The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts?
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| Title: | The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts? |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Brady L. Nash (ORCID |
| Source: | Reading Research Quarterly. 2026 61(1). |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 17 |
| Publication Date: | 2026 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Evaluative |
| Descriptors: | Reading Processes, Navigation, Narration, Reader Response, Educational Games, Video Games, Films, Interactive Video, Interaction, Play, Literacy Education, Multimedia Materials |
| DOI: | 10.1002/rrq.70079 |
| ISSN: | 0034-0553 1936-2722 |
| Abstract: | Stories unfold across a varied landscape of mediums, including video games, tabletop games, interactive films, and traditional literary texts. As that landscape continues to diversify, educators and scholars face growing challenges conceptualizing reading in a way that captures the multifaceted, consequential ways that readers interact with and shape those stories. Building on New Literacy Studies, scholarship from games studies, and reader response theory, this theoretical article proposes a cross-disciplinary model for understanding narrative interactivity in contemporary reading experiences: The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework. The authors analyze seven layers of narrative interactivity: embodied interaction, navigating and wayfinding, transactional meaning-making, two forms of reader authorship, co-constructing stories, and socially embedded meaning-making. These categories provide a language for analyzing how readers, viewers, and players co-construct stories in both fixed and variable narrative texts. The framework illuminates how meaning arises not only in explicitly interactive media, but across all forms of narrative, and provides literacy teachers and researchers with theoretical tools and explicit language for navigating varied types of texts and interactions. The article concludes by outlining implications for research and pedagogy in literacy education. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2026 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1494541 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGXhu7Ygn01dYMHl4asbfYWAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDArOOKkDp4EzWXUofwIBEICBm5ifUH8wwOUOBFkduoyIOKZwRPns_zzqg7apgKuQNCe3YqJrHO2X9u-PHBIvW7BlaU6Laj_dIeIhFkMooChbHnYEUp6rJp3wXRyGREt9eHpUiddl1OyxaUiF-LTLHuF-6psICC8Od3fAsdiFWkfHEGASUWPO0l-rDwGxYSgnDBj3g4qSeOK5c8agZ2vH4NzHCXoOVHCe2wtjktE- Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0191105819;[nrnu]01jan.26;2026Jan28.02:53;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0191105819-1">The Reader‐Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts? </title> <p>Stories unfold across a varied landscape of mediums, including video games, tabletop games, interactive films, and traditional literary texts. As that landscape continues to diversify, educators and scholars face growing challenges conceptualizing reading in a way that captures the multifaceted, consequential ways that readers interact with and shape those stories. Building on New Literacy Studies, scholarship from games studies, and reader response theory, this theoretical article proposes a cross‐disciplinary model for understanding narrative interactivity in contemporary reading experiences: The Reader–Player Interactivity Framework. The authors analyze seven layers of narrative interactivity: embodied interaction, navigating and wayfinding, transactional meaning‐making, two forms of reader authorship, co‐constructing stories, and socially embedded meaning‐making. These categories provide a language for analyzing how readers, viewers, and players co‐construct stories in both fixed and variable narrative texts. The framework illuminates how meaning arises not only in explicitly interactive media, but across all forms of narrative, and provides literacy teachers and researchers with theoretical tools and explicit language for navigating varied types of texts and interactions. The article concludes by outlining implications for research and pedagogy in literacy education.</p> <p>The Reader–Player Interactivity Framework offers a cross‐disciplinary model to understand narrative interactivity.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jan26/rrq70079-toc-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70079-toc-0001.jpg" title="." /> </p> <p></p> <p>In their 2005 book on discourse analysis, Bloome et al. argued that definitions of narrative are inherently subjective, dependent upon "what is inside of the boundaries of the storytelling as constructed by the participants" (Bloome et al. [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref1">18</reflink>], 18). In the 20 years since this publication, video games, streaming services, and other forms of new media have led to new kinds of participation and interactivity in storytelling on the part of readers, viewers, and players, in the process reshaping how narrative texts function (Aguilera [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref2">3</reflink>]; Apperley and Beavis [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref3">9</reflink>]; von Gillern [<reflink idref="bib89" id="ref4">89</reflink>]). Scholars in the humanities and social sciences, alongside media critics, have debated the question of how narrative and meaning‐making function when readers have a hand in how plots are shaped and stories unfold. Film critic Roger Ebert ([<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref5">33</reflink>]) famously declared that video games could never be art in large part because of the interactive nature of their narratives, a point Williams ([<reflink idref="bib93" id="ref6">93</reflink>]) drew upon to argue that reader‐influenced stories may inherently prevent significant meaning‐making on the part of readers. Though drawing from different values and epistemologies, this perspective aligns somewhat with the current movement toward standardization in literacy curricula, as static and objective meanings are central to current instantiations of testing (Alsup [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref7">7</reflink>]).