Breaching Interactive Storytelling’s Implicit Agreement: A Content Analysis of Fa¸cade User Behaviors Christian Roth and Ivar Vermeulen VU University, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands roth@spieleforschung.de, i.e.vermeulen@vu.nl Abstract. Using both manual and automatic content analysis we an- alyzed 100 collected screen plays of 50 users of the IS system Fa¸cade, coding the extent to which users stayed “in character”. Comparing this measure for first and second exposure to Fa¸ cade revealed that users stay significantly less in character during second exposure. Further, related to a set of independently collected user experience measures we found stay- ing in character to negatively influence users’ affective responses. The re- sults confirm the notion that the more Fa¸ cade users keep to their assigned role, the easier they become dissatisfied with the system’s performance. As a result, users start exploring the system by acting “out of character”. Keywords: Fa¸cade, User Behavior, User Experience, Content Analysis. 1 Introduction Satisfaction of user expectations is a key element in successful entertainment media [1]. Users have certain expectations on how the product will fulfill their entertainment needs - e.g., provide arousal, flow, suspense, and/or agency. In turn, media creators have expectations on how their product should be used in order to be entertaining. For example, to experience suspense, movie viewers should not fast forward to find out who ”dunnit”; to experience flow, players of an action game should play at a level appropriate to their playing skills. Based on these reciprocal expectations, creators and users thus form an implicit agreement that entertainment media, if used in a proper way, will be entertaining. For new types of media this implicit agreement holds as well. However, new types of media may not be able to fulfill it immediately. The latter seems to be the case with many Interactive Storytelling (IS) prototypes. IS users expect to have an impact on story progress and outcomes, and thus to receive meaningful feed- back regarding ”global agency” [7]. However, many IS prototypes are proofs-of- concepts focusing mainly on technical challenges and only tentatively offer such feedback. Research on the IS application Fa¸ cade for example showed that the system often did not understand user intentions and failed at giving meaningful responses [5]. Another study found that Fa¸ cade users were initially goal oriented, but when realizing their limited control on story progression, increasingly tested