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68 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
emerged in video streaming services, which raises the question as to whether
these services are in competition with video storytelling games. Kolhoff and
Nack (2019) investigated interactor engagement and perceived agency for
a single interactive episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror, Bandersnatch.
They found that viewers (n = 169) were initially curious and engaged with the
program, but due to the limited number of choices which at times produced
illogical consequences, they felt little agency or control over the narrative.
Thanks to ongoing technological innovations, interactive storytelling is
no longer just a feature of computer games and television narratives, but
also of cultural and educational institutions. The involvement of technology
and the interactivity of the recipient can take many forms. A good example
of storytelling in real space using digital tools and interactivity is a theater
performance in which the narrative was manipulated by the audience using
a Data Generator Engine that they had limited control over, and the actors
improvised and turned the data into a story (Green, Holmquist & Gibson,
2020).
The inclusion of interactive storytelling also allows for a multi-faceted
exploration and playful interaction with museum artifacts representing
cultural heritage. The tools of a period become artifacts whose functions are
not clear to the visitors. However, an exciting museum edutainment experience
can be created if the visitors become participants in a shared narrative and
engage in problem-solving. The experience is enhanced when role-playing
in real space and time is complemented by the museum educators’ use of
external technologies such as VR or mobile AR (Alinam, Ciotoli, Koceva &
Torre, 2020).
Interactions are not limited to taking place through digital interfaces, even
in video games. Echeverri and Wei’s (2020) hybrid interactive story, Letters to
José, is based on the correspondence of two Colombian brothers, presented
in the form of fragmented life events between 1948 and 1957. The designers
assigned artifacts and objects to the decision points in the narrative, which
were presented in digital and physical form. Some of the objects were diegetic
devices belonging to the storyworld while others transdiegetically connected
the real world of the interactor and the storyworld; in addition, there were
also extradiegetic objects existing outside the storyworlds. Physical objects
with microcontrollers allowed the interactor to reveal hidden family histories.
Authoring tools are software that can be used to create IDNs. These
applications are not designed for programmers, but for ordinary users who
want to present their narratives in a hypertextual and modular form. Similarly
to Storyspace, the Twine platform supports a branching structure for interactive
storytelling.” Using the cooperative puzzle method, interactive storyboards
were created in small groups by secondary school students: each of the four
students in the group developed a plot module in the branched storyboard,
% https://twinery.org/