Interactive Fictional Dialogue Games as Arts-Based Research

Supplementary material for this article can be found online at http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/var/media/43.1/liao/index.html.

Using an interactive fictional dialogue game as an example, I argue that digital games are an artful way to represent research such that creating interactive digital games can be seen as an art-making process and likewise a way to analyze and understand research data. The interactive fictional dialogue game featured herein constitutes arts-based research (ABR) focusing on new media as the art medium. First, I discuss fiction writing as arts-based research practice to establish the possibilities and range of ABR. Then, I extend the concept of fiction writing to incorporate interactive fiction, a game genre, and discuss the potential of interactivity as the core characteristic of new media and new media-based scholarship. Further, through the example of a fictional dialogue game on avatar-making created using Twine, I argue that interactive fiction games are a kind of arts-based research.