</p> <p>However, both of these strands run counter to a dominant trend in literacy studies that highlights the always interactive, contextual nature of reading (Aguilera [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref8">3</reflink>]; Gee [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref9">38</reflink>]) and the expansion of the field's vision to encompass a wider range of texts (Albers and Sanders [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref10">4</reflink>]). The decade since the arguments of Ebert and Williams has witnessed the increasing popularity of interactive narrative video games (Shieber [<reflink idref="bib76" id="ref11">76</reflink>]), the resurgence in popularity of collaborative tabletop storytelling games (Gutierrez [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref12">42</reflink>]), the introduction of films with branching plotlines (Radulovic [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref13">70</reflink>]), and an internet architecture through which readers construct unique personalized texts by synthesizing across sources (Cho and Afflerbach [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref14">22</reflink>]). In short, though all texts are, to some extent, interactive, the current world proffers new and varied forms of interactivity that literacy educators and researchers are still working to understand and contend with.</p> <p>Shifting understandings of narrative interactivity exist in the context of a long history of research pointing to meaning‐making as an inherently interactive and socially constructed process. Research across fields has reinforced the notion that meaning‐making happens interactively in relation to socioculturally and personally situated experiences and contexts (Alexander et al. [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref15">6</reflink>]; Bakhtin [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref16">12</reflink>]; Brown et al. [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref17">20</reflink>]; Clark [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref18">23</reflink>]; Gee [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref19">38</reflink>]; Heath [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref20">43</reflink>]; Rosenblatt [<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref21">72</reflink>]; Vygotsky [<reflink idref="bib90" id="ref22">90</reflink>]). Although the interactivity of literacy/ies and meaning‐making is well established on a theoretical level, it remains challenging for literacy educators and researchers to incorporate the varied interactive dimensions of narrative storytelling into frameworks for meaning‐making. This challenge is heightened because of both the rapidly changing nature of available texts as material for designing both curriculum and theoretical understandings, and the persistence of objectivist frameworks in schools with deep roots in reading fixed‐narrative, alphabetic texts (Batchelor et al. [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref23">14</reflink>]; Beavis et al. [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref24">17</reflink>]; Hsu and Wang [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref25">46</reflink>]; see Skerrett and Warrington [<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref26">78</reflink>] for more on the state and history of language arts education).</p> <p>In this paper, we seek to provide a framework for understanding the varied ways in which readers interact with texts of all kinds (Figure 1). To do so, we present the Reader‐Player Interactivity Framework as a tool for understanding interactivity. This framework details six invitations readers take up through varying forms of narrative media (e.g., novels, poems, video games, choose‐your‐own‐adventure texts, tabletop story games, etc.). These types of interaction range from physical touch to mental imagination to reader‐authored shifts in stories.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jan26/rrq70079-fig-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70079-fig-0001.jpg" title="1 The reader‐player interactivity framework visualized. This figure details the varied ways in which readers interact with a multiplicity of texts. We place embodied interaction and transactional meaning‐making in the center, as these forms of interaction occur regardless of what type of texts readers engage with. The four outer ellipses, though they can be enacted by readers of any text, are more common when engaging with particular kinds of texts. These ways of interacting are arranged non‐hierarchically around the center." /> </p> <p></p> <p>Though readers may engage with some texts through certain kinds of interactions more than others (e.g., open world video games invite a kind of exploration that would be sidelined by a realistic short film), we have organized this framework not around text types as essentially tied to one form of interaction, but rather emphasized varying types of interaction as crossing texts. In the remainder of this conceptual essay introducing our framework, we begin by outlining our academic positionality, introducing the theoretical and scholarly background underlying our framework, and then detailing the seven invitations of the Reader‐Player Interactivity Framework. Finally, we close with a discussion of how this framework contributes to literacy research and education.