The goal of this half-day workshop is to explore the role of discomfort for transformative experiences in interactive narratives. We aim to build a community of scholars and practitioners interested in leveraging discomfort in interactive narratives to facilitate positive transformation. Last year’s ICIDS featured the art exhibition “Texts of Discomfort,” showcasing works which present their stories in discomforting ways: Texts that impose a state of loss and unsettle the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistencies of their tastes, values, memories.

Building on this and our ICIDS 2020 workshop "Transformative Experience Through Interactive Narratives," we want to probe further into the discomforting potential of interactive narratives to support transformation and unpack how initially negative emotional responses may ultimately result in reflection, insight, and meaningful experience. The overall topic is delivered in a hybrid format through a series of presentations combined with examples, exercises and discussions. The workshop will be hybrid, and you can join us live at ICIDS21 and virtually on our zoom server!

Before the workshop, we ask attendees to submit a short abstract (500 words max.) outlining an example of a discomforting experience that they've either had with a game, or would like to design into a future game. As one prominent and strong example, we use Romero’s board game Train in which players focus on the task of filling trains to capacity only to learn afterwards about their (obsensibly, the player's) projected role in The Holocaust. Train creates a strong discomfort when players realize how willing they were loading the railcar, perhaps opening a reflective window into the Holocaust and the role of complicacy. Other examples include Molleindustria's game on the fast food industry, Pathologic 2, about the struggle with an outbreak or September 12th, a statement on the War on Terror. Join us online via zoom.