Story Immersion: Creating the Waking Dream of Entertainment

?Have you ever been lost in a book?

That’s deep engagement! The author takes us into a literary world that’s almost a waking dream.

Most of us fondly recall the feeling. It combines the tangible output of a medium with our own intangible, emotional, story experience. Our empathic imagination carries us to an unfamiliar time, place and situation, a magical place in our own imagination, yet not of our own making.

We don’t even notice as we immerse into a masterfully written story. The author’s narrative tools engage our emotional desire and anticipation to the next page and the next.? The most skilled authors weave their characters and situations into a waking dream.?

We love to be caught up and taken away; transported to a reality we can’t find on our own.?

New experiential media, in good hands, enable psychological nuances to this magical spell that help define and create the future of interactivity and immersive entertainment.?

We can now embody the story experience; we can author for all the senses. It merely takes good judgement, skilled story ideation, hard work, and continuous iteration.?

We, as audience, don’t necessarily want to be in control like a lucid dreamer; we want to be dramatically carried away.?

AND we want to participate, enhancing the story experience with our own personal connection.?

When authors enable the audience to embody within the narrative, the narrative flow necessarily becomes more complex. So as designers, creators, authors, we invent and evolve novel, more complex artistic conventions, all still deeply grounded in the story.

In ‘Big IP’ narratives, the framework of the flow is already established. We want to craft just enough dynamic personal participation for guests to feel the tale up close and personal, to be part of the action. Later, our guests will carry their personal experiences home in their own stories.

Done well, story creation has no end. Millions of kids discovered that feeling when they fell in love with the Harry Potter novels. How could such a basic medium—type on a page—transport young minds so far, to a multi-billion dollar franchise? The fabulous story has infused all forms of media, into theme parks, games, merchandise—engagement in every dimension and direction. Audiences co-author the engagement, creating so much that the author and licensees didn’t do or didn’t even think to do. This grows into the full creative authorship of fan fiction, extending our guests’ immersion in the magic.

Remember Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory of authorship? “Give the reader just the tip of the iceberg so they imagine the rest.” The tip is a premise that asks the compelling question “what if?” luring us in to discover what is hidden. Our curiosity replies, “What then?”?

That moment is where the co-authored Story Experience begins.?

The rest is a Call-and-Response of “What if?” What then?” …a conversation between author and audience.?

To bring enable embodied story participation in an already richly evocative theme park attraction, we use interactive techniques to listen to the audience and uniquely adapt to their response, live.?

That way, the embodied story can pause, leave momentary voids, just enough for the audience to contribute a little substance (not just excitement), then the living experience adjusts accordingly.?

The art is in setting up the audience’s imagination to be ready to be triggered, then liberated …within the authored story gaps.?

Our new tools and methods enable authors to seduce the reader’s empathetic responses for a dance of the imagination. It’s a new form of interaction, collaboratively created, if only in guests’ imagination.?

Ernest Hemingway realized his literary skills could get the reader to create 7/8 of the story experience spontaneously between the lines and beats of his story.? That’s how he measured the difference between a good and a great story. He believed that the less he wrote and the more the reader imagined, the better writer he was. That’s how he redefined a new era of American literature.?

It’s also why we can never fully represent literature’s scope in cinema. Most of the experience of a novel is in the reader’s own imagination.?

Where story can transcend the media, storytelling conventions are defined by the limitation of each type of media tech. The limits of static print propel the literary convention of painting with the reader’s imagination. The limited dimensions and immersion of films drive cinematic methods to propel your guests’ imagination right through the proscenium. Each medium tells the same story in different ways. With the immersive methods of experiential entertainment, story methods expand as limitations diminish.?

But can we construct the story’s immersion to the extent that the audience is inspired to contribute 7 times more to the actual authored story, like Hemingway?

No? Why not?

The novel took 400 years to evolve before Hemingway’s time. Film has only had a little over a hundred. With immersive, realtime, interactive media, the embodied story’s audience participation and agency have barely begun.? The empowerment’s new conventions go beyond story creation and consumption.?

The new magic lies in managing the ‘Call-and-Response’ conversation between author and audience.?

With integrated sensing systems, we listen; with machine learning, we can orchestrate infinite variables to achieve more personalization, with hard work, we empower guests to contribute more to the immersive story, to make it their own.

This is where the embodied story transforms authorship, agency and the audience experience by invoking guests’ own lives for context. We program a world across all senses, all dimensions, all realities. Themed Entertainment Design can help transform the world beyond the berm for our guests when they go home.?

The result: All-new forms in how we live, learn, work, play and even shop, even identities, leveraging experiential story, play and games of experiential entertainment.

Life—as well as? theme parks—will never be the same.

What are your thoughts?

Christopher Stapleton ,

Creative Producer, Director, Strategist for Experiential Entertainment?

Copyright (c)2024 Christopher Stapleton, SIMIOSYS, LLC?

Acknowledgments:

Clark Dodsworth for collaborative editing.

Microsoft AI Prompting: Multiple images collaged of a child reading a book and imagining wizards, knights and superheroes?