Interactive Narrative Design is a craft
which focuses on creating dramatic play
meaningful participatory experiences with interactive systems. An interactive
narrative designer seeks to craft systems which deliver narremes, narrative elements,
to a player in such a fashion that the player may craft a story cognitively based on
their navigation within said system. When narrative design is successful the
player believes that they are experiencing a story driven out of their own agency
within a navigated dataspace or
played video game. While the aims of Interactive Narrative Design are similar
to Game Writing and Game Design, and
surely involves the crafts, this hybrid craft aims to allow story to take center stage so that
the systems engaged by the player are centered around the core thematic aim of the
writers story.

Interactive Narrative Design is a craft that
meets at the apex of Ludology and Narratology and turns the conjoining into
functional interactive entertainment development methodologies. Ludology being the study of play that has
become very fashionable in the game design community within the past 2 decades. Narratology is the theory of narratives,
of spectacles, cultural artifacts that ‘tell a story’. Video games allow the
player to witness data as a navigable,
participatory dramatic spectacles,
unfolding before their eyes in real-time.

The aim is to
transport the player through play into the video game by all means of his
visual and aural faculties, so that
he may forget the confines of reality and live and breathe in the video game
which seems as life itself and on the screen which seems the wide
expanse of a whole world. The craft to bring about that paradigm shift is Interactive Narrative Design.