The Reader‐Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts?

ABSTRACT Stories unfold across a varied landscape of mediums, including video games, tabletop games, interactive films, and traditional literary texts. As that landscape continues to diversify, educators and scholars face growing challenges conceptualizing reading in a way that captures the multifaceted, consequential ways that readers interact with and shape those stories. Building on New Literacy Studies, scholarship from games studies, and reader response theory, this theoretical article proposes a cross‐disciplinary model for understanding narrative interactivity in contemporary reading experiences: The Reader–Player Interactivity Framework. The authors analyze seven layers of narrative interactivity: embodied interaction, navigating and wayfinding, transactional meaning‐making, two forms of reader authorship, co‐constructing stories, and socially embedded meaning‐making. These categories provide a language for analyzing how readers, viewers, and players co‐construct stories in both fixed and variable narrative texts. The framework illuminates how meaning arises not only in explicitly interactive media, but across all forms of narrative, and provides literacy teachers and researchers with theoretical tools and explicit language for navigating varied types of texts and interactions. The article concludes by outlining implications for research and pedagogy in literacy education.