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-4">Positionality and Process</hd> <p>We are a team of seven English educators. Six of us are currently university faculty members, and one is a high school faculty member. Each of us has extensive experience working in schools with youth across contexts. Although we all share a sociocultural and critical orientation regarding literacy, we bring expertise in different forms of interaction with narratives in English education, including role‐playing games, video games, escape rooms, visual reader response, and more broadly, transactional interpretation (Aleo et al. [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref27">5</reflink>]; Corbitt and Becker [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref28">27</reflink>]; Killian Lund et al. [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref29">54</reflink>]; Krone and Enciso [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref30">56</reflink>]; Nash [<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref31">65</reflink>]; Storm and Jones [<reflink idref="bib81" id="ref32">81</reflink>]). We came to this paper having organized and participated in various conference sessions surrounding the nature of narrative and the role of a diverse array of interactive and game‐like texts in language arts education. Through these professional discourse spaces, we collaborated with colleagues in the field, university and K‐12 educators alike, to identify and dig into some of the thornier challenges of interpretation and teaching across a spectrum of texts.</p> <p>This project grew out of the identification of several overlapping challenges in our field. First, there is a lack of clarity regarding how to teach and conceptualize game‐based texts in the ELA classroom, particularly when considering the elastic nature of stories in which players have varying or divergent narrative experiences on the basis of their choices in the game. Second, there is variation in how the term <emph>interactivity</emph> is used in narrative and pedagogical contexts; we sought language that would allow for greater specificity in discussing how a reader‐player is invited to shape narratives, which could lead to greater clarity in critical and pedagogical contexts. We found in our own classrooms, and in our collaborations with K‐12 educators, that these limitations in the field led to challenges in the kinds of texts and pedagogical interactions that could find purchase in English teaching and learning.</p> <p>Procedurally, over the course of 1 year, we held analytic meetings during which we discussed distinctions across categories; analyzed sample titles and texts according to our emerging categories; produced, discussed, and revised visual models of our theoretical concepts; shared references to empirical and theoretical literature; and engaged in wide‐ranging discussions that drew together our respect for classic texts, our wonder at texts that push boundaries, our delight in the ways that discursive communities take up invitations to interact, and our deep desire to see English education continue to evolve so that young people can learn to dive deeply into texts that matter to them.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-5">Background: Narrative Interactivity Across Fields</hd> <p>Shifting understandings of narrative interactivity exist in the context of a long history of cross‐disciplinary research pointing to reading as an inherently interactive and socially constructed process. In this section, we introduce three fields to construct our framework for narrative interactivity: reader response theories, sociocultural theories of literacy, and games studies. In the remainder of this essay, we synthesize and draw upon these theories directly and explicitly as we construct a larger framework for understanding what it means for readers to interact with texts across a variety of types and genres of texts.</p> <p>As early as 1938, literary theorist Louise Rosenblatt put forth the transactional theory of meaning‐making in relation to literature, arguing that meaning arises through transactions between readers and the text on the page. In literacy studies, sociocultural theories of literacy presume the role of each reader's culture, history, and personal background in the way they construct meaning (Gee [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref33">38</reflink>]). Scholars in game studies have developed extensive theoretical tools for analyzing interactive narrative texts. Recognizing that many fields have explored meaning‐making in relation to text, we synthesize theories from literary studies, literacy studies, and game studies to situate our exploration of interactivity within narrative texts.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-6">Literary Studies: Reader Response Theory</hd> <p>Emerging in the mid twentieth century, reader response theories (Rosenblatt [<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref34">72</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref35">73</reflink>]) emphasize that meanings are constructed through dynamic transactions between readers and texts. Rather than locating meaning solely in the text itself, many reader response theorists viewed reading as an event that includes both readers and texts as essential to meaning‐making. Reader response theories are not monolithic. Drawing on a legacy of Dewey's pragmatist philosophy of education, Rosenblatt uses the term transaction instead of interaction as a way to mark that text and reader are part of a shared context for meaning‐making as opposed to discrete concepts that exist indivisible from one another. For Rosenblatt, the term transaction also helps to highlight the non‐hierarchical nature of the relationship between reader and text. In this article, we adopt Rosenblatt's focus on seeing readers and texts as part of a larger context that is non‐hierarchical. However, we use the term interaction because it is the term more often used to discuss a wider range of texts that includes not only print texts but multimodal and co‐constructed texts, including digital webpages, video games, and group storytelling. Further, the term transaction for some audiences can carry connotations of a dehumanizing economic process, and so we argue that a return to interaction is necessary to underscore that meaning‐making is a dynamic human practice.