Space, Imagination, and Story: Understanding how contemporary interactive stories are told

Storytelling is one of the foundations of humanity and a shared experience between humankind. However, at times, storytelling has resulted in an alienated audience that are treated as passive beings. This passive audience could be seen as part of a mass audience collective to whom authors could feed stories for mass consumption.

I argue that contemporary interactive storytelling enables the audience to have more power and control over the stories with which they engage. Here, the audience has a choice of which stories they wish to consume, an approach that requires further research. In this thesis, I examine how contemporary authors create and tell interactive stories. My research question is: How do authors utilise relationships between space, imagination, and narrative within contemporary interactive storytelling?

To answer this question, I conducted a close reading of the York-based project, People We Love, selected for its particular engagements with my chosen themes of space, imagination, and narrative. I collected further qualitative data via interviews with personnel closely associated with the People We Love project. I also conducted deductive literature research on topics related to my research question and explored secondary case studies of correlated story projects.

My findings present a new appreciation of the author as a creator not so much of a specific story, but of a platform on which the audience may interact to create unique story experiences. My findings also showcase how a reader or user may feature in a contemporary interactive narrative as an individual rather than within a mass collective. These findings boost further understanding of the authorship of interactive storytelling and how stories may be told between complex relationships of space, imagination and narrative.