Natureculture heritage sites are dynamic spaces where ecological, cultural, and historical forces converge, often creating tensions between preservation, accessibility, and interpretation. This study explores how locative technologies can navigate these tensions by embedding digital interaction within the material and affective fabric of place, enabling context-sensitive storytelling and surfacing silenced narratives. We investigate visitor experiences at three contrasting sites — Madeira's Levadas (Portugal), the Avebury Landscape (UK), and the site of the Battle of the Boyne (Ireland) — to examine how visitors engage with more-than-human histories and temporalities, thus identifying six distinct design spaces within three overarching typologies of natureculture heritage: Ideal Nature , Ideal Time , and Ideal History . Based on how these novel typologies inform the operation of locative technologies as ethical mediators between human and nonhuman agencies, we subsequently present the design of seven bespoke locative experiences across the three sites, diversely exploring communication technologies in support of novel heritage encounters. This paper advances HCI debates on posthuman design for naturecultures by illustrating how locative media concepts can be informed by the particular context and challenges of the heritage site, and how its design can consider situated, relational, and ethically attentive engagement with multilayered heritage.

NHT is a continuing workshop series associated with the ACM Hypertext conference for over a decade. The workshop acts as forum of discussion for the narrative systems community within the wider audience of the Hypertext conference. The workshop runs both presentations from authors of accepted short research papers, and unstructured unconference sessions to provide a venue for important discussions of issues facing and opportunities for members of the narrative and hypertext community. This year the workshop aims to broaden the community again after two years of more focussed themes on mixed reality by encouraging discussions on the breadth of interdisciplinary hypertext narrative.

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.

Hypertext and games research have long been intertwined; both as understanding games as a form of hypertext, and also through identifying ludic interactions and patterns in hypermedia. While this research often seeks to understand theoretical and structural connections, in this paper we seek to go beyond these to build an explicitly hypertextual game engine. We target Mixed Reality (MR) and locative games for our engine as media that have been previously identified as well-suited to sculptural hypertext, and demonstrate the value of hypertextual patterns and structures as part of a game creation toolkit. In this paper we present LUTE (LoGaCulture Unity Toolkit Engine), a technology framework built on top of the Unity 3D game engine for the creation of MR games and locative experiences. LUTE builds on the established state of the art in both MR games and Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) with a modular design that uses hypertextual structures to handle the flow of content nodes in the game, and a declarative order system to specify gameplay in those nodes.

Mixed Reality (MR) Games integrate digital elements with real world places. In doing so they change those places, with important ethical implications. We present a synthesis of 8 existing frameworks on MR Ethics to establish a set of ethical issues for MR Games, and a qualitative analysis of interviews with 17 MR Game Designers to define the strategic approaches they use to address them. We identify 26 ethical issues over 5 dimensions: Claim Rights, Duty of Care, Social Justice, Privacy, and Control; and 59 separate tactics forming 13 strategic approaches over three areas: Design, Participant Management, and Logistics. Mapping these to codes of ethics from the ACM and IEEE we show that the strategies can be seen as methods for behaving ethically within the context of MR Game development, although many strategies rest on the virtues of individual designers and their critical engagement with an ongoing ethical process.

The Authoring Burden describes the overhead of writing an Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) as opposed to a linear story. There are many methods and tools that have been proposed for writing IDNs with the implicit goal of reducing this burden, but because there is no comprehensive model of the Authoring Burden assessing the impact 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 therefore highlights the heterogeneity of IDN as both a strength, but also a challenge to theorists and tool designers.

NHT is a continuing workshop series associated with the ACM Hypertext conference for over a decade. The workshop acts as forum of discussion for the narrative systems community within the wider audience of the Hypertext conference. The workshop runs both presentations from authors of accepted short research papers, and unstructured unconference sessions to provide a venue for important discussions of issues facing and opportunities for members of the narrative and hypertext community. This year the workshop aims to build on last years discussed of “Mixed Reality Hypertext” with a targeted discussion of the ethics confronting narrative hypertext and specifically mixed reality hypertext as part of a wider discussion on the ethics of mixed reality games.

