Evaluating the Pleasures of Agency in Shiva's Rangoli, a Tangible Storytelling Installation

The experience of agency has been centralized in interactive digital storytelling research. Current approaches to agency place the actions of a reader into direct conflict with the authorial intentions of an interactive storyteller by privileging the authorial pleasures that come by interacting with the story's plot. In this paper we present the design and results of an empirical study of Shiva's Rangoli, a tangible interactive narrative system that supports meaningful interactions with the narratives that are decoupled from character actions and plot outcomes. Shiva's Rangoli allows readers to change the emotional, presentational, and aesthetic context of the story by giving them control over the ambience of the installation space where it is experienced, through a tangible interface. From our study, we identify three interaction styles or strategies undertaken by readers that reframe readers as Story Supporters, Meaning Makers, and Story Controllers to explore the pleasures of bounded agency within interactive storytelling.