</p> <p>Building on but also breaking from Rosenblatt, scholars such as Iser and Fish furthered understandings of readers' active meaning‐making. Iser's ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref36">48</reflink>]) concept of <emph>gaps</emph> in texts that readers must fill through their imagination, and Fish's ([<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref37">35</reflink>]) notion of <emph>interpretive communities</emph> that shape how we read, both emphasized the interactive nature of reading. More recent scholars have expanded reader response theories by incorporating critical and affective dimensions (Coleman [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref38">24</reflink>]; Lewis [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref39">59</reflink>]; Park [<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref40">69</reflink>]). These developments maintain the central insight that meaning‐making is fundamentally interactive while acknowledging how power relations, emotional responses, and cultural positioning shape this process, whereas intentional critical stances can be employed to recognize these elements during discursive engagements in classrooms. Scholars have begun to apply Rosenblatt's theory to online spaces, examining how this transaction may pivotally reshape not only reading experiences but also texts (Thomas and Stornaiuolo [<reflink idref="bib86" id="ref41">86</reflink>]) and genres (Magnifico and Jones [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref42">62</reflink>]). We build on this resurgent interest in reader response theories by exploring how the social context in which readers approach different texts invites different kinds of interaction.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-7">New Literacy Studies: Sociocultural Theory</hd> <p>The term New Literacy Studies (NLS) indexes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding literacy that draws upon sociocultural lenses (Bakhtin [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref43">12</reflink>]; Vygotsky [<reflink idref="bib90" id="ref44">90</reflink>]) recognizing literacy/ies as a diverse set of practices inherently intertwined with the cultural and historical contexts in which readers, each with their own culturally and historically situated individual identities, make sense of the world and the various texts within the world (Heath [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref45">43</reflink>]; Street [<reflink idref="bib82" id="ref46">82</reflink>]). From this perspective, readers actively construct meanings by assessing texts within the frame of their own contexts and experiences (Gee [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref47">38</reflink>]). NLS has a history going back over 40 years and has become one of the dominant paradigms for understanding reading, even in the narrower sense of the term. NLS scholars have detailed this type of interaction in language that can be read as speaking almost directly to early accounts of reader response theory. Kress ([<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref48">55</reflink>]), for example, explains that "in reading, the reader 'fills' the form with her or his meaning, hence the form as interpreted by the reader is always a transformation of the maker's meaning" (p. 39).</p> <p>Over the last two decades, NLS scholars have emphasized both the expansive nature of literacy, arguing for the plural term "multiliteracies" (New London Group [<reflink idref="bib85" id="ref49">85</reflink>]) to better capture its diversity, as well as the application of literacy as a construct to a diverse array of texts (Lankshear and Knobel [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref50">58</reflink>]). This expansion of what counts in literacy research (Street [<reflink idref="bib83" id="ref51">83</reflink>]) has led to literacy research examining a plethora of multimodal texts, including McDonald's happy meal boxes (Vasquez [<reflink idref="bib88" id="ref52">88</reflink>]), advertisements (Fairclough [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref53">34</reflink>]), films (Marsh [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref54">63</reflink>]), and comics (Low and Torres [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref55">61</reflink>]). This tradition has also recognized an expanded definition of narrative, with scholars recognizing that narrative, like literacy itself, is a social practice that takes on a diverse array of forms across culturally situated spaces (Heath [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref56">43</reflink>]; Street [<reflink idref="bib82" id="ref57">82</reflink>]). From a NLS perspective, narrative is conveyed through seemingly chaotic children's drawings, TikTok videos, childhood games and imaginary play, and any number of explicitly and implicitly narrative texts and experiences. Although the broad scope of the lens is not always actualized in schooling, this tradition has opened the door for researchers and educators to consider a wider variety of narratives. Scholars building from this tradition have more recently drawn attention to the study of texts that include more explicitly interactive narrative forms, in which readers serve a dual role as both author and reader as their participation actively shapes the plot of the texts they study within literacy and language arts research (Bacalja et al. [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref58">11</reflink>]; Garcia [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref59">37</reflink>]). NLS's emphasis on the culturally situated nature of literacy as the practice of making meaning, and its emphasis on the diverse array of literacy practices and texts intersect in bringing these texts to the attention of literacy researchers and educators.