The witch: Identity construction and the fairy tale in interactive narrative

Unrestricted The Witch is a single-player, narrative game on the Apple iPad where one plays a girl labeled by her neighbors as a witch. By manipulating the language said by other characters in the game, the player shapes how the witch protagonist is viewed and, in turn, how the nature of the storybook changes over time. By standing at a crossroads of physical and digital media, The Witch project strives to leverage and challenge the conventions of traditional, children’s fairy tales in order to construct a new kind of interactive, identity-building system. This set of mechanics uniquely uses traits from three categories of such systems prevalent in interactive media: component, variable, and fixed.