Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative

Janet Murray Professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, Director of the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center: In this comprehensive and synthetic survey of the diverse practices and evolving critical frameworks of Interactive Digital Narrative, Koenitz does a masterful job of establishing the social and cultural imperative for moving beyond legacy formats to capture the complexity of our moment with more richly interactive complex modes of digital storytelling. He also offers his own groundbreaking theoretical analysis of digital narrative, moving us past the structures of print-oriented narratology, cinema studies, and game studies, with new vocabulary and design guidance that offer deeper understanding and exciting new expressive possibilities for this crucial genre of the 21st century. Mads Haahr (CEO Haunted Planet Studio and Associate Professor Trinity College Dublin): Hartmut Koenitz has written an important and ambitious book. Not only does he take on the plethora of misunderstandings around interactive digital narratives and arrives at a way in which we can think and talk about them without getting bogged down in irrelevant ideas from other narrative forms, but he also presents a model for how we can go about designing interactive digital narratives that does justice to the medium and its unique characteristics. Koentiz’s passion for the topic is rivaled only by his deep understanding of it. This book is one of the biggest steps forward in the theory and design of interactive digital narratives in a long time and a milestone towards the maturation of this new way of telling stories.