Creating a story branch in response to unexpected user actions in an interactive narrative is considered a desirable feature of an experience manager. Adapting to the user in this manner aspires to improve his or her experience. However, few robust mechanisms exist to create story branches and there is a lack of studies that measure a story branch's effect on experience. Our work addresses these limitations by using plan-based intention revision as a branching mechanism and evaluates it using established measures of narrative experience. Our results show that when measuring narrative transportation, we observe a significant main effect for group F(1, 652) = 10.74, p < .01 where individuals in the treatment condition (M = 50.70; SD = 12.81) who read narrative texts that included intention revisions reported higher levels of narrative transportation compared to individuals in the control group (M = 47.43; SD = 12.92). When measuring perceived interest, we observed a significant main effect of group F(1, 652) = 6.43, p < .05, where individuals in the treatment condition (M = 28.51; SD = 8.97) who read narrative texts that included intention revisions reported higher levels of perceived interest compared to individuals in the control group (M = 26.67; SD = 9.22). These results establish the efficacy of using intention revision as a branching mechanism for intentional planning and invites its extension to interactive narrative.
