Interactive narratives that use tangible and bodily interactions can facilitate multi-sensory, performative, emotional, and lived experiences. Tangible and bodily interactions can be leveraged through diegetic elements as they exist both in the reader’s reality and the fictional world, providing readers a way to enter the story world. To unlock the potential of diegesis as a design concept in interactive narratives further, I give design guidelines focusing on three less investigated areas. I explore how diegetic elements can help readers take internal (positioned inside the story world) and ontological (actions impact story world) roles, provide support for character engagement, and help readers navigate possible complexities of novel interactive narrative systems.I explore these topics through the design and user analysis of three of my storytelling systems – Shiva’s Rangoli, the Next Fairy Tale, and Gummy’s Way Out. Shiva’s Rangoli is a tangible interactive narrative where the reader takes the protagonist’s role and impacts his affective state through a diegetic interface and diegetic ambient effects. The Next Fairy Tale is a VR experience where the reader takes a character’s role by performing diegetic actions like casting spells as they converse with and understand the antagonist’s point of view. Gummy’s Way Out (GWO) is a food-based interactive narrative where the reader eats a gummy bear and then helps him find his way out of their body by consuming various diegetic food items and performing different bodily actions. I provide design guidelines for creating diegetic elements that use tangible and bodily interactions. I describe how affordances and attributes can leverage the sensory, affective, and semantic aspects of actions with diegetic objects and the body, to provide logically convincing narrative consequences to actions, and help readers feel the impact of their actions sensorily and emotionally while taking internal-ontological roles. I describe how character engagement can be built by endowing readers with responsibility, aligning their goals and interests with the character’s, sharing and negotiating diegetic elements with the character, and applying affordances to help readers wear a mask and take a role. Lastly, I identify and recommend how to help readers navigate complexities of the system like - understanding who their character is, how to perform the role and take desired actions, and what consequences their actions may cause. This dissertation provides insight into how diegetic elements can help readers step into, enact, impact, and experience the narrative world in a sensory, emotional, and lived way.

This paper examines the concept of agency within games and proposes a shift from the notion of agency as representing choice or freedom to one of agency as representing commitment to meaning. This conception of agency is aimed at understanding the pleasures of engaging with narratively rich games, and helps to address the tension between player choice and authorial intent. We draw on what speech act theory says about how trust, meaning and communication are achieved in human conversation, applying these notions to interactive storytelling. This new perspective on agency provides us with a better analytical tool for understanding the relationship between interaction and narrative pleasure, and provides a useful metric for designers of story-rich games.

From Sword Art Online to Ready Player One, people have never stopped envisioning how virtual reality (VR) can transform digital games and potentially everyday life. As VR continually evolves, understanding its interaction design is crucial. In this dissertation, I establish a framework of simulation and efficiency as two fundamental design values for VR game interactions. I theorize the design of VR game interactions as reconciling value tensions between simulation and efficiency through case studies of the state-of-the-art in the first generation commercial VR games. In game studies, simulation often refers to how well game interactions represent their real-world counterparts, and efficiency is often an aspect of usability, playability, and ludic interaction. I contend that simulation and efficiency can be viewed further as duality rather than mapping them to separate continuums and scales as in existing frameworks. I examine the formal elements of the platform, the interaction, and the game context within the interaction design to see how the value tensions between simulation and efficiency can be amplified or reconciled.

My dataset includes hundreds of gameplay screenshots depicting interaction design examples of over 20 semantic actions organized under four categories: 1) Locomotion Interactions, 2) Object Interactions, 3) FPS Combat Interactions, and 4) RPG Combat Interactions. I use the Oculus Rift S headset and motion controllers as the VR platform for my close reading. I analyze several representative examples in each category and map them onto the two-dimensional simulation and efficiency framework for comparison.

The analysis produces new understandings of simulation and efficiency and extends two existing frameworks – 1) interaction fidelity and 2) narrative and embodied interface. I redefine simulation to emphasize the experiential perspective of achieving realism over its predominant formal perspective of being technically realistic. I provide a new perspective for the controversial uncanny valley model in the interaction fidelity framework to reveal the risk of over-simulating the realistic. For efficiency, I propose a hierarchical model to highlight levels of inefficient interactions and the contextual efficiency of achieving the desired game goal. For practical contributions, I analyze the emerging best practices (high simulation, high efficiency) and representative cases of suboptimal design. Finally, I propose several principles and guidelines for future VR game interaction design based on the new simulation and efficiency framework.

When encountering a new digital game, players can rarely access gameplay without first installing and patching the game, assenting to its End User License Agreement, creating an account, or adjusting the audiovisual and gameplay settings. In this dissertation, I critically examine everyday transactions of authority and value in the design of digital games by calling attention to interfaces and interactions on the periphery of gaming such as authentication, character configuration, and physical interfaces. Interfaces like these dictate accessibility and inclusivity and influence how players interact with games. These interfaces set the stakes for what gameplay can be and demand players conform to implicit and explicit norms in return for access to gameplay. Authentication secures access control while enrolling players in data-driven practices that are increasingly commonplace in computational media. Character configuration can allow players to customize their experience, but limits in the design of customization can limit who games can be about. Physical interfaces facilitate gameplay yet constrict game design practice and constrain physiological accessibility. By moving beyond the lens of efficacy that is commonly applied to these interfaces by UX/UI researchers, I re-frame how these interfaces mediate, manage, enable, and enforce transactions of authority for both players and designers alike.