4 tips for immersive and interactive storytelling
Story Juice founder and creative director, Dr Hannah Wood, shares 4 tips for immersive and interactive storytelling from 10+ years making experiences ranging from immersive theatrical productions to video games. She’s worked on single-player games, immersive shows experienced by 200,000, projects given 5-star reviews and won an international award for her work.
Tip 1: Storybeing not storytelling
I think a good immersive and interactive experience puts the audience in the storyworld. There’s a spectrum of narrative participation, from players freely exploring the world as themselves, to giving them a particular role, solving puzzles, taking different pathways, or changing the outcome. This opens up the opportunity to deliver narrative in ways beyond traditional audio, visual and textual storytelling, and two effective methods are environmental storytelling and narrative mechanics.
With the first, audiences/players explore and interact with physical or digital environments to learn about characters and events. For example, in Press Go, we had players visit physical crime scenes and character locations to progress the narrative. The same happens digitally in our video game, Underland.
Press Go (pic: Hannah Wood)
Underland (pic: Story Juice)
In constructing these spatial narratives, it’s useful to think like a narrative architect, rather than a storyteller. Creating pathways, using light and sound to draw attention, embedding narrative in objects, and also being aware audience members won’t experience the space in the same linear way, which will impact how you manage dramatic tension.
The second method, narrative mechanics or player verbs: the things you ask your players to do to interact with the world—and why—are some of my favourite things to talk about. They work well when an audience can embody a character perspective or parallel a theme in the story through the mechanics.
In Lost Origin, there’s a character who loves nature, so the audience embodies her perspective by holding up and swirling their hands to interact with butterflies projected on the giant walls of her journal, as her story unfolds in VO and animation around them.
Interacting with butterflies in Lost Origin (pic: Seamus Ryan)
The Glass Ceiling Games mobile screenshots of AR gameplay
But it’s more than more than just that—you also want the audience to experience the emotion of the character, so if it’s a joyful moment the mechanic promotes joy. If the character has a moment of disappointment, you might play the mechanic against the player to generate that same feeling.
In The Glass Ceiling Games, we give players fantasy powers to slay sexism by, for example, slingshotting catcalls—as a means to catharsis and to embody the joy of ridding the world of them. It also puts players who haven’t experienced being catcalled in an embodied perspective that shocks and can provoke real world change.
Approaching mechanics in this way means they aren’t used for the sake of it, or completely disconnected from the story.
Tip 2: Use technology in the service of story
The novelty of technology can’t sustain audiences, they want emotion and remember how they feel. So start with story, then ask how it can be expressed by the technology. You can have the same story in a novel and a game, for example, but it’ll be expressed very differently through the form.
A good question to ask is: what does the technology enable you to do that you can’t do in any other way, and how can that have a narrative logic?
In Lost Origin, we had Magic Leap mixed reality headsets, allowing you to see things that aren’t in the real world, so for us they became ‘paraforensic scanners’ (aka. ghost goggles) enabling you to see a ghost dinosaur world and scan it for info.
Magic Leap in Lost Origin (pic: Seamus Ryan)
The ghost world viewed through Magic Leap in Lost Origin
We could also transform the physical space with digital portals ripping open walls to immerse the audience in another reality. And one of the key innovations was integrating the physical and digital so dinosaurs ran along real logs, or hit a ceiling fan and made it turn, blending the two realities to deepen immersion for an audience.
That wasn’t the only technology we used. We also had sensors embedded around the set that would trigger light, sound and movement when you went close to them, to create the feel of a haunted environment before you put the Magic Leap on and saw the ghosts.
The haunted Emporium in Lost Origin filled with sensors (pic: Seamus Ryan)
The dome landing port in Mission To Mars (pic: Steve Tanner)
If your technology is a geodesic immersive dome then perhaps it can take you somewhere you can’t go everyday? We used one in Mission to Mars for the final scene where the audience arrive on the red planet.