Power dynamics, resources, urbanization, sociopolitical trends, cultural policies, audience diversity, digitization, and innovation deeply influence engagement in cultural production in Europe today. Cultural institutions increasingly adopt co-creation, cooperation, and collaboration to remain relevant, expanding their reach beyond traditional boundaries. Digital tools are critical in audience development, enhancing engagement and accessibility, and offering diverse perspectives. This workshop will explore the ethical implications of interactive locative entertainment, games, and social media within cultural heritage contexts. It aims to extend human-computer interaction (HCI) situational ethics to locative media and mixed reality gaming, addressing concerns such as physical trespass, cultural norms, and narrative integrity. Sponsored by the EU projects LogaCulture and BIG - Blockchain Innovation for Social Good, the workshop will foster discussions on ethical frameworks and innovative uses of emerging technologies. Participants will collaborate on developing ethical guidelines for mixed reality gaming and storytelling, with outcomes aimed at future iterations and broader dissemination in the cultural sector.

Millard, David E.Structure is key to interactive narrative authoring. It can be perceived at the micro, meso, and macro levels of navigationNavigation, and when presented as common patterns creates a toolboxToolbox from which authors can build their stories. This structuralistStructuralism (Structuralist) approach to authoring appeals to the engineer’s mindset, but post-structuralists would argue that no patterns are fundamental or universal. As Interactive Digital Narratives become more gamelike they turn into Strange HypertextsStrange hypertext, with playful mechanics deeply aligned with their narrative goals. This ludonarrativeNarrative mode ludonarrative aspect of IDNs is exactly the sort of shift in perspectivePerspective that post-structuralism warned us about and suggests that patterns might limit authors rather than empowering them. This chapter reviews the reported patterns in hypertext and interactive narrative and explores how patterns could continue to be important for authoring in a strange and post-structural world.

With the rising popularity of Virtual Reality (VR), there is also a rising interest in co-located multiplayer experiences, as people want to play VR games together with their friends. As having multiple VR headsets is out of reach to the average consumer, we need to look into different possible ways of including multiple people in this play space. We have created a multi-modal co-located multiplayer VR game, Stuck in Space, that introduces a second player in two ways - one with a PC (the baseline that a lot of current games do), as well as a tracked Phone that can be used as a ‘window into the virtual world’. We have conducted a user study (n = 24) where we explore the difference in immersion and co-presence between the two versions using two questionnaires (IPQ and NMMoSP), as well as a thematic analysis of the subsequent interview data, from which 5 themes emerged. Surprisingly, we found no significant difference in co-presence or immersion based on the quantitative data. However, the qualitative analysis helps reveal one of the main reasons why that is - maintaining a mental model of the real world while also being in the virtual world makes it harder for the person wearing the headset to immerse themselves and feel co-present. From these themes and sub-themes we theorize that each of the two versions has positives and negatives that cancel each other out in the quantitative data, and for there to be a difference we would need to accentuate or change certain elements of the game. The results show that introducing a second player through a Phone is not detrimental in terms of co-presence and immersion and that it is a viable way of doing so, although certain design considerations would have to be taken into account to minimize the negatives.

Building our discipline has been an ongoing discussion since the early days of ICIDS. From earlier international joint efforts to integrate research from multiple fields of study to today’s endeavours by researchers to provide scholarly works of reference, the discussion on how to continue building Interactive Digital Narratives as a discipline with its own vocabulary, scope, evaluation and methods is far from over. This year, we have chosen to continue this discussion through a panel in order to explore what are the epistemological implications of the multiple disciplinary roots of our field, and what are the next steps we should take as a community.

