By Dr. Alke Groppel-Wegener, Associate Professor in the School of Digital, Technologies and Arts at Staffordshire University.
Is what makes a storytelling experience immersive the ‘agency of imagination’?
Is the ‘passive’ vs ‘active’ debate really a straightforward question and/or distinction?
We could consider this as a question of literal immersion and possible interactivity. After all, if you are in an immersive environment, whether virtual or not, you are in one sense immersed. Considering how much (if any) interactivity is encoded in the experience potentially extends the notion even further. But this might leave out an important option, which is the consideration of what goes on in people’s heads and the importance of that. It is a consideration of the power of the author/creator(s) as opposed to the agency of your own imagination.
For example, when reading a novel, the reader has a lot of control over what we could call the mechanics (you decide how carefully to read, when to start and stop, whether you make any pauses, and what environment you are in when reading, whether you finish the book), but can you actually change the story? Unless your book of choice is of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure variety, you can’t change the story as such, because the words remain the same, and the plot is unchanged by your interaction with it. It is the author that is in charge. Or are they? When talking about agency in immersive storytelling at the Evolution of Storytelling 2 symposium, playwright James Kenworth suggested that there is such a thing as the “agency of imagination”. The things that are going on in your head, when you imagine the characters and environments, the sounds, smells, colours, shapes and tastes in your head potentially build an immersive experience. They may be tethered to the words on the page, but it is the individual’s imagination that enriches/processes them in a unique way – an individual experience inspired or guided by the author/creator(s), but ultimately happening in your very own imagination.
This is a fascinating concept, that almost feels like a puzzle piece that was missing from my own contribution to the symposium. Called ‘Heroes in the Gutter’ (and available with the other contributions here), this traces the evolution of storytelling within theme parks, and argues that theme park lands could be considered similarly to the gutter within comics scholarship – the spaces between the images, that just like the cuts in a film montage need to be ‘filled in’ by the reader/audience. Usually what happens here is the mundane, the character being asleep or other life-as-usual activities that can easily be skipped in order to focus on actual plot points. What is happening in theme parks is interesting, because they started out with lands that were loosely themed around a type of story (think Fantasyland for fairy tales or Frontierland for Westerns in Disney theme parks), which could be seen as an almost literal interpretation of that gutter – yes they are themed environments, but really this is where the mundane happens – here are the bathrooms, shopping venues and eateries located – as opposed to the rides that tell the stories. This has recently changed with whole lands now being themed to a particular franchise, for example, the village of Hogsmeade at Universal Parks is located within the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, while Carsland at Disney California Adventure allows guests to visit Radiator Springs, the location of the first Cars movie, and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge invites you to visit Black Spire Outpost, a place on a planet called Batuu located within the Star Wars storyworld.
While the environment that these franchise storyworld lands provide within the theme park is based on the visuals developed for the respective movies, rather than on guests’ imagination, I believe that the agency of imagination still comes to play here. Because while the environment remains tethered to the creators, the stories you can play out in them are much more open to your own imagination. These lands are not just about creating a themed environment that is not jarring when going from one attraction to the next, these lands are attractions in their own right, which people might want to visit even if there were no rides located within them. Having said that, the designed attractions and interactions do help to make the story a more immersive one. And what the land offers that rides don’t, is a much looser framing. In a ride, particularly a dark ride, the guest is very limited in how they interact with the story. There is often sensory immersion, but little scope for interactivity apart from where the individual looks and even that is manipulated by vehicle movements and lights. But the land itself is not just a realistic environment, it also includes cast members (the Disney term for people working at a theme park) that are briefed to interact with the guests in-world, for example, cast members at the Diagon Alley land will pretend that you are in London, UK rather than Orlando, FL, while the cast members in Batuu have phrases they use as greetings, etc. to make it seem like you are if not a different planet then at least interacting with a different culture. (Yes, they still speak English, but glyphs of a different language are dotted about, which you can translate using your datapad, i.e. smartphone.) What this in conjunction with the agency of imagination can open up is the opportunity for you to become a character within this storyworld. Which means that you are both profiting from the author/creators’ guidance (somebody else has, after all, built this for you), but that you can also make up and act out your own stories within this.
This is a big deal because it means that the concept of the agency of imagination allows us to easily introduce and consider this aspect of immersive storytelling and story-experiencing. It allows us to see something as ‘active’ that we might not have considered the audience having agency over before. And I believe that one of the next trends within immersive storytelling is to combine the built franchise storyworlds with the opportunity for more agency of the imagination, as can be found in Live Action Role Playing. Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, colloquially known as Disney’s Star Wars hotel is the first large-scale experience that has been built around these concepts, and it will be interesting to see what comes next.