This issue explores digital media’s new role in narrative and meaning-making strategies. Authors describe how the fusion of traditional and digital tools combine for a unique user-experience, forming new aesthetic encounters that creating a new “digital aesthetic.” Not only does this create extensions of the narrative itself, but author Heidi May describes this as new cultural expression and a reflection of us in contemporary society.

This fact has new implications for a variety of narrative genres. For example, comic art can now allow location-based participation that explores a storyline in the physical world. Video mash-ups and other social media tools become an important means for generational identity construction. Interactive storytelling systems provide readers with an opportunity to physically engage with physical artifacts from the world of the story. With these new tools, techniques and participant extensions, understanding the structure of these narratives is pivotal for both analysts and practitioners.

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In this issue

• V8N2: Conventions and Innovations: Narrative Structure and Technique in Heavy Rain

  By Huaxin Wei, Dr. Tom Calvert | February 28, 2013

  Heavy Rain is probably one of the most dramatic games and one of the most engaging interactive narratives that have achieved commercial success. Developed by France based Quantic Dream and released by Sony Computer Entertainment solely on PlayStation 3 in February 2010, the game had sold 1.5 million copies worldwide by August 2010 and received universal critical praise.

• V8N2: Digital Narratology: Rethinking Narrative Competence in Interactive Media

  By Jennifer Smith | February 28, 2013

  In industrialized nations, there is a vast expanse of everyday communication, educational exploration, and pleasure reading occurring in digital spaces. This trend is not likely to lessen as people continue to rely on technological devices […]

• V8N2: From Site-specific Comics to Location-based Comics: Ordinary Things, Planting Comics, and GPS Comics

  By Özge Samanci | February 28, 2013

  Unlike print media, digital media offers a vast amount of canvas. In Reinventing Comics, McCloud (1) imagines the computer monitor as a window that can be scrolled across an infinite canvas. Current location tracking technologies […]

• V8N2: Getting Your Hands on Electronic Literature: Exploring Tactile Fictions with the Reading Glove

  By Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum | February 28, 2013

  In this paper we describe an interactive narrative that we have designed that is experienced via a custom tangible embodied user interface called the Reading Glove. We present three important theoretical perspectives on how readers make sense of mediated experiences and apply them as analytical lenses for viewing the experiences of participants interacting with our system.

• V8N2: Journeys in Travel: A Recombinant, Computercontrolled Cinematic Essay

  By Christin Bolewski | February 28, 2013

  "Journeys in Travel" is a work-in-progress artistic research project and evolves from the interest in developing new contemporary modes of travel narrative within the realm of digital storytelling rather than investigating the genre of the digital database narrative itself.

• V8N2: Processing: Understanding Art as Encountering Ongoing Narratives

  By Hedi May | February 28, 2013

  Living life under the sign of the digital is about the emergence of a spatiality and duration in which relative speeds and differential relations are foregrounded in embodied experience. It is these conditions that constitute […]