Comparing Speech and Text Input in Interactive Narratives

Intelligent user interfaces are finding new applications in interactive narratives, where players take on the role of a character in a fictional storyline. A recent example is the interactive audio narrative "Traveler", in which a combination of technologies for speech recognition and unsupervised text classification allow players to navigate a branching storyline via open-vocabulary spoken input. We hypothesize that the affordances of audio-based interaction in interactive narratives are different than text-based interaction, and that these differences change the player experience and their understanding of their fictional role. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a controlled experiment (n=39) to compare player interaction in "Traveler" with a text-only variant of the same storyline. We found significant differences in the types of input provided by players, suggesting that interaction modality impacts how players conceive of their relation to narrators of fictional storylines.