Beyond Authorial Burden

Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), a primarily web-first hypertextual medium, creates an overhead of writing for authors. There are many methods and tools that have been proposed for writing IDNs with the goal of reducing this burden, but because there is no comprehensive model of the Authoring Burden assessing the impact and appropriateness of these approaches is difficult. We have undertaken interviews with IDN authors (n=14) to understand how they manage the authoring burden within their own projects. Based on these interviews, and drawing on the existing literature, we propose a model of the Authoring Burden comprised of three parts: Content Creation, Dynamic Authoring, and Programming/Tool Creation. The initial size of this burden is set by the Author’s Goals informed by their Capability and the Audience/Publishing Context. We also find 29 strategies employed by authors to manage the burden. There are five distinct types. Embracing and Reducing strategies impact the overall scale of the challenge, whereas Generative, Reuse, and Decoupling strategies move work between the three parts of the model. We validate our model with focus groups comprising different sets of experts (n=8). Our model shows that many strategies for managing the burden transform rather than reduce work, and that the most appropriate strategy for a given author will be highly dependent on their personal goals and capabilities. It shows claims to alleviate the ’burden’ of authoring labour may often shift the nature of the labour itself, or the design of a given IDN, into unwanted forms.