Personalized and Interactive Literature

Interactive and personalized narrative – two aspects of interactive storytelling – are familiar as a pair of science fiction visions. The Holodeck, from Star Trek, imagines real-time, plot-defining interaction as a protagonist in an immersive virtual world. The Illustrated Primer, from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, instead imagines a computerized book which automatically writes custom, multimedia stories for its owner, indirectly contextualizing and commenting on the owner’s current life situation and challenges. Neither of these visions yet exists, and some believe that interactive storytelling is an inherently flawed concept. Nevertheless, interactive storytelling is experienced by many people every day. This is most common in computer games but is also experienced through a wide variety of other forms, from hypertext fictions to live performances. Researchers, designers, and authors continue to make progress by focusing on the specifics of particular fictional genres and tropes. This has produced a flowering of approaches and research directions, which are already indicating ways in which interactive storytelling will transform our key experiences of fiction. This chapter focuses on three of these experiences: empathy, curiosity, and responsibility. Empathy includes our experiences of identification, theory of mind, and social simulation with fictional characters. It is already changing as players, for example, struggle to complete gameplay challenges that mirror those of characters within a game’s fiction. It promises to shift further as it becomes possible to, for example, radically customize fictions to facilitate identification with particular characters. Curiosity includes our experiences of speculating about plot developments, character motivations, and the significance of fictional themes. It is already changing as interaction allows audiences to not only speculate but manipulate, investigate, and enact strategies within fictional worlds, receiving feedback that shapes their understandings of the world and what the fiction’s systems make possible. It promises to shift further as fictions are developed with a much wider range of possible audience actions and system responses within the key areas of fiction (rather than in the simulation of, e.g., physical movement or resource flows) and as fictions are able to actively reason about means of engaging audience curiosity. Responsibility is an experience that traditional fictions have struggled to create, with both radically experimental and traditional storytellers working to produce experiences that result in audiences reflecting on their own patterns of thoughts, actions, and complicity with the actions of others. Interactive experiences seem to promise an easy way to address this, because audiences choose and take actions. But we are only beginning to see this happening, as research efforts produce fictions that give audiences a broader range of meaningful choices within the key interpersonal action. Future developments in these areas are expected to produce fictions that are more emotionally engaging, that help us make sense of our lives, and even that contribute to positive behavior change – necessitating the development of knowledge about the impacts of the powerful new art forms that emerge, as well as new ethics and aesthetics of interactive storytelling. A product of the convergence of computer science and the humanities, cognitive science and literature, engineering and art, new interactive and personalized approaches to narrative offer insights into future applications of science and technology, as well as into the fundamentals of human nature.