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With the advent of mass consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets and controllers in the second decade of the 20th century, some experts have predicted we are on a path toward losing the distinction between the real and the virtual. These predictions overstate the empirical evidence for the effects of VR; ignore its technical limitations; take for granted highly speculative claims about the nature of consciousness; and, most fundamentally, lose sight of the continuities between VR and other representational media. This article argues against thinking of VR as a magical technology for creating seamless illusions. Instead it situates VR as an emerging medium within an evolving community that is beginning to develop the media conventions to support sustained interaction and immersion. The future of VR is not an inevitable and delusional metaverse but a medium of representation that will always require our active creation of belief.

Dino-Store is a persuasive game that was designed to use gamification way to communicate with people and raise awareness on COVID-19. The game’s setting is grocery shopping and the mechanic indicates that how different protection strategies, such as wearing mask, keeping social distance can affect people’s infection chances in the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper will break down how the game designed by merging concepts from persuasive game models and uncomfortable interaction theory to create an engaging, but stressful experience for the user.

The Timeline platform aims to afford interactors a novel way of experiencing complex, multi-sequential stories and causal relationships while capitalizing on the affordances of interactive digital narratives. Along with the authoring tool, this paper discusses exploratory techniques and best practices that hope to promote new methods of multi-sequential storytelling, i.e. replay stories centered on multiple instantiations, that emphasize parallelism and orienting milestones.

With AR’s dynamic and immersive qualities, the Pickrick AR project aims to serve two purposes: to support the civil rights movement in remembrance of the African Americans who fought for equality and to educate students about this special moment in history via a pedagogical tool. With considerations of the Covid-19 pandemic, this tool aims to create an immersive and enlightening experience within the real physical space without the presence of a tour guide. In this paper, is an introduction to our design concepts, specifically in how to integrate multimedia information and create a user-friendly interface by using Human Computer Interaction (HCI) principles and the Sense of Place (SOP) Theory.

In order to understand a pandemic like the COVID-19 crisis of 2020, we have to keep in mind larger patterns (e.g., information visualizations such as charts), and individual perspectives (e.g., interviews). However, it is challenging to connect these larger patterns with lived experiences. In this work-in-progress paper, we argue that interactive digital experiences such as games have the potential to bridge this gap by allowing players to explore the pandemic at multiple levels of abstraction. We present Essential Workers: an online multiplayer game which situates players as one of four workers?Nurse, Grocery Worker, Office Worker, or Delivery Driver?who face difficult dilemmas as they live through three weeks of rising infection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a core cooperative game mechanic, Essential Workers seeks to tie the constraints and choices of the individual to the health of their communities, and to simulate some of the interdependencies that keep our communities functional during the pandemic. We aim to illustrate our approach to key challenges commonly faced by designers seeking to model the entanglements of the individual and society.

Sam Barlow’s story-based video game Telling Lies (2019), like his previous game, Her Story (2015), is based on an interaction mechanic in which the player searches a fixed archive of videoclips using keywords found in the dialog of the fictional characters. This storytelling strategy can be situated within traditions of epistemic narratives in which the interactor navigates through a set of unchanging narrative segments, motivated by the desire to increase knowledge of the story. Such stories offer the pleasure of revelation, and they hinge on hiding information so that it is later revealed in a way that maximizes the experience of dramatic agency. This paper explores the expressive potential of Barlow’s signature database search mechanic for creating the experience of dramatic agency through managed revelation. By mapping our own experience and examining Barlow’s development documents and code, we describe how the artfully gated search mechanic creates temporal disjunctions that provide glimpses of narrative situations that pique curiosity while suppressing explanatory revelations. Using Telling Lies as an example, we identify some characteristic design challenges and opportunities afforded by the constrained database search approach and point to unexplored design opportunities that could make this strategy the basis of a more widely-practiced genre.

We are at a milestone moment in the development of the cultural form of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), and in the development of the study of IDN as a field of academic research and graduate education. We can date the beginning of the field to the late 1960s with the release of Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza in 1966, and recognize the late 1990s as another turning point when 30 years of diverse development began to coalesce into a recognizable new media practice. For the past 20 years we have seen accelerated growth in theory and practice, but the discourse has been split among contributory fields. With the convening of IDN as the focus of study in its own right, we can address key questions, such as its distinct history, taxonomy, and aesthetics. We can also recognize more clearly our unique challenges in studying a field that is evolving rapidly, and from multiple intersecting genetic strains. We can also articulate and investigate the potential of IDN as an expressive framework for engaging with the most pressing themes of human culture of the 21st century, and as a cognitive scaffold for increasing our individual and collective understanding of complex systems.

The Englishwoman’s Review, which published from 1866 to 1910, participated in and recorded a great change in the range of possibilities open to women. The ideal of the magazine was the idea of the emerging emancipated middle-class woman: economic independence from men, choice of occupation, participation in the male enterprises of commerce and government, access to higher education, admittance to the male professions, particularly medicine, and, of course, the power of suffrage equal to that of men. First published in 1984, this twenty-eighth volume contains issues from 1895 to 1896. With an informative introduction by Janet Horowitz Murray and Myra Stark, and an index compiled by Anna Clark, this set is an invaluable resource to those studying nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminism and the women’s movement in Britain.