Skarth-Hayley, Luke
(2025)
Attention-driven scenography.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
Game engines now find use beyond video games for virtual production in television, film, and other fields. Streaming services also use these engines to provide games and interactive media for new audiences. While interactive media become more accessible via these technologies, game engines still hold novel narrative design opportunities. They offer significant possibilities in the production of interactive narrative experiences in rich virtual environments. Interactive and adaptive narrative spaces can enhance immersion and provide experiences other media do not. Yet branching narrative remains a common design pattern.
This research asks what novel forms of interactive narrative design are possible with game engines, via environmental storytelling. It asks what roles exist for the audience between viewer and player, and how new approaches to interaction and narrative design can provide experiences that react to user attention in virtual environments. It explores what other non-linear forms of narrative are possible, with a focus on those involving environmental storytelling in virtual spaces, organised to be experienced spatially rather than temporally. An overview of existing forms and key examples is provided.
Attention-Driven Scenography (ADS) is presented as a novel form of environmental storytelling-focused interactive digital narrative design. ADS tracks user attention via the proxy of camera view in a virtual environment, and uses this to provide tacit and implicit interactions with virtual objects that respond in the moment, over time, and ahead of time, to the amount of attention given, resulting in engaging adaptive environmental and thematic storytelling. ADS offers the possibility of customising environments and scenes over time to adapt an experience to what seems to be of interest to the user based on their attention.
The primary research consists of the design work that informed the ADS design concept, and the formalisation of the concept in a plugin for the Unity game engine. Example experiences were created and evaluated through observations and user studies to assess ADS as a novel form of interactive storytelling. Studying ADS through the experience Woolgatherer showed that participants responded positively, though questions were raised about user agency, consistent interaction patterns, and induction for ADS mechanisms.
Future design work is needed, particularly in balancing user agency with attention and memory in a complex interactive environment, and the complexity of authoring a cohesive but adaptive experience. With the ADS software plugin, engaging others in its use may provide further useful assessment of the concept. In conclusion, there is an interesting tension in using attention to drive a spectrum of interactions from explicit through tacit to implicit, and situating users as percipients in a complex position of agency where their influence is stronger than they realise. ADS is emerging as a useful design concept for complex adaptive environmental storytelling across virtual time and space.
| Item Type: |
Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
(PhD)
|
| Supervisors: |
Flintham, Martin
Martindale, Sarah
Benford, Steve |
| Keywords: |
attention, scenography, game design, experience design, interaction design, HCI, human-computer interaction, implicit interactions, tacit interactions. |
| Subjects: |
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA 75 Electronic computers. Computer science |
| Faculties/Schools: |
UK Campuses > Faculty of Science > School of Computer Science |
| Item ID: |
81119 |
| Depositing User: |
Skarth-Hayley, Luke
|
| Date Deposited: |
30 Jul 2025 04:40 |
| Last Modified: |
30 Jul 2025 04:40 |
| URI: |
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/81119 |
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