Narrative books
This is one of a series of reading lists I put together between 2002 and 2004 when I was starting out in interaction and experience design. This one is on narrative: interactive storytelling, theatre as a model for interaction, story structure, and the sequential-art tradition of comics.
Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Brenda Laurel’s Computers As Theatre are the two foundational texts that frame interaction design as a narrative practice. Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is the story-structure canon. And Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, along with Eisner’s books, are among the most useful things an interaction designer can read, more practical than most HCI books for thinking about pacing, framing, and the relationship between words and images.
The Amazon links below are what I had at the time, most will be dead now, but the ISBNs will find you a copy.
Hamlet on the Holodeck
Janet H Murray.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
Mark Stephen Meadows.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Computers As Theatre
Brenda Laurel.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Interactive Acting: Acting, Improvisation, and Interacting for Audience Participatory Theatre
Jeff Wirth.
amazon.com
Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence
by Roger C. Schank, Gary Saul Morson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Comics & Sequential Art
Will Eisner.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative
Will Eisner.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com