Interactive Digital Narratives to Represent Complexity: A Review

Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) have been long considered potential solutions to the issue of accessibly representing complex topics in a cognitively manageable way. This review article is aimed at investigating the affordances IDNs offer for representing and making complex issues accessible, as discussed in the relative academic literature. This review analysed the entirety of the proceedings of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) and related texts, for a span of 28 years. From the analysis of the 126 selected publications, 10 macro-topics emerged, namely: Participation, Model complexity, Increased engagement and motivation, Multi-user capacity, Narrative, Adaptability, Multimodality, Structuring thinking, Replayability, and Caveats. These topics are discussed in relation to what they entail for the accessible representation of complexity through IDNs.