Narrative Interplay in the Digital Era : Generative AI, Alternate Reality Games, and the Future of Interactive Pedagogy

Explores interactive media through alternate realities, digital fiction and gaming ideologies. It examines play in learning, community engagement, human-machine collaboration and social dimensions of gaming, bridging theory and practice from LARP (live action role-play) to AI-assisted writing.

This anthology explores the current evolution of interactive storytelling across digital as well as physical spaces by examining how games, digital narratives and participatory art can reshape creative expression and learning at fundamental levels. The contributors propose that interactive fiction is best examined by combining social, literary and technical analyses together. Used independently, each modality provides an insufficient picture of the deeply merged social, technical and artistic media environments we currently inhabit. We focus instead on the nature of the social interactions involved when engaging in digital storytelling, emphasizing that an interactive narrative is perpetually constructed and reconstructed each time it is experienced. The collection provides in depth analysis, organized into three distinct sections, the first two based on the key modalities of alternate realities and digital interactive fiction. The third section then provides an important political critique of gaming ideologies. Contributors with expertise and experience in each section topic provide diverse and timely analyses on how interactive narratives function in educational contexts, community engagement and human–machine collaboration. The authors also investigate both theoretical frameworks and practical applications, from live-action role-playing to AI-assisted writing, while considering the significant social and political implications of gaming culture in general. The collection's strength remains on its unique bringing together diverse perspectives from game designers, educators, artists and theorists to examine how new forms of storytelling emerge at the intersection of analogue and digital realms, with particular attention to the role of play and interactivity in contemporary learning environments.