The Harrison Family: A story about the 23rd President and his Life

This interactive digital narrative encapsulates the immaculate history of Benjamin Harrison and his family.  It offers a unique insight into the lives of this influential family and their contribution to American history. The story is divided into different pathways each focusing on a different family member. It includes historical information and multimedia elements to bring the story to life. With this narrative, you get to experience the trials and tribulations that this family went through while helping guide decisions that can change the path of the United States. You can learn various lessons about overcoming hardships, and United States history, or even better understand how decisions made in the past can have a lasting impact.

Reflection on Design

For this project, we used a template that used SugarCube in Twine to create this interactive digital narrative. We were inspired by Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States, and his family. We wanted to make the story fun and add elements of fiction. We loved the idea of users being transported back in time and making their own decisions as the president or his family members. We did a lot of background research on the family and the time period but also created new narratives and alternative versions of history.

This semester we used feedback from usability tests and Dr. Fisher to help us with the narrative. This is a nonlinear story, which was something neither of us had experience writing, loosely about real people in history. This IDN is very text-heavy with a lot of dialogue and Dr. Fisher helped us with adding more interactivity with the text in Twine. We added sound effects, voice-overs, images of the people, and 360-degree photos of the Benjamin Harrison house to help keep people engaged. Users move through the narrative using hypertext (which was coined by Ted Nelson) and have a little bit of agency throughout the story. They have choices on where to move next through the story and which characters they can become. 

We know learning history is not interesting for everyone, but giving users some choice and adding elements of fiction can make the story more interesting. In our transformation lecture, we learned that allowing users to transform themselves into someone else for the duration of the experience and letting them experience new perspectives through roleplaying can transform the narrative. Our users can switch perspectives, follow different Harrison family members, and change some of their choices throughout the experience. Users can also replay, or return to a specific point in the story, and make different choices.