Employing branching comics to design, visualise and evaluate interactive stories

This thesis presents the case for adopting comics in the design, visualisation and evaluation of interactive stories. The potential for comics to be employed in the representation of interactive story-driven material has been identified in previous work. However, there is a lack of theory or evidence upon which an informed approach can be based. Consequently, this thesis contributes a process for employing branching comics to design and visualise interactive stories informed by previous approaches to stories, interactive stories and visualisations. It is argued that comics have several advantages over previous methods of designing interactive stories due to their inherent structural compatibility with visualising hierarchies of abstraction of story content. A series of studies are conducted to demonstrate how comics can be employed to visualise abstraction levels, and how branching comics can be employed to evaluate interactive stories. Qualitative and quantitative methods related to both user experience and comprehension are employed, which demonstrate the advantages in the use of comics to explore a range of different phenomena related to creating, interpreting and using interactive stories.