In Resurgam, a location-based immersive adventure game, the bespoke mobile phone app is the players’ quest kit. A map in it marks a start point where you find a character, scene and physical puzzle to solve using the code cracker, unlocking the next location that you must reach by evading capture by sea monsters. Mobile apps are good for close up tasks, navigation and personalisation and here it was a tool to unlock the storyworld.
The Resurgam app quest kit
A Resurgam sea monster (pic: Dom Moore)
Tip 3: Design for different player types and playtest early
A good strategy is to design a golden path that everyone will get without too much effort, usually through performed and synchronous moments (if it’s a group immersive experience).
Add another layer in the environmental storytelling to reward those who explore, so they can have a personalised experience to share and compare with others.
Add another layer for those who want to contribute, this might involve improvisation with actors, making a distinct choice that opens up one pathway and closes another, or allowing the audience to leave a trace in the experience. In our small audio immersive experience, The Art of Getting Lost, players build cairns and dream catchers, for example.
Another way to approach this is to think about designing for different player types. I call them:
Novice – the ones who may not have done an immersive experience before, or freak out about possible interactions and need guidance and extra care.
Keen – the ones who’ve been here before, love it and want to make the experience work so will play along and help.
Anarchic – the troublemakers, who are often designers themselves and want to push against the boundaries of the experience to see if it will respond.
In one way players are like dogs—they want to exercise and have story as a reward; but don’t keep them on a lead because—unlike dogs—they don’t want to be fed things on a plate.
Resurgam players off the lead (pic: Dom Moore)
Playtesting a demo of The Glass Ceiling Games at EGX (pic: Hannah Wood)
Narrative will emerge from the audience’s experience of it and what they chose to do, so be ready to embrace and react to that too.
I’ll always have a story bible, treatment and script for an experience but the words written on the page don’t complete an interactive work like they do a novel.
Story is no longer yours once it goes out in the world, whatever the form, but interactive and immersive experiences need players present for them to happen—so plan a lot of playtesting. Get it out of the blocks and in people’s hands as soon as possible. This is one of the most important parts of our process at Story Juice; there are often factors and behaviours that can’t be predicted and ways to make an interactive and immersive experience better always emerge in playtesting.
Observe what playtesters do, be open with your questions about what they feel and understand, and adapt in response—knowing what’s true to your vision and what isn’t.
Tip 4: Interrogate representation
This is always top of my mind working in video games because the problems are stark:
Male characters outnumber female 4 to 1
27.6% of lead characters are female, and 10x more likely to be in revealing clothes
75.3% of characters are white
0.03% LGBTQI+
0.1% have a disability
(Figures from The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media report (2021) on masculinity in video games and the gaming community)
When writing, I always ask myself why characters have a particular characteristic or identity and have found it especially annoying when people have assumed a cleaner is a woman and a rocket ship captain a man. We made the captain a woman in Mission To Mars, inspired by Marian Wright Edelman’s words ‘you can’t be what you can’t see,’ and we saw this intent manifest positively when young girls came out of the experience saying they wanted to be astronauts.
The space port in Mission To Mars (pic: Steve Tanner)
Moon flyby in Mission To Mars (pic: Steve Tanner)
But it’s far beyond just what you represent, it’s thinking about your story making process and who’s in your team.
In the UK games industry, 67% of the workforce is male; 90% white.
(figures from the 2022 UKIE census)
What’s worse than a white man appropriating a black woman’s story so it looks diverse on the surface but isn’t underneath? You have to elevate and amplify those voices and sacrifice your own privilege.
In giving power to your players through agency also check that it doesn’t reinforce unhelpful cultural narratives. We’re very conscious in The Glass Ceiling Games that we’re giving power to people who don’t have it in reality, not those who already have it.
Slingshotting catcalls in The Glass Ceiling Games (pic: Story Juice)
Macheteing unsolicited pix in The Glass Ceiling Games (pic: Story Juice)
I hope these tips are useful to you as you create your own interactive and immersive experiences. We’re always open to collaboration, so get in touch via hello@storyjuice.co.uk if you want to work together. We’d also love it if you check out our current Kickstarter campaign for The Glass Ceiling Games and share it with others you think it will appeal to! Thanks for reading!