The specific case of two apps, namely Choices: Stories You Play and My Story: Choose Your Own Path are taken up as primary case studies, to embark on a close textual analysis. The paper contends that this format of storytelling creates a greater immersion for its players by requiring their active participatory imagination throughout the game-play.
Moreover, the paper aims to examine the fluidity of narrative elements such as plot structure and characterisation in the context of theorising branching narratives. The multiplicity of such narrative experiences is juxtaposed with the illusion of choice that these formats advertise while directing the player to a singular ending. The paper concludes that on the whole, these narrative formats offer a qualitatively different immersive experience than traditional media and have potential for expanding a reader’s narrative autonomy.
Dr. Dipannita Ghosh, born in 1992 in India, worked in the domain of Digital Humanities for her doctoral research. She has consistently worked with Popular Culture in its expressions across media, be it cinema, visual art, social media and fiction. She has also worked on orality, folk tales and their emerging relationship with digital media in the South Asian context. Dipannita has been teaching course of cinema, literature, the arts and providing language training to various cohorts of undergraduate and postgraduate students. She has herself been a game content creator, creating short narratives as well as translating Indian epic and mythic tales for the mobile app-based gaming format.
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