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 narrative and dramatic meaning through what participants notice, question, pursue, test, misunderstand, remember, reinterpret, connect, and eventually understand.

Dramaturgical Cartography sits at the intersection of several fields:

Dramaturgy and Performance Studies
Fuchs, Barba, Bleeker, Trencsényi, Kok, Eckersall, Pledger, Bharucha
Frames performance as world, system, terrain, 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, systems, and meaningful action.

Curiosity and Knowledge Networks
Loewenstein, Litman, Patankar et al.
Explains inquiry through information gaps and the filling, compression, and reconfiguration of knowledge relations.

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

Graph, Network, and Topological Thinking
Graph theory, network models, topology, qualitative coding, critical digital humanities
Provides a relational vocabulary for turning this 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, system, 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 a dramatic world.

Fernández-Vara’s account of the player as both performer and spectator, and particularly of the detective player reconstructing events from traces, is especially important here. Iser, Eco, Barthes, and Ricoeur provide related accounts of gaps, enigmas, interpretive cooperation, 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.

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 method deliberately separates two operations:

Encoding Stage

constructing the relational field

The work and participant encounters are represented through analytically distinguished units, warranted relationships, attributes, trajectories, overlapping constellations, and distinctions between the broader possibility structure and particular participant encounters.

Interpretation Stage

interpreting the encoded field

Higher-order queries and interpretive lenses are applied to the encoded relationships in order to identify configurations that were not coded into the map as conclusions in advance.

This separation matters. If I encoded “coherence,” “responsivity,” or one of my interpretive constructs directly into the graph and then later discovered those same categories in the graph, the method would simply reproduce its own assumptions. Dramaturgical Cartography instead encodes lower-level relational evidence and asks what larger patterns become visible through analysis.

Nodes, Edges, and the Relational Field

The maps represent dramaturgically consequential units such as questions, discoveries, clues, locations, objects, actions, rules, performance choices, hypotheses, tests, epiphanies, contradictions, revelations, and moments of reinterpretation.

These become nodes within the map.

Edges represent explicitly warranted relationships among them: causality, dependency, access, spatial or temporal relation, knowledge-gating, performance uptake, callback, contradiction, confirmation, revision, or retrospective recontextualization.

Additional attributes preserve distinctions such as Participant Position, evidentiary source, uncertainty, temporal status, and whether a relation belongs to the wider structure of possibilities or to a particular participant encounter.

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

Topology offers another useful conceptual precedent. Its historical development includes the study of relations such as position, inclusion, neighborhood, connection, and continuity independently of fixed measurement. Dramaturgical Cartography uses this principle cautiously: the dramaturgical significance of two nodes does not depend on how close together they happen to appear on the screen. What matters is the encoded relation between them.

Dramaturgy as Cartography

The cartographic lineage is not merely metaphorical.

Kok Heng Leun describes the dramaturg as a mapmaker who helps collaborators perceive the terrain of an emerging work. David Pledger describes dramaturgy as a production’s collectively developed operating system. Peter Eckersall positions dramaturgy within a network of relations, while Rustom Bharucha emphasizes the dramaturg’s movement among positions rather than ownership of a single stable perspective.

Trencsényi’s heterarchical dramaturgies similarly resist the assumption that one element or perspective must govern the whole, while Bleeker describes dramaturgical meaning as emerging through changing relations among materials, actions, structures, and audiences.

Barthes provides another important 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 extends these traditions by turning relational dramaturgical analysis into an explicit and queryable procedure.

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

• Which discoveries depend upon a particular clue?

• Which earlier encounters are transformed by a later revelation?

• Which nodes participate in several different relational groupings?

• Where do investigative paths converge or diverge?

• Which hypotheses were confirmed, contradicted, revised, or abandoned?

• Which relations were available in the work’s broader possibility field, and which were actually encountered by a particular participant?

• Where do participants reach similar understandings through different routes?

• Where does inquiry stall or fail to produce coherence?

Blueprints and Footprints

The framework distinguishes the broader relational field from particular participant encounters through Blueprints and Footprints.

The Blueprint is the structured field of available or emergently established relations within a work: events, locations, discoveries, rules, constraints, clues, dependencies, actions, relationships, and possibilities.

This concept draws on Jantke’s partially ordered story spaces, Koenitz’s distinction between interactive system and realized narrative process, Jenkins’s narrative architecture, Murray’s procedural and spatial environments, and Mateas’s relationship among intention, affordance, and constraint.

A Footprint is a participant-positioned realization within that field: what a participant encountered, in what order and circumstances, through which actions, and with what interpretive consequences.

In an authored nonlinear game, much of the Blueprint may be established before play, while Footprints vary according to players’ routes, discoveries, experiments, omissions, and interpretations.

In collaborative improvisation, the Blueprint is more provisional and may develop alongside participant Footprints as performers establish new facts, relationships, constraints, callbacks, and possibilities through rules, improvisation, uptake, and shared memory.

