• Anastasia Salter deposited Building Interactive Stories in the group Group logo of Electronic LiteratureElectronic Literature on MLA Commons 3 years, 10 months ago

    The integration of interactive stories into digital humanities practice has taken several forms. Interactive stories are certainly an object of study, and the intersection of digital humanities with media and games studies (as well as communities dedicated to making and studying interactive stories, such as the Electronic Literature Organization, which released Electronic Literature Collection 1, 2 and 3, three volumes of interactive narratives) has assisted our understanding of what interactive stories might accomplish. A growing interest in games in the classroom has also focused attention on serious and educational games, which often use interactive storytelling as one means to build an experience. (Significant examples include Jane McGonigal’s Evoke, an alternate reality game encouraging players to collaborate and address world hunger and water shortages, and Play the Past, a non-digital role-playing game system for character-based play in history courses.) By building interactive stories, we can communicate complex ideas that change our relationship to texts and have the potential to serve as textbooks, persuasive works, thought experiments, and personal narratives. In this chapter, I first position and define interactive stories as a medium, placing the form in its contested space in scholarship. Then I survey exemplars, design principles, and platforms for building interactive stories.