An Enactive Approach to the Construction of Meaning in Interactive Digital Narratives

Resumen

Narratives are essential to our perception of the world. Considered ubiquitous in all activities involving the representation of events in time, they play a crucial role in collaborative sense-making in society. As the potential and uniqueness of computing as a storytelling medium become increasingly visible, narratives become volatile, unstable, dynamic, and unpredictable, allowing systems and readers to collaborate to tell stories together. Interactive Digital Narratives are essential artifacts to how we relate with the world and causally link structured states and events. They expand with conventional narratives because their interaction dynamics are involved in procedural, performative, and interactive forms that shape the narrative and readers’ experiences. Considering that the aesthetic experience of Interactive Digital Narratives consists mainly of perceiving and enhancing the outcomes of the interaction between agents, we seek to understand how action influences the construction of meaning by the readers.
In this paper, we reassess the emergent properties of Interactive Digital Narratives, framing how the aesthetics of behavior has a significant role in this embodied and action-guided medium. Through the lens of the enactive theory of cognition, we want to understand how Interactive Digital Narratives incorporate information and structure the processes of reception, functioning as complex semiotic meaning productions and embodied sensorimotor making. For that, we establish and describe a strategy that specifies the behaviors a system can have to fulfill some abstraction layers that include their external surface and internal processes. We contribute to the discussion about how action and interaction promote new readership performances and subsequently affect the readers’ subjectivity.