</p> <p>Although both reader response theory and NLS have always framed all texts as interactive, the emergence and spread of more explicitly interactive narrative texts that invite and often require players to shape storylines through their actions and choices present new questions regarding the nature of literary transaction/interaction. It is now commonplace in literacy research to speak of meaning as individually and socially constructed, even as this idea is not always applied in research (and certainly not in standardized testing, state standards or school contexts) (see Skerrett and Warrington [<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref60">78</reflink>]; Collins [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref61">26</reflink>]; Freire [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref62">36</reflink>] for critiques of objectivist traditions in schooling). The field has yet to develop an articulated vocabulary for discussing the varied forms of interactivity that emerge across texts that present new critical and pedagogical affordances (Gibson [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref63">39</reflink>]). In this article, we highlight the possibilities for meaning or action that texts provide to an individual, on the basis of both the text's own properties and the individual's capabilities, dispositions, or background, for readers' individual or collaborative impact on how narratives unfold. Although NLS asks how social and cultural worlds shape reading and writing experiences, we conversely wonder how reading and writing experiences, especially those invited by new text types, invite students to reshape both texts and their larger social and cultural worlds.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-8">Games Studies</hd> <p>Many, though not all, of the texts that readers take up to push the boundaries of narrative unfolding are presented as games (Ostenson [<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref64">68</reflink>]). In part, naming these texts as games stems from a lack of conceptual categories for describing different narrative forms. Though today's tabletop and video games have roots in activities whose ludic (game‐like) elements are more salient, many are more akin to complex narrative experiences that unfold collaboratively around tables or via audiovisual communications on screens. The ludic elements can be both direct or in the background. As such, we draw from scholarship in game studies, a field that has wrestled with narratives shaped by multiple participants (e.g., creators, readers, and players) for decades. Game studies can complicate the way we understand text and textual nuances of play. Although we do not limit our discussion of interactivity to games, both analog and digital games provide salient examples of how stories can be made explicitly interactive. In presenting this framework, we are interested in thinking across media types to consider various ways that narratives can be interactive. Much of this thinking emerges from research and scholarship on narrative games. As such, we detail how scholars in game and media studies have explored narrative interactivity.</p> <p>Aarseth ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref65">2</reflink>]) coined the term ergodic literature to refer to texts that require significant "non‐trivial" effort from readers in order to navigate and advance the story through puzzles, non‐linear organization, or multimodal features. Aarseth's use of the term "non‐trivial" focuses on ludic actions in rule‐based narratives, rather than the literacy or literary focus that would be brought by scholars studying these topics. Zimmerman ([<reflink idref="bib94" id="ref66">94</reflink>]) described interactivity as "one of those words that can mean everything and nothing all at once" (p. 158). He broke the term into four types: cognitive, physical, explicit (e.g., available choices to make within a text), and meta (cultural participation and production around a text). We build on these initial structures throughout this essay as we continue to expand what interactivity means in literacy studies.</p> <p>Focusing on narrative in interactive contexts, Jenkins ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref67">49</reflink>]), looking specifically at games, drew distinctions between two types of narratives. <emph>Embedded narratives</emph> are established, pre‐written stories told multimodally within games. These cannot be changed by players or can only be changed in author‐delineated ways. <emph>Emergent narratives</emph> are those that arise from experiences that happen during gameplay—for example, where exactly a character or avatar is directed by players or computer agents. To begin tracing how game‐based narratives develop across embedded and emergent processes, we think with Huizinga's ([<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref68">47</reflink>]) concept of the magic circle of play. Huizinga explains how when participants play a game, they step into a world that (re)shapes the roles, rules, and routines by which players interact. To this end, we think of games as texts that can have unique impacts on the ways participants understand themselves and the processes and relationships by which they engage with others.