The distinction lets the method compare:

what the work makes possible → what becomes possible through performance → what a particular participant actually encounters and understands

Overlapping Constellations

The map is not divided into one set of mutually exclusive categories.

A node may participate simultaneously in several encoded constellations because different relationships make it relevant in different ways.

An object might belong to one constellation because of where it appears, another because it belongs to a recurring object class, another because it participates in a character relationship, and another because it is involved in a systemic or narrative pattern.

These constellations do not have to coincide, and they do not have to correspond to a Curiosity Trajectory.

This matters because Curiosity Trajectories are important structures within the map, but they are not the whole map. Dramaturgical Cartography also preserves the broader spatial, causal, performative, systemic, social, material, and thematic field through which inquiry moves.

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. Litman further distinguishes forms of curiosity associated with interest and with a more urgent need to resolve uncertainty. 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 through the filling, compression, and reconfiguration of knowledge networks.

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

Curiosity Trajectories

One important structure traced across the relational field is the Curiosity Trajectory:

Query → Pursuit → Hypothesis → Epiphany → Recontextualization → Synthesis

These are not mandatory stages in a fixed sequence. They are recurring epistemic functions or fenceposts through which inquiry may be traced.

A trajectory may branch, loop, stall, recur, split, preserve competing hypotheses, terminate in a dead end, return to an earlier question from a transformed position, or remain unresolved.

Query identifies an actionable gap.
Pursuit turns that gap into investigation.
Hypothesis proposes a provisional explanation.
Epiphany marks an epistemically consequential realization.
Recontextualization reorganizes earlier material through new understanding.
Synthesis compresses multiple observations and relations into a more coherent explanatory configuration.

A Curiosity Trajectory therefore resembles a developmental path of inquiry, not the fixed trajectory of a projectile through an unchanged space. The participant’s understanding develops recursively, and later discoveries may reorganize the very relational field through which earlier inquiry is interpreted.

Emergent Dramatic Coherence

The project’s broad interpretive concern 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 more specifically to the configuration of events, actions, agents, and information as an intelligible story.

This distinction draws particularly on Eugenio Barba’s layered account of dramaturgy. Narrative dramaturgy organizes actions, events, characters, and meanings; organic or dynamic dramaturgy concerns physical, rhythmic, sensory, and energetic composition; and evocative dramaturgy concerns the associations and transformations produced in spectators.

Bleeker, Behrndt, Trencsényi, Warner, and other contemporary dramaturgical thinkers extend this relational logic into devised, systemic, physical, multidisciplinary, and heterarchical performance. Ricoeur provides a complementary account of retrospective configuration through which later understanding can gather temporally dispersed material 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 a work’s available structures and a participant’s situated encounter with them.

It also does not require perfect understanding, closure, or the elimination of uncertainty. A coherent configuration can remain provisional, revisable, incomplete, or bounded by recognized gaps.

Four Epistemic Engagement Constructs

During the Interpretation Stage, four Epistemic Engagement Constructs function as interpretive lens queries for tracing higher-order configurations within participant Footprints.

They are not encoded as node or edge types, and they are not psychological states or a four-stage progression.

Singularity: Localized Investigative Momentum

Singularity asks whether an unresolved question continues to generate viable inquiry.

Its coherence function is to sustain investigative momentum.

A strong configuration may include repeated pursuit, productive failure, experimentation, redirected inquiry, or returns to an unresolved question through different approaches.

The relevant criterion is not simply that activity continues. Inquiry remains organized around an epistemic gap and continues to produce intelligible next moves.

Within a larger convergence, Singularity may contribute to the feeling that the work recognizes the participant’s inquiry by continually offering a viable next move.

Perturbation: Meaningful Play

Perturbation asks whether actions, discoveries, experiments, or interpretations become consequential.

Drawing on Salen and Zimmerman’s account of meaningful play, the relevant relation must be both discernible and integrated into the larger experience.

Its coherence function is to make actions and discoveries consequential by changing what can subsequently be known, inferred, accessed, attempted, or reinterpreted.

Within a larger convergence, Perturbation may contribute to the feeling that the work registers what the participant has done, noticed, or cared about.

Conjunction: Cross-Frame Integration

Conjunction asks whether meaning becomes coordinated across simultaneously active experiential frames.

These may include fictional, systemic or mechanical, performative, social, material or embodied, and reflective frames.

Its coherence function is to coordinate meaning across experiential frames.

The mere simultaneous presence of several frames does not establish Conjunction. A configuration becomes significant when information or action in one frame becomes consequential in another.

A corresponding alignment built into the Blueprint may be described as a Syzygy: a structural condition that may afford Conjunction without guaranteeing that a participant actually realizes it.

Within a larger convergence, Conjunction may contribute to the feeling that multiple dimensions of the work are responding together.

Asterism: Higher-Order Configuration

Asterism asks whether distributed material becomes mutually explanatory as a larger interpretive pattern.

