Gamification and digital fiction

The commonplace view that reading a book is a silent and solitary pastime, with the occasional listening audience, such as child having a bedtime story read to them, has been challenged during the 20th century as more interactive modes of reading have come to the fore. Rather than being the recipient of a morally improving and didactic story, child readers have come to be viewed as participants, their imaginations stirred and complicit with the storyteller, dictating the mode of telling and even the direction of the story. It is true that books with fold-outs, pockets, moveable characters, pop-ups, a range of textures and sounds, and games and puzzles have long been made for the children’s market. But the revolution in publishing technologies of the past thirty years as a result of digital convergence has made us even more aware of the prevalence of participatory practices in reading. To the haptic features of older interactive books, digital technologies have added balance and directionality, location, voice recording and recognition, and smart elements from mathematics to algorithms to game mechanics. But has not been a straightforward transition: material and digital forms of gamification in children’s fiction have evolved together as authors, publishers, and developers have capitalised on the affordances of technology. In this chapter we look at the shift from material to digital interaction in children’s books, and the history of branching narratives and development of interactive fiction (IF).