This issue has been a long time in the making, much longer as we all at JIN had hoped. But there are good reasons for this delay–the journal now has a much stronger technical foundation than before and while it might look similar, everything has been rebuilt from the ground up. The first issue used a custom-built WordPress theme and an editorial workflow centered around Easychair, which turned out to be unsustainable. Easychair works well enough for conferences, but the specific requirements of a journal which needs options for a revise-and-resubmit workflow are different. We therefore made the difficult decision to move to ojs (open journal system) after publishing the first issue. Ojs is built around a journal workflow and allows us to host the journal, the submission system and the editorial workflow on a single site, making administration much easier. At the same time, ojs only has a small community of theme developers resulting in many similar-looking websites. We wanted to preserve our distinct look and that meant that our main programmer and journal managing editor Joshua A. Fisher had to learn ojs theme programming, which delayed the process further. Yet the result was worth the wait, we now have a much stronger version of JIN, thanks mainly to the heroic efforts by Josh along with Jayme Markus-Fisher and Oluwatobi Akerele – thank you!
In terms of content, the new issue continues with our mission to include interactive artifacts into the journal, first, by featuring an art piece (Being Water by Terhi Marttila, Rafaela Nunes, Paulo Bala (all University of Lisbon, Portugal) and Andrés Isaza-Giraldo, University of Porto, Portugal), and secondly by integrating interactive pieces into articles.
This issue features two peer-reviewed articles and a collection of short pieces from the participants of the first Futures in Interactive Digital Narratives Student Research Symposium (FIDN) organized by the ARDIN Graduate Research Committee (Sarah Anne Brown, University of Florida, USA, Coordinator), Jade Arbo (Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Brazil), Mauro Colarieti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy), Sathaporn “Hubert” Hu (Algoma University, Canada), Jasmine Mattey (University of Bergen, Norway), Samya Brata Roy (Deemed-to-be University, India), and Anca Serbanescu (University of Salford, UK).
The first article, War in Your Own City. Transformative Learning through Experiencing the Newsgame I am Mosul by Renske van Enschot (Tilburg University, The Netherlands), Christian Roth (University of the Arts Utrecht, The Netherlands) and Libby van den Besselaar investigates the effect of the IDN newsgame “I am Mosul” which aims to transport participants in Dutch cities into a war scenario inspired by the one in the city of Mosul, Iraq, with the intention to make them reflect on war as situation in their own environment to increase overall understanding and empathy. The authors evaluate transformative learning in this scenario and find significant effects of agency, even in a relatively simple branching narrative. Importantly, they also identify aspects which can significantly improve future designs.
The second article,Roots of Fear and Empathy: Rethinking Plant Agency and Eco-Horror in Interactive Narratives for Ecological Awareness by Gareth W. Young and Nour Boulahcen (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) discusses ways how video games can use plant representations—particularly through eco-horror and Human-Plant-Computer Interaction (HPCI)—to foster ecological awareness while avoiding the pitfalls of "ecophobia" (fear-based portrayals that alienate humans from nature). Amongst other topics, the article considers the role of plants in game narrative, derived from an analysis of games such as Flower and Mutazione. The authors offer design recommendations for integrating plants into ecco-horror scenarios and conclude that thoughtful integration using HPCI principles is possible.
The Futures in Interactive Digital Narratives Student Research Symposium (FIDN) section is testimony to the vital work undertaken by emerging scholars as well as of ARDIN’s commitment to supporting them. The short pieces cover a wide range of topics including an argument for new methodologies in studying IDNs(Sarah Anne Brown, University of Florida, USA), designing ludonarrative media for game-based learning (Pratama Wirya Atmaja, Universitas Pembangunan Nasional “Veteran” Jawa Timur, Indonesia), a framework for immersive counter-storytelling in contested heritage (Anurak Chandam, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan),a research-through-design approach to urban futures using interactive digital narratives (Jacopo William de Denaro, Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy), and ways to make research accessible through IDNsways to make research accessible through IDNs (Jonathan Barabara, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland).
Finally, the interactive art piece Being Water is an exploration of the state of water through 360° video, artifact-beings, voice-over, and atmospheric sound. Employing N. Kathrine Hale’s concept of speculative aesthetics, it is an escape from anthropocentrism which centers on a non-human existence–water–while allowing navigation and action.
At JIN, we are excited (and a little bit proud) about this relaunch. Now go read about all this exciting work in the space of IDN research. And rest assured–more is coming. There are a number of articles in the pipeline and we just published the call for the first guest-edited issue on “Autonomy In and Through Interactive Digital Storytelling”, which you can read here.
Hartmut Koenitz, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief