, mobile hints and characters, etc. Exploring the links between a “campaign” narrative and its parts in the wide field of interactive fiction is a new research area.

Keywords

• chapter
• video game
• interactive fiction
• interactivity
• roleplaying games
• scriptwriting