Interactive Digital Storytelling in Cultural Heritage: The Transformative Role of Agency

Digital storytelling has been established as an effective approach for promoting visitor engagement in cultural heritage contexts. Interactive digital storytelling is however not as prevalent in this field. In this work we attempt to gain insight for the added value that interaction in the form of enhanced user agency brings to a cultural heritage experience in terms of supporting its ultimate objectives: engagement with the cultural content as well as reflection, meaning making and historical empathy. Through a user study with 67 participants experiencing a historical "choose your own adventure" type of IDN on-line, we examine the user experience in general and, in particular, correlations of user perceived agency with the dimensions of immersion and transformation. Our results are promising as to the use of this type of IDN for the wider audiences and reveal a concrete effect of user perceived agency on the aforementioned two user experience dimensions.