The Triangle of Misunderstanding in Interactive Virtual Narratives: Gulfs Between System, Designers and Players

Designers of storytelling experiences in virtual reality (VR) can take advantage of the medium's realism and immersion to communicate their intentions. However, interaction freedom comes with unpredictability, raising the risk of miscommunication between the experience sought by the designer and the player's interpretation. To better understand such miscommunications, we revisit Don Norman's work on stages of action to propose a model of designerplayer gulfs in VR that incorporates eight classes of communication gulfs. We designed a two-phase study where 10 participants designed VR scenarios and then played scenarios created by previous participants. Through coupled structured interviews, we identified 127 issues in VR-mediated communication that were mapped to our model to understand their impact on the player's interpretation of the narrative experience. Our work provides a roadmap to identifying sources of miscommunication in VR, a first step to conceiving principles and guidelines for achieving effective communication in storytelling experiences.