Persistence and Evolution Within Interactive Design: An Integrated Approach to ICT Innovations in Emergent Game Narratives

Video games, as interactive artifacts within the continuum of information and communication technology (ICT), encapsulate an ontological inquiry: which mechanism maintains user engagement while evolving with ICT-driven innovations? How is this mechanism structured within video games in the competitive industry? This study analyzes the emergent narrative of the Animal Crossing franchise, focusing on the interplay between persistence and evolution, aligning with our inquiry by examining how technological integration, interactive design, and player agency co-construct narrative adaptations across generations. Employing an integrated approach, we introduced the ENSF framework to analyze emergent narrative mechanisms. On this basis, the qualitative walkthrough method and quantitative unsupervised learning methods—principal component analysis and VADER techniques—were used to examine narrative flow, linguistic metrics, and sentiment tendencies across four game generations and official materials (N = 37). This study contributes to (a) establishing the structural emergent narrative simulation framework (ENSF) delineating the narrative techniques’ interrelations—simulation, orientations, story events, resolutions, evaluations, and characters; and (b) interpreting how narrative mechanisms within interactive design balance persistence with evolution, proving that ICT innovations comply with player agency reinforcement. These discoveries establish a hermeneutic proposal identifying the socio-technological characteristics of interactive communications in video game design, emphasizing the dynamic balance within innovative gaming environments.