Mapping Curiosity-Driven Coherence in Interactive Narrative Performance

My dissertation develops dramaturgical cartography, a transferable, interactive analytical protocol for mapping how dramatic organization becomes knowable through participant inquiry in Interactive Narrative Performance. Put more simply: I am building a method for showing how interactive works make meaning through what participants notice, question, pursue, test, misunderstand, remember, reinterpret, and eventually understand. Dramaturgical cartography sits at the intersection of these fields:

Dramaturgy and Performance Studies
Fuchs, Barba, Bleeker, Trencsényi, Kok, Eckersall, Pledger, Bharucha
Defines performance as world, system, constellation, and relational process.

Interactive Narrative and Game Studies
Murray, Mateas, Koenitz, Jenkins, Jantke, Aarseth, Fernández-Vara, Juul, Salen, Zimmerman
Explains possibility spaces, agency, traversal, rules, and meaningful action.

Curiosity and Knowledge Networks
Loewenstein, Patankar et al.
Explains inquiry as gap recognition and reorganization of knowledge relations.

Semiotics, Narratology, and Hermeneutics
Barthes, Peirce, Eco, Ricoeur, Iser, Carroll
Explains signs, hypotheses, interpretation, delay, revelation, and retrospective understanding.

Graph-Based Topology and Qualitative Methodology
Graph theory, qualitative coding, critical digital humanities
Turns the synthesis into an explicit, inspectable, and revisable analytical instrument.

Interactive Narrative Performance

I use the term Interactive Narrative Performance, or INP, to describe works in which participants do not simply receive a prearranged dramatic sequence, but actively construct dramatic understanding through interaction, investigation, exploration, interpretation, experimentation, or collaboration.

Possible forms include participatory and immersive theatre, interactive drama, actual play, tabletop role-playing games, interactive fiction, nonlinear narrative games, escape rooms, and other hybrid forms. A work may qualify through causal interactivity, in which participant actions alter what happens; epistemic interactivity, in which participant actions shape what is encountered, known, connected, or understood; or both.

The central problem is therefore not only what story a work contains, but how that story and its larger dramatic world become knowable. What does a participant encounter first? What remains hidden? Which questions become possible? Which discoveries alter the significance of earlier events? How do scattered pieces of information, action, space, performance, and affect come to feel like parts of a coherent whole?

The Participant-Dramaturg

A player, performer, or observer may function as a participant-dramaturg, or dramaturg-from-within: someone who performs dramaturgical inquiry while still situated inside an unfolding experience and without complete knowledge of its organization.

This concept adapts Elinor Fuchs’s invitation to ask of a play, “What kind of world is this?” My project reformulates that question:

How does the work teach participants to discover what kind of world this is?

The participant-dramaturg notices gaps, identifies what appears consequential, follows clues, experiments with rules, forms and tests hypotheses, recognizes callbacks, revises assumptions, and gradually reconstructs the operating logic of the dramatic world. Fernández-Vara’s account of the detective player is especially important here, as are Iser, Eco, and Ricoeur’s accounts of interpretive cooperation, gaps, provisional understanding, and recursive movement between parts and wholes.

In Interactive Narrative Performance, interpretation does not happen only after the work ends. Participants interpret while acting.

Emergent Dramatic Coherence

The project’s primary outcome is emergent dramatic coherence: the process through which dispersed actions, signs, spaces, rules, performances, affects, discoveries, and interpretations become intelligibly and affectively related within a larger dramatic configuration.

Within that broader category, emergent narrative coherence refers specifically to the configuration of events and information as story.

This distinction draws particularly on Eugenio Barba’s layered account of dramaturgy. Narrative dramaturgy organizes events and information; organic or dynamic dramaturgy organizes rhythmic, sensorial, and embodied experience; and transformative or evocative dramaturgy allows the composition as a whole to produce larger meanings or changes of state. Warner and Trencsényi extend this logic into nonlinear, heterarchical, physical, and multidisciplinary performance, while Ricoeur explains how later understanding can retrospectively gather earlier events into a meaningful whole.

Coherence is therefore neither completely contained inside the artifact nor freely invented by the participant. It emerges through the relationship between the work’s available structures and the participant’s situated path through them.

Perceived Dramaturgical Responsivity

A related concept is perceived dramaturgical responsivity: the possible feeling that a work is meeting, rewarding, or anticipating the participant’s inquiry.

In live improvisation, this may come from literal interpersonal listening, uptake, adaptation, and callback. In an authored nonlinear work, the system may not change at all, yet the design may anticipate many possible routes of inquiry and distribute discoveries so that the participant repeatedly encounters a meaningful next question, consequence, or recontextualization.

The map cannot prove that participants experience responsivity. It identifies structural conditions that may support such a feeling and creates a basis for comparison with practitioner accounts, close analysis, and participant testimony.

Dramaturgical Cartography

Dramaturgical cartography is the method I am developing to make these processes visible.

It is an interactive visual-relational protocol for identifying, encoding, mapping, querying, and comparing how dramatic organization becomes knowable through participant inquiry.

The maps represent dramaturgically consequential units such as questions, discoveries, clues, locations, actions, rules, performance choices, hypotheses, tests, epiphanies, callbacks, contradictions, revelations, and reinterpretations. They also represent relations such as causality, dependency, spatial and temporal connection, knowledge-gating, performance uptake, callback, contradiction, convergence, divergence, hypothesis revision, and retrospective recontextualization.

The method is informed by graph and network thinking, but it is not primarily a quantitative network-science project. Nodes, edges, paths, clusters, branches, and dependencies provide a disciplined relational syntax for humanities analysis.

