A collective interdisciplinary agenda for immersive storytelling: Editorial analysis

This article represents our editorial contribution to the exploration of immersive storytelling, broadly conceived in this Special Issue as a set of creative and design practices, audience experiences, a field of study and a toolkit of rapidly developing digital technologies. Herein we set out our motivation for collaborating as an interdisciplinary team seeking to interrogate and expand on celebratory industry-led discourses that (over-)emphasise the transformative potential of digital innovations for immersive storytelling without properly situating these as part of longer trajectories of creative and audience practice. We provide an account of this background context that purposefully shifts the focus from technologies of the moment – Virtual Reality, the Metaverse, Artificial Intelligence – to the underpinning storytelling that can give rise to, as well as make use of, these technologies to facilitate immersion. Having introduced the various perspectives on immersive storytelling presented in the articles collected in this Special Issue, we go on to draw out key themes, topics and approaches from the body of work as a whole. Our analysis encompasses definitional questions, interdisciplinary perspectives and the sharing of expertise. It highlights the role of users as the nexus of technology and narrative, including emotional and sensory interactions, which contribute to their agency within immersive experiences. The discussion of immersive storytelling moves beyond a focus on VR to consider the wider context, including the overlap between real-world locations and narrative content of experiences, and the importance of setting audience expectations. Because, taken together, the articles include multiple projects and case studies involving designing and making immersive experiences, it is apparent that this is an expanded, rather than normalised, design space in which inclusion and exclusion are important considerations. From these findings we put forward a future agenda for the field of immersive storytelling, which revolves around issues of accessibility, ethics and audience research.