It’s tempting to see storytelling as a transaction. One person offers another a story; the storyteller is like a vendor, and the captive audience buys into illusion for a time. The storyteller is active; the audience is passive.
But what, then, is the purpose of interactive storytelling, which asks the audience to become an active participant? Why do writers go to such lengths to create them—writing thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of words, when only a fraction of these may reach any given audience member at a time? And why are they gaining traction?
What Is Interactive Storytelling?
An interactive story is a narrative experience that depends at least partly on audience participation.
Most video games are interactive stories, with choice-based games being particularly reactive to the player’s actions. The Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, of course, exemplify this concept in print. More recently, film experiences like Netflix’s Bandersnatch have been using interactive features to test the boundaries between games and movies.
Some works are more prominently interactive than others, and whether any story is interactive is wide open to debate. Even a traditional novel, for example, relies somewhat on the reader’s ability to imagine characters, settings, and events for themselves. Yet this is nowhere near as interactive an experience as a video game in which every player choice has significant plot-altering consequences, like Until Dawn.
For the purposes of this post, “interactive storytelling” involves crafting a narrative in which player participation plays a prominent role in determining the course of the story.
What Is the Purpose of Interactive Storytelling?
It’s fair to ask what the purpose of interactive storytelling is—especially when I’ve just gone and admitted that many stories are arguably interactive to at least some degree. What does it matter if the audience participates or not?
For audience members, interactive storytelling is appealing for a number of reasons:
- Immersion—demanding your active attention pulls you deeper into the story, making the narrative (and especially its characters) feel more real
- Empowerment—your choices shape character destinies, plot points, and sometimes, the fates of entire worlds
- Novelty—you can replay the same title more than once and experience new things each time
- Connectivity—interactivity and an element of uncertainty can forge deeper, more poignant relationships between audience and characters
Also, it’s fun to try things just to see what happens next.
As for writers, we have our own reasons for putting ourselves through the special hell of designing and drafting interactive narratives. Some stories just beg us to explore multiple possibilities, and there’s no better way to do that than with a story that can take players in multiple directions. You can also explore the same basic story from multiple points of view—chiaroscuro, for example, explores how our experience of reality is affected by our perception of it.
Is Interactivity the Future of Storytelling?
Again, it’s important to remember that interactivity has always played a role, whether subtle or significant, in storytelling. But as technology continues to advance (and AR and VR, in particular, continue to be improved upon), it’s natural to wonder if more traditional storytelling may get crowded to the sidelines by bigger, better, more interactive narratives.
I don’t think there is cause for concern, however. Our oldest forms of storytelling—visual and oratory—are still alive and well, and the novel (whether print or electronic) isn’t likely to go extinct anytime soon.
Rather than worry about what we might lose, I’m looking forward to whatever we might come up with next. I’ve always been a sucker for a good story, particularly one I haven’t heard before.
chiaroscuro is an upcoming interactive story set in modern-day Rome in which you play an artist in search of inspiration. You are joined by two companions, one dark and one light, and the choices you make affect your relationship with them, the world around you, and ultimately, your art. Coming soon to an internet near you!
