Digital Narrative
How stories and world-building happens in an age shaped by digital production.
Overview
Digital narrative is tied closely to creative writing and rhetoric within English and the humanities, and extends investigation and practice into the forms where narrative now often lives: games, digital media, podcasting, immersive theater, and virtual worlds.
Research directions
- Electronic literature and generative or combinatory text.
- Interactive and environmental storytelling in games.
- VR narrative, immersive theater, and humanities-based performance.
- Podcasting, audio storytelling, and sound as narrative research.
- Film, digital media, and post-production as narrative inquiry.
- Rhetoric, poetics, and questions of authorship in computational media.
Canonical readings
A starter shelf.
1997
Hamlet on the Holodeck
Janet H. Murray
The foundational vision of digital and interactive narrative.
1997
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
Espen J. Aarseth
Introduces “ergodic literature” and the vocabulary for game narrative.
2001
Narrative as Virtual Reality
Marie-Laure Ryan
Canonical theory of immersion and interactivity across media.
People in this area