Shifting from narrating in everyday life and culture to designing an IDN is a major challenge. It requires rethinking the goals and elements of narrating, with a focus on the player’s perspective. Yet, we know little about student designers’ IDN composing processes, such as how they use digital techniques (like branching) and develop narrative qualities, like character, to create multiple story trajectories for player engagement. Novices’ uptake of devices and narrative elements, such as character and choice poetics, is a process that can inform IDN theory and practice about the shift to this new genre. This paper presents a secondary analysis of interactive digital narrative (IDN) designs and player reflections created during a 2.5-h online workshop. Detailed analyses of narrative elements and digital devices in hundreds of design and reflection sequences trace uses and developments of novice authoring strategies. Four strands of analysis (narrative elements, choice poetics, player reflection, and Twine tree structure) offer a complementary picture of the IDN design learning process. Findings of our analysis show that, over time, student designers developed characters with increasing literary quality and with sophisticated choice options (socio-emotional and moral dilemmas) as pivots for narrative trajectories. Different character and choice development patterns related to player feedback suggest the importance of integrating these multiple dimensions into IDN research and pedagogy. Discussion highlights how the analysis captures the complexity of the IDN genre, provides a foundation for ongoing research into IDN designing as a developmental process, and offers a foundation for IDN pedagogy.

Interactions between players and designers during IDN authoring are an undervalued source of information about the authoring process. This paper analyzes a corpus of player-author interactions from an online workshop. We classified feedback types and IDN design features, showing player reflections during authoring influenced the peer designer’s work. Some types of feedback correlated positively with the overall growth of a design partner’s IDN, while other feedback types correlated with story content. When players suggested authoring techniques or other subjective experiences playing through the emerging IDN, their partner’s designs expanded structurally (nodes and branches). When players shared negative evaluations, the partner’s design did not grow. In comparison, player reflections that were cognitively oriented led to increases in story settings, while player affective expressions led to more character dialogue. Effects include increases in both IDN narrative elements and structure. Some effects correlate with participant gender and native language, although not with race/ethnicity. The study results offer insights about intersubjectivity - what is on novice player-designers’ minds as they wrestle with interactive digital narrative authoring. IDN pedagogy can, thus, benefit from designer-player collaboration as students experiment with technical authoring tools, develop and employ relevant vocabulary, and interpret a player’s feedback. Additionally, the Authoring-Other Exchange System employed in this study provides a framework and novel measures for future research and pedagogy.