A Game of Thrones Companion: Orienting Viewers to Complex Storyworlds via Synchronized Visualizations

ABSTRACT

The merger of television and digital technology allows TV producers to author increasingly complex narratives, which pose new challenges for modern audiences. The prototype presented here is targeted at viewers of HBO's Game of Thrones and utilizes manipulatable, tightly synchronized spatial visualizations to concretize complex character relationships. A preliminary user study was conducted, utilizing the less tightly synchronized, non-diagramatic HBO Go application as an experimental control. Results show that users were able to more accurately identify character relationships after watching segments of the TV drama with the companion app prototype.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)