Do different act structures have an impact on audience appreciation of a story?

Hey all!

I was reading through back-entries on this site (as you do) and came across an interesting post about how act structure works in Dramatica:

So I think it’s fascinating that Dramatica can predict linear act structure for a Grand Argument Story based on a complete storyform, given the progression of various throughlines as either bump-bumb-bump, bump-slide-bump, or slide-bump-slide, leading to either a four act structure, a three act structure, or a two-act structure, but I’m still wondering what to make of this information; i.e. what is the consequence from the point of view of Audience Appreciation of structuring a story in one of these three ways (two, three, or four acts, respectively)?

There seemed to be some suggestion in that initial post chain (if I remember correctly) that we might term hairpin-based structures (slide-bump-slide) as “rise-fall” narratives, which makes a certain amount of sense, but which also seems a bit prescriptive (must all such narratives feel like they end “down,” so to speak?). And I’m all on board for four-act structures “feeling” more episodic then three act structures would, but still-- I wonder if there might be deeper implications to picking one of these structures over another for a given storyform. Perhaps three-act structures feel more subjectively “close” to the characters than four act structures do, for example. No idea, just spitballing, but I’m curious to hear other thoughts!

“Rise-fall” can also be “fall-rise”. My experience so far is that three-act structures do not feel more subjectively “close” to characters than four-act structures. In fact, it seems like I run into more and more predominantly two-act structures than anything else.