Affording Playfulness in Daniel Benmergui's Storyteller

Daniel Benmergui's puzzle videogame Storyteller (2023) serves as an interesting example of what could be described as recipient-oriented playfulness (see Gaver 2002;Gaver et al. 2004;Sicart 2014) in that it affords significant levels of both ambiguity and agency, thus encouraging experimentation within an underspecified ludic context.Storyteller invites the player to create narrative comics to solve plot descriptionbased prompts, which they do by dragging and dropping elements from toolboxes of characters and "scenes" into preset numbers of empty panel slots.As an example of what can be termed "comics games," Storyteller's innovative gameplay heavily relies on conventional comics sense-making principles (i.e., the inference of relationships between co-present narrative pictures) but subverts such principles through its panels' dynamically updated nature.In doing so, the work also affords an unusually high degree of "narrative agency" (Bdi 2023, 59; Bdi and Thon 2020, 164; see also Murray 1997).It does not simply allow the player to make choices among different narrative paths within various interactive "architectures" (Ryan 2006, 106) but to quite literally "play with" narrative conventions in the bottom-up construction of stories (see also Boelmann and Knig 2023).This extended abstract draws on the ambiguity afforded by Storyteller's nonstandard use of medial, generic, and narrative conventions as the background for a discussion of two features of its design likely to encourage playful experimentation: multiple solution pathways and instant reactivity.