Narrative Interplay in the Digital Era: Generative AI, Alternate Reality Games, and the Future of Interactive Pedagogy

This anthology explores the current evolution of interactive storytelling across digital as well as physical spaces by examining how games, digital narratives, and participatory art can reshape creative expression and learning at fundamental levels. The contributors propose that interactive fiction is best examined by combining social, literary, and technical analyses together. Used independently, each modality provides an insufficient picture of the deeply merged social, technical, and artistic media environments we currently inhabit. We focus instead on the nature of the social interactions involved when engaging in digital storytelling, emphasizing that an interactive narrative is perpetually constructed and reconstructed each time it is experienced. The collection provides in depth analysis, organized into three distinct sections, the first two based on the key modalities of alternate realities and digital interactive fiction. The third section then provides an important political critique of gaming ideologies. Contributors with expertise and experience in each section topic provide diverse and timely analyses on how interactive narratives function in educational contexts, community engagement, and human-machine collaboration. The authors also investigate both theoretical frameworks and practical applications, from live-action role-playing to AI-assisted writing, while considering the significant social and political implications of gaming culture in general. The collection's strength remains on its unique bringing together diverse perspectives from game designers, educators, artists, and theorists to examine how new forms of storytelling emerge at the intersection of analog and digital realms, with particular attention to the role of play and interactivity in contemporary learning environments.

Table of Contents:
Foreword: The Ambivalence of Interactivity and Potentials of Play  Patrick Jagoda Acknowledgments Introduction  Andrew Klobucar PART I: ALTERNATE REALITIES AND GAMING  1. A Digital Walk-Through: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Monuments Series and Alternate Reality Games Andrew Klobucar 2. Larp as Medium, Larp as Message: Some Notes on Managing a Diegetic Commons Harlin/Hayley Steele with Alejandro Ponce de León 3. Kustom Karakter Orthographee for a Visual, Written, Digital World  Rob Wittig and Mark C. Marino 4. Deliberate Play and Workplace Learning  Zsolt Olah PART II: DIGITAL INTERACTIVE FICTION  5. Fun Time: Exploring Clocks, Computers, and Videogames  Rebecca Rouse 6. Interactive Storytelling as an Educational Tool: Escape to Apple Wick Hill Jessica Ross-Nersesian PART III: THE IDEOLOGIES OF GAMING  7. Are We All Speaking of the Same Feminazi? Understanding the Nuances of a Gendered Slur in Gaming Culture Kristian A. Bjørkelo 8. Interactivity and Its Discontents  J † Johnson Notes on Contributors  Index  

About the Author :
Dr. Andrew Klobucar is a scholar specializing in digital media and narrative interactive technologies. His research examines how advances in media platforms transform creative expression, authorship, and social communities, deeply focusing on the relationship between technological developments and evolving digital aesthetics across narrative, image, and sound.