Project Aporia: An Exploration of Narrative Understanding of Environmental Storytelling in an Open World Scenario

The genre of interactive narratives in computer games has been researched extensively in the past. However, it still seems that there is a potential for investigating how a narrative can be conveyed solely through environmental storytelling. This paper reports an experimental study which examines the understanding of a pre-written story which is mediated without the use of characters, dialogue, or words and only through the environment in the prototypical game 'Aporia'. The evaluation of the story construction in Aporia analyses and quantifies written open-ended answers and compares them to the pre-defined elements of the story. The findings indicate that Aporia mediates a narrative potential, which generates emergent narratives among users rather than mediating an embedded and evoked narrative. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.