What Is Interactive Storytelling? Definition, Types, Examples

Most stories ask you to sit still. Interactive stories ask you to do something: turn to page 47, press a button, type a line of dialogue, choose who to trust. People have built stories like this with paperbacks, cinema seats, laserdiscs, game engines and, lately, AI models.

This guide covers what interactive storytelling is, the main types, the examples people cite most, what researchers have learned about why choices feel meaningful, and where AI fits. Every date and claim below links to a source at the end of the page.

What is interactive storytelling?

Interactive storytelling is any story where the audience is part of the cause and effect. In a novel or film, events happen the same way for everyone. In an interactive story, what you do changes what you see next, so two people can finish with different stories.

Researchers usually call the computer version "interactive narrative." In a 2013 survey in AI Magazine, Mark Riedl and Vadim Bulitko define it as a form of digital interactive experience in which users "create or influence a dramatic storyline through their actions." The definition has two parts that matter: there is still a dramatic storyline (it is not just a toy or a simulation), and the user's actions shape it.

Interactive storytelling is older than computers, though. Choose Your Own Adventure books did it with paper, and Kinoautomat did it in a cinema in 1967. The idea that ties them together is simple: the audience stops being only a witness and becomes a participant.

What is agency in interactive storytelling?

The most useful idea in the field comes from Janet Murray's 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck. Murray groups the aesthetics of digital stories under three headings: immersion, agency and transformation. Agency is the one that makes a story interactive. Murray defines it as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions."

The key word is meaningful. Clicking "next" is an action, but it does not give agency. Choosing to open the door, and then seeing the story change because you did, does.

Researchers have tested this. In "Foreseeing Meaningful Choices" (AIIDE 2014), Rogelio Cardona-Rivera and colleagues had 88 people play a choose-your-own-adventure game. Players reported a higher sense of agency when the options in front of them led to meaningfully different situations than when the options only differed on the surface. In practice: a choice between two ways of saying the same thing feels hollow; a choice between staying on the train and jumping off does not.

Chris Crawford makes the same point from the design side in Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (2004): how interactive a story feels depends on the choices it offers the person playing. More real choices means more interactivity, and also more story to build.

What are the main types of interactive storytelling?

Interactive stories differ mostly in one thing: how the audience is allowed to act. Here are five common types.

Type	How you act	Example	Strength	Limit
Branching (choice-based)	Pick from options the author wrote	Choose Your Own Adventure books, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch	Every path is crafted by hand	Each choice multiplies what must be written or filmed
Group vote	An audience votes, the majority decides	Kinoautomat (1967)	A shared, live event	You may not get the ending you voted for
Typed text (interactive fiction)	Type commands or actions in words	Parser text adventures, AI Dungeon	Feels open: you can try anything the game understands	The game must understand what you meant
Simulated characters with a drama manager	Talk to characters; a system steers the plot	Façade (2005)	Characters react to you, scene by scene	Very hard to build; Façade's authors aimed for about 20 minutes
AI-generated scenes	Choose or type the next move; AI makes the scene after you act	FICT (2026), AI text adventures	No fixed list of branches; the story can go where you take it	Less hand-crafted; quality and consistency vary

Most real works mix types. Bandersnatch is branching, but its branches loop back. A modern story game might be branching on the surface with simulated characters underneath. If you want the practical patterns writers use to keep branches under control, our guide on how to write a choose your own adventure story covers them with a worked example.

What are some examples of interactive storytelling?

These are the works that come up again and again, in rough order.

Year	Work	Made by	What the audience does
1967	Kinoautomat	Radúz Činčera (with Ján Roháč and Vladimír Svitáček)	Votes with buttons on the cinema seats at Expo 67; the majority picks the next scene
1976	Sugarcane Island	Edward Packard, published by Vermont Crossroads Press	Turns to a different page for each choice
1979	The Cave of Time, first Bantam "Choose Your Own Adventure" book	Edward Packard	Same, at mass-market scale
2005	Façade	Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern	Types lines of dialogue to a couple in crisis
2018	Black Mirror: Bandersnatch	Netflix, story by Charlie Brooker	Picks between two options on screen
2019	AI Dungeon 2	Nick Walton	Types any action; a language model writes what happens
2026	FICT	SecondEarth AI, Inc.	Chooses or writes the next move; each scene is generated as animation

Choose Your Own Adventure (1976 and 1979)

The format began as a bedtime story. According to Aaron A. Reed's history 50 Years of Text Games, Edward Packard was making up a bedtime story for the two Packard daughters, asked them what the hero should do next, and wrote an ending for each answer. That became Sugarcane Island, published in 1976 by Vermont Crossroads Press, the Montgomerys' small press in Vermont, under the banner "The Adventures of You." In July 1979 Bantam launched the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series with Packard's The Cave of Time. Chooseco, the company R. A. Montgomery co-founded to bring the series back into print, says there are 270 million copies in print across 40 languages.

Kinoautomat (1967)

Kinoautomat brought choices to a cinema. Created for the Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, it stopped at set moments and let the audience vote using buttons wired to their seats; a simple majority decided what played next, according to the Czech National Film Archive. We cover what happened to interactive film after that in our history of choose your own adventure movies.

