What is interactive storytelling?
Stories are a fundamental piece of human experience. They help us understand our experiences, guide us through our daily lives, and help distract us from the horrors of reality. We have adapted stories to every communication technology invented along the way, and each of those stages created different approaches to how stories are made. Novels, films, audio plays, and games each have a different focus and tell stories in their own ways.
When seen through the lens of technology, interactive stories tend to appear in the most low-tech and the most high-tech ways. We tell interactive stories when we’re face to face, whether in traditional oral storytelling contexts or in tabletop or live-action RPGs. But we also tell interactive stories using digital technologies which allow us to bring together vast amounts of information. It’s the flexibility of each of these contexts that ultimately defines the potential of interactive storytelling.
So what does interactive storytelling look like? There are a few defining factors to get us started:
- Interactive stories aren’t linear. Different aspects of the story can be experienced in different orders and different ways. As a result, each person’s experience of them is unique.
- Interactive stories require agency. This means that the reader should feel like they have meaningful control over the story and how it unfolds. Many techniques can be used to create this agency, from challenges to be overcome to information to be assembled.
- Interactive stories are multimodal. They often combine different sources of information into a coherent landscape that is assembled into a story. Having different ways of presenting information is an important tool for enabling meaningful player control.
- Interactive stories are bound by rules. The ways that readers can interact and the effects of their interactions should be well-defined and connected to the story being told. Readers aren’t always aware of the rules and structures that are being used, but they need to be there for the interactive story to work.
This list serves two primary purposes:
The first is to give people the tools they need to understand pieces of interactive media that they come across. Ask yourself: how do I have control over this story? What tools are being used to convey information?
The second is to shape the way that creators think about the interactive stories they are creating. When you’re making an interactive story, you still need to have answers to all of the usual story elements, but you also need to wrestle with how to make the interactivity meaningful.
Hopefully this quick glimpse behind the curtain will help you get more out of your stories.