There is a long history of research exploring how augmented and mixed reality systems can be used to support visitors to cultural heritage locations, but the technological or application specific focus of much of this research means that our understanding of how these experiences work is more of a collection of insights, rather than a coherent theory about how the elements of the experience come together. There is a danger that without developing this knowledge further, our systems will be technologically complex, but experientially simplistic. In this article, we explore how one form of mixed reality experience, digital locative storytelling, can impact the experience of place, and in turn how place impacts the experience of story. We have analyzed 33 interviews, and 25 participant observations from 12 story deployments at 2 different sites. Our findings confirm that locative storytelling experiences not only impart information to readers, but also help them to rediscover familiar places and see hidden relationships-especially through time. But our findings also show how the success of the experience is reliant on the balance of attention between the virtual and real (the story and the place), and that issues with navigation, social interactions, and technology are problematic because they can disrupt this balance. Digital locative experiences therefore need to be designed carefully in order to create a balance of attention (e.g., by aligning the elements of the story with the topology and character of place). We call this a state of Loco-Narrative Harmony, in which place and story are working together and reader attention is balanced, creating an effect that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Individual's privacy, especially with regard to their personal data, is increasingly an area of concern as people interact with a wider and more pervasive set of digital services. Unfortunately, the terminology around personal data is used inconsistently, the concepts are unclear and there is a poor understanding of their relationships. This is a challenge to those who need to discuss personal data in precise terms, for example, legislators, academics and service providers who seek informed consent from their users. In this article, we present a lexicological analysis of the terms used to describe personal data, use this analysis to identify common concepts and propose a model of the digitally extended self that shows how these concepts of personal data fit together. We then validate the model against key publications and show in practice how it can be used to describe personal data in three scenarios. Our work shows that there is no clearly delineated kernel of personal data, but rather that there are layers of personal data, with different qualities, sources and claims of ownership, which extend out from the individual and form the digitally extended self.

Multi-participant Interactive Narratives have the potential for novel types of story and experiences, but there is no framework to show what is possible, and therefore no description of what types of multi-participant narrative could exist. In this paper, we attempt to build such a framework by first considering the core characteristics of interactions in multiplayer games, and then considering how those might be used to define different types of multi-participant narrative. Our framework is based on a systematic analysis of 56 interactions across 17 multiplayer games, resulting in 9 distinguishing characteristics. We then validate this framework by applying it to 3 novel multiplayer games, showing that it successfully captures the player interactions, although some higher level design decisions are missed. Finally, we demonstrate that novel premises for multi-participant narratives can be constructed from these characteristics. Our work provides a foundation for considering the types of multi-participant narrative that are possible.

In a location-based story a reader's movement through physical space is translated into movement through narrative space, typically by presenting them with text fragments on a smart device triggered by location changes. Despite the increasing popularity of such systems their poetics are poorly understood, meaning limited guidance for authors, and few authoring tools. To explore these poetics we present a co-operative inquiry into the authoring of an interactive location-based narrative, 'The Isle of Brine', set on the island of Tiree. Our inquiry reveals both pragmatic and aesthetic considerations driven by the locations themselves, that affect the design of both the Story (narrative structure) and Fabula (events within the story). These include the importance of paths, bottlenecks, and junctions as a physical manifestation of calligraphic patterns, the need for coherent narrative areas, and the requirement to use evocative places and to manage thematic and tonal discord between the landscape and the narrative.

It is well known that the Web, as with any communications technology, has brought new opportunities for citizens around the world to transcend the physical borders of their states. Global Justice activism seeks to challenge dominant socio-political power systems and promote fairer, free and environmentally friendly political discourse on a global scale. The nature of Global Justice activism has meant that it has historically maintained a close relationship with the Web and is influenced by new Web tools and technologies. Social media in particular has been lauded as opening up a new era for Global Justice activism, providing activists with means to network and organise horizontally, circumventing hierarchical power dynamics. However, these tools and technologies are becoming ever more ubiquitous in the everyday socio-political landscape, they are not the radical tools they once were. This poster presents the findings from a week of participation in the "Stop G8" demonstrations in London in June 2013, a week of meetings, lectures and direct action designed to raise awareness regarding the contention of some citizens to dominant capitalist, neoliberal and globalising socio-economic systems.