Visualizing Redundant Paths Through Hypertext Narratives

Visualization of interactive narrative structures remains a difficult problem: while authoring systems have developed robust ways to visually communicate narrative structures, comparatively little work has been done towards visualizing the output of playthroughs, namely story metrics and redundant content paths. This paper explores an interactive visualization that quickly helps authors spot redundant paths in interactive narratives made with the Twine authoring tool. By treating branching narratives as directed graphs and walking the graph of each unique path through a story, the visualization collects all possible paths through a narrative, using force-directed graph layouts to visualize the narrative structure and increasing size of the node thickness of the paths through the narrative to indicate nodes and links visited on different possible paths. The outcome is a clear indication of redundant paths and most-visited nodes.