Digital Creativity

Interactive Digital Narratives: Creativity, Theory, and Emerging Practices

This Special Issue positions Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) as a coherent, critically urgent, and future-facing interdisciplinary research field, bringing into sustained dialogue scholarship and practice across electronic literature, digital arts, performance studies, Human-Computer Interaction, AI and creativity research, game studies, and computational design. While these domains have historically advanced interactive narrative innovation in parallel, this issue foregrounds the shared research problems that now define IDNs as a distinct area of inquiry: how narrative coherence, user agency, and computational systems can be meaningfully reconciled in interactive media.

A central aim is to consolidate and extend the theoretical foundations of IDNs by advancing research on agency, authorship, and control in computational storytelling. Contributions will be invited that interrogate how narrative form changes when users are not readers but decision-makers and co-producers, and when interactive stories are organized not as linear texts but as procedural, modular, and adaptive systems. Particular emphasis is placed on emergent approaches beyond branching logic, such as drama management, storylet architectures, planning-based narrative systems, and multimodal narrative design, that enable scalable and replayable narrative experience while preserving aesthetic integrity.

Equally central is the Special Issue’s focus on AI-mediated narrative generation and co-creative authorship, addressing one of the field’s most pressing questions: can machine learning and generative systems produce interactive stories that sustain coherence, character consistency, emotional resonance, and cultural meaning over time? By emphasizing hybrid narrative production, where creativity is distributed across designers, participants, algorithms, and interface affordances, the issue challenges inherited distinctions between author and audience, and reframes interactive creativity as a system of shared agency spanning human and machine actors.

The issue further highlights research on embodied, spatial, and performative narrative environments (including VR/AR/MR and installation-based works), examining how interactivity operates when the body becomes an interface and when narrative unfolds in digitally mediated environments. In this framing, IDNs are understood as experiential narrative ecologies shaped by dynamic relations between user action, system response, and socio-cultural context, rather than as static textual artifacts.

Finally, the Special Issue foregrounds two increasingly urgent dimensions of IDN research: evaluation and ethics. It invites contributions proposing methodological frameworks and metrics for assessing narrative quality in interactive and generative systems, alongside critical work on bias, safety, consent, and accountability in AI-enabled IDN. Bridging conceptual scholarship with research-through-design and practice-based inquiry, the issue positions creative artifacts, prototypes, installations, interactive artworks, and experimental narrative systems, as knowledge-producing interventions that expand the research horizon of Interactive Digital Narrative studies.

This special issue invites contributions that:

1. Define, map, or theorize Interactive Digital Narratives as a creative field in the age of AI:
   1. To conceptualize a framework for interactivity, agency, and digital authorship
   2. To study the taxonomies or models utilising electronic literature, video games, digital theatre, AI-mediated creativity, and interactive arts
   3. To develop methodological approaches bridging design research, literary theory, Human-computer interaction, game studies, and digital art theory
2. Explore creativity in Interactive and computationally mediated narrative forms:
   1. To explore creativity as process, practice, or collaboration (human-human, machine-generated, human-machine)
   2. To design creativity in interactive installations, VR/AR storytelling, generative or adaptive narratives
   3. To explore aesthetic innovation through multimodality, hybridity, and transmedia forms
3. Investigate audience/interactor experience and meaning-making in Interactive Digital Narratives:
   1. To investigate agency, decision-making, embodiment, and participation in IDN
   2. To study narrative comprehension, emotional engagement, and the phenomenology of interactivity in digital medium
   3. To examine the spectatorship vs. co-authorship in digital theatre, performance, and immersive environments
4. Examining emerging forms of digital writing and narrative experimentation:
   1. To explore the various emerging forms of IDN such as Electronic literature, web-based narratives, nonlinear poetry
   2. To examine social media literature (twitter poetry, Instapoetry and platform-native creativity) as IDN
   3. To study the emerging practices of multimodal writing combining text, image, sound, data, code
5. Analyse the role of new technologies in shaping narrative:
   1. To identify the role of AI/ML models in generative storytelling and creative co-production
   2. To analyse the VR/AR immersive narrative experiences of the audiences
   3. To explore the scope of interactive and algorithmic art installations
   4. To analyse the populace of procedural and computational narrative systems

Topics of Interest:

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

Interactive Narrative Theory

• Multimodal narrative theory
• Agency, choice, and interactive meaning-making
• Narrative time/space in immersive or procedural media
• Complexity, nonlinearity, and branching narrative design

Digital Writing & Electronic literature as IDN:

• Hypertextuality and ergodic literature
• Platform-native poetry
• Codework, algorithmic writing, glitch poetics

Video games & Playable Narratives as IDN:

• Narrative systems design
• Narratology vs. Ludonarrative
• Player agency, immersion, and storytelling mechanics

Digital Theatre & Performance as IDN:

• Interactive dramaturgy
• Telematic or networked performance
• Audience co-presence and participation

Interactive Arts & Installations as IDN:

• Narrative installations using sensors, physical computing, robotics
• Participatory art and co-creative storytelling
• Procedural and generative art narratives

Immersive VR/AR Narrative Environments as IDN:

• Embodied storytelling
• Spatial narrative architectures
• Mixed reality performance narratives

AI & Computational Creativity in IDN:

• Large-language model storytelling
• Co-creative authoring tools
• AI as performer, narrator, or character
• Ethical and conceptual issues of machine authorship

Transmedia & Hybrid Narrative Forms:

• Cross-platform storytelling
• Nonlinear documentary
• Interactive data narratives