Its coherence function is to integrate distributed material into higher-order configurations.

An Asterism may draw across one Curiosity Trajectory, several Curiosity Trajectories, encoded constellations, or material that belongs to no trajectory at all.

It is not simply a dense cluster, repeated motif, or accumulation of many related elements. The relevant question is whether those materials become intelligible together in a configuration that cannot be adequately explained through any one node, relation, trajectory, or encoded constellation alone.

Within a larger convergence, Asterism may contribute to the feeling that dispersed material has somehow been prepared to cohere through this participant’s particular route of discovery.

Epistemic Convergence

The four constructs remain analytically distinct.

Epistemic Convergence names the more specific condition in which all four become independently legible in relation to the same developing inquiry:

investigative momentum + consequence + cross-frame coordination + higher-order configuration

A single Epistemic Convergence may represent an especially rich configuration of emergent dramatic coherence.

But Epistemic Convergence is not the same thing as Perceived Dramaturgical Responsivity.

Three strongly realized constructs do not constitute convergence if the fourth is absent. Near-convergences are analytically useful because they can reveal precisely which form of organization did not become legible.

Perceived Dramaturgical Responsivity

Perceived Dramaturgical Responsivity describes the participant’s possible sense that the work is not merely coherent in general, but is somehow recognizing and responding to the particular shape, sequence, and style of their inquiry.

In live improvisation, literal interpersonal listening, adaptation, uptake, and callback may produce this experience directly.

An authored nonlinear work cannot literally improvise in response to a particular player. Yet it may anticipate many possible routes of inquiry and distribute discoveries, consequences, frame alignments, and higher-order connections so effectively that a participant repeatedly feels met by the work.

My current hypothesis is that this feeling may become especially salient when Epistemic Convergences recur in relatively close succession and repeatedly correspond with the participant’s Curiosity Trajectories.

In other words:

individual construct configurations
→ all four together: Epistemic Convergence
→ repeated convergence patterned around participant inquiry
→ possible Perceived Dramaturgical Responsivity

The map cannot prove that someone experienced the work as responsive. It can identify structural and relational conditions consistent with such an experience and provide a basis for comparison with participant testimony, practitioner accounts, and close analysis.

The Two Cases

The dissertation develops and evaluates Dramaturgical Cartography through a deliberately contrasting case design centered on Worlds Beyond Number and Outer Wilds.

Worlds Beyond Number: Production-Discovery

Worlds Beyond Number is a collaboratively improvised tabletop role-playing actual play in which dramatic structure emerges through performance, rules, chance, memory, character action, contingency, uptake, and callback.

Its dominant mode is production-discovery: performers investigate a world while also helping to produce, specify, and stabilize the relational field they are exploring.

A question may reveal something prepared in advance, but it may also require a new answer to be improvised. Once accepted into the fiction, that answer can become a durable constraint or affordance for later performance.

Outer Wilds: Reception-Discovery

Outer Wilds is an authored nonlinear investigative game whose principal dramatic materials and relations are substantially established before a particular player encounters them.

Its dominant mode is reception-discovery: the player produces the route, sequence of disclosure, hypotheses, experiments, reinterpretations, and synthesis through which the authored field becomes experientially intelligible.

The player does not ordinarily make a relation true by discovering it. Instead, discovery changes what that relation means within the participant’s developing understanding.

The contrast is deliberate.

One case allows relations to emerge through live collaborative performance; the other anticipates relations through authored nonlinear design. They are joined by the same underlying problem:

How does an intelligible dramatic configuration emerge from locally encountered relations?

The Outer Wilds ship’s log is also an important design precedent. Its graphical rumor mode translates the designers’ node-and-connection planning structures into a player-facing cognitive scaffold. It preserves discovered information and relationships among mysteries without prescribing a quest sequence or making the participant’s inferential leaps on their behalf.

Dramaturgical Cartography extends that logic by representing not only established information but also participant-specific routes, provisional hypotheses, contradictory explanations, uncertainty, abandoned interpretations, and changing relationships among discoveries.

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, revisable, and retrospectively coherent.

Its contribution has two major dimensions.

First, it develops an explicit procedure for translating interdisciplinary theory into:

encoded units and relations → queryable relational structures → higher-order interpretive configurations

That procedure is intended to be transparent enough that its assumptions, uncertainties, and interpretive decisions can be inspected and revised rather than hidden inside a finished diagram.

Second, the case maps may themselves become participatory interpretive environments. Different users could preserve and compare Footprints, Curiosity Trajectories, hypotheses, constellations, and interpretations without requiring those experiences to collapse into one authoritative account.

The broader aspiration is that Dramaturgical Cartography could eventually support analytical frameworks organized around concepts other than curiosity—such as grief, identity, power, belonging, memory, or transformation—by providing a repeatable procedure for translating a theoretical framework into a relational ontology and interpretive query system.

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.