Interactive storytelling provides experiences to the users that go beyond the simple passive role of experiencing story events and situations in a third person perspective. Users are driven into taking an active role in a narrative by acting and interacting with characters, by feeling what characters feel, and thus influencing the outcome of that narrative. As such, when interactivity is brought into storytelling, a quite delicate balance needs to be found between the user's participation and the wishes and intended directions of the authors. Many different aspects of this "interactivity dilemma" have been raised over the past few years, either by taking an authors' centric perspective, or a perspective that is centered on the participant's experience. In this paper, I would like to raise a different view where interactivity is seen as the dynamics created on the boundaries between the virtual and the real. In that sense, the role of tangibles, as the gateways for interactive storytelling systems, is explored, and some issues related to their design are addressed.
['Ana Paiva']
From pencil to magic wand: tangibles as gateways to virtual stories