Stories and storytelling are central to the human experience.They help us make sense of the world’s complexity and facilitate the understanding of ourselves as individuals and as participants in society. Therefore, stories are critical elements in adolescent cognitive development - how children adapt or learn about the world. The internet provides secondary students with unprecedented opportunities to survey diverse stories; both a blessing and a curse as our world becomes growingly complex. Until recently, levels of complexity, specifically in social systems, were relatively low. With the development of the internet and other digital technologies, "complexity has become a defining feature of the 21st Century [1].”

Complex systems are difficult to understand and don’t lend themselves well to simple presentations. Existing conventions for social media, search, and video streaming lack the power to capture complex stories and breed large-scale confirmation bias, resulting in "Fake News" and the polarisation of populations. While “fake news” is relatively easy to spot with advances in computer science fields like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), biassed news is more complex [2]. Biassed stories may be relatively accurate or inaccurate - perspective can determine classification. In reality, there isn’t always a single ‘right’ perspective, there are ‘truths’ in multiple stories on the same topic.  So how can educators navigate this complex system with their students, especially when these topics are so controversial and sensitive? 

There is a need for novel approaches that can be used to capture complex, multiperspective narratives in order to sustain the public sphere and further democratic discourse, and digital technologies have been suggested as a way to address these concerns by means of their ability to create complex interactive representations [3]. To help secondary students untangle the world’s complex web of interrelations, this research aims to develop a narrative architecture for structuring complex content through Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) experiences - narratives in digital media that change according to user input [4]. Specifically, this work examines the interrelations of knowledge gaps [5], curiosity, and explanations as keystone structural elements for these transformative IDNs. The desired outcome is recognition of the need for a paradigm shift in pedagogy, where precedence is put on long-term cultivation of systemic thinking fostered through IDNs for complexity representations. 

While examples of IDNs exist, like the Last Hijack Interactive[6], Fort McMoney [7], and Nonny De La Peña’s immersive journalism experiences [8], they are few and far between. They tend to be once-off works that are (a) created from ad hoc models; and (b) have generally not been subject to methodological evaluation to assess their efficacy as tools for people to understand complex problems. Therefore significant research is needed to understand how these rare multi-perspective works function as digital media objects at the fundamental level, e.g., what are their narrative structural properties, what are their interaction models, how are the multiple perspectives represented and why are these particular works successful and engaging. For the research to have maximum impact, the research is not merely analytical, but will include the development of an (abstract) narrative architecture based on the analysis, and also a (concrete) prototype of an authoring tool that will be evaluated through the creation of (concrete) digital media works based on the narrative architecture.

Over the past few decades, learning with IDNs has emerged into a promising academic field of study. It has benefited from an increase in publications and a better communal comprehension of how computers can potentially “narrate responsively and in revolutionary ways” [4]. Simultaneously, educational institutions are faced with dwindling student engagement, increased learner diversity, and a world of deeply challenging, nearly incomprehensible complex systems which educators are charged with helping students navigate. This project aims to investigate whether thoughtfully constructed IDN’s, ones that incorporate the elements mentioned in this study’s current research above, can be effective educational tools for capturing the complexities of our world and cultivating a generation of systemic thinkers. While measuring the ability of IDNs in fostering long-term, permanent systemic thinkers cannot be measured within the scope of this research, predictive testing can be done, along with evaluating both immediate and short-term impacts through user experiments. This research plans to study these above-mentioned topics and develop a structure to satisfy optimal learning. Overall, the goals can be summarised as follows: (1) Conduct a literature review of the state of the art and narrative aspects of current approaches. This will be done through analysis of current artefacts and methodical classification (2) From the literature review, identify characteristics/abstractions of learning that have potential for helping humans deal with complexity in a manner that does not create polarisation (e.g., systemic thinking, curiosity) (3) Develop a narrative model useful for structuring multi-perspective narrative content based on the abstractions identified with a view to encourage systemic thinking (4) Develop media works based on the model and evaluate efficacy in helping the audience grasp complex problems. The works will be multi-modal IDNs and potentially incorporate VR/ AR elements (5) Evaluate media works through a qualitative user study to estimate how effective the works are in improving audience understanding of the complex problem.

Preliminary findings suggest IDNs support the constructivist learning theory - children are innately active and intrinsically motivated, or curious, which is integral to cognitive development [9]. Research also shows that curiosity can counteract biased information processing since it promotes open-minded engagement with ideas contrary to individual political predispositions [10]. Since IDNs are exploratory by nature - they require action in the form of interaction - they are a promising new medium for building knowledge and fostering curiosity. Additional means of stimulating curiosity in an IDN include: Explanatory Activities - Requiring individuals to explain complex topics stimulates curiosity. Often, people think they understand complex phenomena with better depth than they actually do, but through providing explanations, they become aware of their initial illusion of understanding. This is known as the illusion of explanatory depth[11]. Knowledge Gap Activities - States of curiosity are associated with a psychological interest for activities or stimuli that are surprising, novel, complex, or characterised by a knowledge gap, all of which can be quantified mathematically [12]. Goleman and Loewenstein draw attention to knowledge gaps as a source of curiosity, stating it is “a cognitive induced deprivation that arises from the perception of a gap in knowledge and understanding [13].” The short-term impact of the work is expected to be an improved understanding of how IDNs can be used to solve complex problems and how these problems can be represented as narrative Digital Media content using multiple perspectives and fostering curiosity. The biggest problems faced by humanity today are highly complex (e.g., climate change, refugee crises) and an improved (non-reductive) understanding of them is critical for our ability as a global society to address them. It is possible that educational institutions, documentary film-makers and news organisations will be interested in adopting this type of structure to express multi-perspective complex content, but our conversations with entities in this space are preliminary at this time.

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