Façade (2005)

Façade is the example researchers cite most. You play an old friend visiting Grace and Trip, a married couple, at their apartment, and you type whatever you want to say. Behind the scenes, a part of the system its authors call the drama manager picks the next story beat based on what you said and did. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern wrote that they wanted to give the player "20 minutes of emotionally intense, unified, dramatic action." It was released free in July 2005 and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance festival in 2006.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)

Netflix released Bandersnatch on December 28, 2018, as its first interactive title for adults. Charlie Brooker first mapped the story in Twine, a free tool for branching stories, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Viewers pick between two choices at a time with a remote or a tap, and Netflix said there are five main endings, with variations. It won the 2019 Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie.

AI Dungeon (2019)

AI Dungeon showed what happens when nobody writes the branches in advance. Nick Walton built the first version at a hackathon in March 2019; AI Dungeon 2 arrived on December 5, 2019, running on OpenAI's GPT-2 model. You could type any action and the model wrote the result. The study of it by Minh Hua and Rita Raley in Digital Humanities Quarterly (2020) is a good read on what that freedom felt like and where it broke down.

Why is interactive storytelling hard to make?

Because every real choice creates more story. If each scene offers two choices and none of them merge, a story ten choices deep needs over a thousand endings. Writers handle this with structures that bring branches back together, which is why so many interactive stories feel like a river delta rather than a tree.

Researchers took a different route. Riedl and Bulitko describe the "drama manager," an idea they credit to Joe Bates: an intelligent agent that watches the story world and steps in to keep the experience on track. Think of a game master at a tabletop game. Façade was built this way, and it also shows the cost: according to Game Developer, its authors expected the project to take two years, and it took more than five, for an experience of about 20 minutes.

There is a quieter problem too. Espen Aarseth's Cybertext (1997) called works like these "ergodic literature," where the reader has to put in nontrivial effort to move through the text. Effort is part of the pleasure, but every extra tap, vote or typed command is a moment where someone can lose interest. Good interactive stories make the effort feel like play.

Where does AI fit in interactive storytelling?

AI changes the cost side of the equation. Instead of writing or filming every branch in advance, an AI system makes the next part of the story after you act. That is the same move Façade made with hand-built rules, now done with language, image and video models.

There are two broad flavors. Text-based AI adventures, like AI Dungeon, let you type anything and answer in prose. AI movie apps, like FICT, answer with a scene you watch. We compare the two in AI choose your own adventure: text games vs. AI films.

AI does not remove the craft. The research on agency still applies: the choices that feel good are the ones that lead somewhere different. AI also brings new problems that hand-written branches do not have, such as characters drifting off model or a scene that misses the point of your choice. Treat it as a fast collaborator, not an author.

How do you make your own interactive story?

The same five steps work whether you are writing a gamebook, building in Twine or directing in an AI app.

1. Start with a what-if. A premise with a question built in ("What if the last train only stops for people who can't go home?") gives every choice a direction. Our list of 100 what if scenarios is a quick place to start.
2. Give the hero a goal and a problem. Choices only feel meaningful when the hero wants something and something stands in the way.
3. Write choices that change the situation. Following the 2014 agency study, make each option lead somewhere different: a new place, a new ally, a new risk. Avoid two options that end in the same scene.
4. Pick a structure. Decide where branches split and where they come back together, so the story stays finishable.
5. Play it, then cut. Play every path once. Cut or merge any choice you would never pick yourself.

In FICT, step 1 is the setup screen: you write a "what if…" premise and pick a hero, a world, a mood and an art style (anime, watercolor, 3D and more). FICT makes a 5- or 10-second animated scene with narration and dialogue. Then you choose one of three suggested moves or write your own, and the next scene follows from it. Choices cannot be undone, and the finished film replays from the start. New players get 20 free credits, and a 5-second scene uses 10.

Interactive storytelling has always been a trade between freedom and craft. Paper books gave readers a few hand-written paths, Façade gave them a voice, and AI now gives them a scene for almost any move. The principle from 1997 still holds: give people choices that matter, and show them the results.

Sources

1. Riedl, M. O. and Bulitko, V. (2013). Interactive Narrative: An Intelligent Systems Approach. AI Magazine 34(1)
2. Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Free Press; updated edition MIT Press, 2017
3. Wardrip-Fruin, N., Mateas, M., Dow, S. and Sali, S. (2009). Agency Reconsidered. DiGRA 2009; quotes Murray's definition of agency
4. Cardona-Rivera, R. E., Robertson, J., Ware, S. G., Harrison, B., Roberts, D. L. and Young, R. M. (2014). Foreseeing Meaningful Choices. Proceedings of AIIDE 10(1)
5. Mateas, M. and Stern, A. (2003). Façade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama. Game Developers Conference
6. Procedural Arts. Façade release and awards
7. Thompson, T. (Game Developer) (2020). The Story of Facade: The AI-Powered Interactive Drama
8. Crawford, C. (2004). Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling. New Riders; 2nd edition 2012
9. Malloy, J.. Review of Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Leonardo reviews
10. Reed, A. A. (2021). 50 Years of Text Games: 1979, The Cave of Time
11. Chooseco. About Choose Your Own Adventure
12. National Film Archive, Prague. Kinoautomat: One Man and His House
13. NPR (2018). Netflix Releases Interactive Experience For Adults: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
14. The Hollywood Reporter (2018). Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Netflix's interactive film, explained
15. Television Academy (2019). Outstanding Television Movie, 2019 nominees and winner
16. Hua, M. and Raley, R. (2020). Playing With Unicorns: AI Dungeon and Citizen NLP. Digital Humanities Quarterly 14(4)