Its dramaturgical lineage is also important. Kok Heng Leun describes the dramaturg as a mapmaker; Pledger describes dramaturgy as a production’s collectively developed operating system; Eckersall positions dramaturgy within a network of relations; and Bharucha emphasizes the dramaturg’s movement among positions rather than ownership of a single stable perspective. Trencsényi, drawing on Glissant, contributes a constellational model, while Bleeker draws on Benjamin and Adorno to explain meaning as emerging through tensions among elements rather than linear exposition.

Barthes provides a direct analytical precedent. In S/Z, he “stars” the text by breaking it into provisional units of significance, or lexias, so that its codes, enigmas, actions, and interpretive pathways can be examined relationally. Dramaturgical cartography adapts that operation to interactive performance by explicitly coding the relations through which one unit enables, complicates, contradicts, recalls, or recontextualizes another.

The goal is not to produce a decorative diagram or a neutral picture of the work. It is to build a usable analytical instrument through which users can ask:

• Which discoveries depend upon a particular clue?

• Which earlier moments are transformed by a later revelation?

• Where do different paths converge or diverge?

• Which hypotheses were confirmed, contradicted, or abandoned?

• What relations were designed in advance, and which emerged through performance?

Curiosity as an Organizing Force

Curiosity is treated not merely as a feeling or engagement metric, but as an organizing dramaturgical force.

Loewenstein explains curiosity as arising from a perceived gap between what someone knows and wants to know. Barthes and Carroll show how narrative organizes attention through enigmas, questions, delays, partial answers, and revelations. Patankar et al. provide the project’s most important relational model by describing curiosity as the construction, filling, compression, and reconfiguration of knowledge networks.

A discovery may answer one question while opening several others, connect previously separate mysteries, weaken a hypothesis, or transform the meaning of something encountered much earlier.

The project models this process through a Curiosity Trajectory:

Query → Pursuit → Hypothesis → Epiphany → Recontextualization → Synthesis

This is not a mandatory linear arc. It may branch, loop, stall, split, preserve competing hypotheses, terminate in a dead end, or remain unresolved. Peirce helps explain hypothesis formation through abduction; Eco explains interpretive constraint; Ricoeur explains retrospective reconfiguration; and Patankar et al. explain changing knowledge relations.

Blueprints and Footprints

The framework distinguishes between two levels of a Curiosity Trajectory. The Blueprints are the larger field of potential or emergently established relations available within a work: possible events, locations, discoveries, rules, constraints, clues, dependencies, actions, and revelations. This concept draws on Jantke’s partially ordered event spaces, Koenitz’s protostory and narrative vectors, Jenkins’s narrative architecture, Murray’s procedural and spatial environments, and Mateas’s relationship among intention, affordance, and constraint. The Footprints are the particular route through which a participant encounters, acts upon, and interprets some portion of that field.

In an authored nonlinear game, much of the Blueprint may be designed in advance, while the Footprints vary according to the player’s route and interpretations. In collaborative improvisation, the Blueprint is more fluid and may develop alongside the Footprints through rules, prior choices, shared memory, offers, uptake, and callback. The distinction allows the method to compare what the work makes possible, what becomes possible through performance, and what a particular participant actually encounters and understands.

Four Epistemic Engagement Constructs

Four complementary interpretive lenses help explain how Curiosity Trajectories contribute to coherence and possible responsivity:

• Micro-flow describes local investigative momentum: the movement from one question or clue toward another actionable possibility.

• Meaningful play, drawing on Salen and Zimmerman, Murray, and Mateas, describes actions or discoveries that change what can be known, inferred, accessed, or reinterpreted.

• Dual-world engagement, drawing on Juul, Fine, Bowman, Cover, Torner, and White, describes the coordination of fictional, performative, social, and systemic frames.

• Emergent complexity describes the accumulation of local discoveries, choices, failures, jokes, callbacks, and revelations into larger dramatic patterns.

These constructs are not measurements generated automatically by the graph. They are interpretive layers applied to mapped relations.

The Two Cases

The dissertation develops and evaluates the instrument through a most-different comparative case design centered on Worlds Beyond Number and Outer Wilds.

Worlds Beyond Number represents production-discovery. Its dramatic structure emerges through collaborative improvisation, rules, dice, memory, character action, contingency, uptake, and callback.

Outer Wilds represents reception-discovery. Its dramatic architecture is substantially fixed, but its experienced configuration emerges through exploration, environmental traces, physical and temporal systems, knowledge gates, hypotheses, and retrospective synthesis.

The contrast is deliberate. One case generates relations through live collaborative performance; the other anticipates relations through authored nonlinear design. They are joined by the same underlying phenomenon: the emergence of intelligible dramatic configuration from locally encountered relations.

The Outer Wilds ship’s log is also an important design precedent. Its graphical rumor mode translates the designers’ own node-and-connection planning materials into a player-facing cognitive scaffold. It records discovered information and displays relations among mysteries without prescribing quests, determining the next action, or making unwarranted inferential leaps for the player. Dramaturgical cartography extends that logic by also representing provisional hypotheses, affective associations, contradictory explanations, abandoned interpretations, and participant-specific trajectories.

The Contribution

The central contribution of the dissertation is not simply a new interpretation of two works. The contribution is the method itself. Dramaturgical cartography is designed as a transferable visual-relational protocol for examining how Interactive Narrative Performances organize the conditions through which dramatic worlds become askable, discoverable, inferable, testable, and retrospectively coherent.

Its broader aspiration is twofold. First, the protocol should eventually support maps organized around constructs other than curiosity, such as grief, identity, power, belonging, memory, or transformation. Second, the case maps themselves may become participatory interpretive environments in which users compare paths, propose relationships, and discover new epistemic, affective, or existential dimensions of works they already know.

The project’s wager is that making these relationships visible can do more than describe how interactive stories work. It can create a new environment for thinking with them.