</p> <p>Jennings proffered the terms <emph>potential and actualized textualities</emph> to consider players' role in shaping both the story and the form a mutable text takes more broadly. These terms refer to narrative game experiences in which players have some level of non‐trivial agency over the course of the story. In this sense, Jennings provides a more detailed layer to understand Aarseth's concept of the <emph>ergodic</emph>. As Jennings explains, "Potential textualities encompass an unbounded realm of possible factors and affordances and combinations of features, choices, and ways of playing a game" (Jennings [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref69">50</reflink>], 10). Actualized textualities are the actual narratives and narrative experiences that emerge within each player's (or group of player's) narrative play sessions. These are the stories that wind up playing out.</p> <p>In including these distinctions, we do not intend to suggest that literacy studies should import game studies' conceptions of narrative. Rather, we draw upon the types of thinking germane to scholars who have focused specifically on games to help understand and conceptualize how interactivity functions within various forms of literature and media. In doing so, we draw from game studies to help the field of literacy studies conceptualize the varied ways in which texts can be interactive.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-9">Conceptualizing Interactivity in Literacy Studies</hd> <p>Recent scholarship has redefined what we call "texts," moving beyond traditional print books toward more expansive and dynamic conceptualizations that take into account digital technologies (Burnett and Merchant [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref70">21</reflink>]; Rowsell [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref71">74</reflink>]) and the ways in which narratives or texts emerge through experience with those technologies (Cho and Afflerbach [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref72">22</reflink>]), even though they fall outside of the boundaries of traditional narrative structures. Such moves in the field highlight the importance of interactions both with texts as well as their situated environments (Nichols and LeBlanc [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref73">66</reflink>]). This blurs boundaries and shifts our collective focus away from text types toward processes of meaning‐making, thus focusing on interactivity.</p> <p>The term <emph>interactivity</emph> has been used to index a variety of activities in relation to narrative (Holstein and Gubrium [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref74">45</reflink>]); there is no single way of interacting with a text. Interaction can include activities as diverse as pulling tabs on a pop‐up book, imagining a story in one's mind, changing the course of a story through one's actions, or participating in the active, emergent authoring of a story in collaboration with other story participants. Part of our purpose in composing this piece is to unflatten (Sousanis [<reflink idref="bib80" id="ref75">80</reflink>]) this term, separating it from any one claimed meaning. In doing so, we intend to provide a discussion of varied forms of interaction with texts that literacy researchers and educators can draw from as they design studies and curricula.</p> <p>Our framework in this paper gives consideration to narrative texts in multiple formats, including novels, plays, comics, short stories, film, animation, immersive theater, single‐ and multiplayer video games, and collaborative storytelling games. Many of our examples focus on narrative digital games, as these present new and novel ways of telling stories that are helpful in articulating forms of interaction for educators and researchers. Though we acknowledge the textual nature of all games, we have created some boundaries for the sake of this paper. We have excluded games without explicit narratives or those in which narrative plays only a minor role, such as Tetris, also known as no‐embedded‐scenario games (Hsu and Wang [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref76">46</reflink>]), as well as games with almost exclusively emergent narratives (e.g., <emph>Mario Kart</emph>, <emph>SimCity</emph>) that focus much more on simulation and gameplay than on what might be traditionally referred to as narrative content and thus arguably fall outside of the realm of narrative texts (Skolnick [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref77">79</reflink>]), at least as they are likely to be understood within literacy and language arts education. However, recognizing how rapidly narrative genres change and evolve especially across digital networks (Magnifico and Jones [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref78">62</reflink>]) as well as the ways in which emergent narratives can take shape through play outside of traditional narrative texts, we by no means intend to discount the potential textualities that youth may compose from any sort of text, and we invite readers to consider how our framework of invitations might apply to any sort of textual engagements they observe from youth.</p> <p>Drawing from across fields, we begin from the starting assumption that all texts require interactivity to be meaningful. Readers must connect symbols to various forms of literate knowledge and skill, connect words and sentences to prior experiences, simulate imagined worlds, and generally put together a picture from text on the basis of a personalized, historical, cultural experience (Gee [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref79">38</reflink>]; Heath [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref80">43</reflink>]; Jenkins [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref81">49</reflink>]; Rosenblatt [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref82">73</reflink>]). Although we discuss in this article a diverse array of texts that readers take up, including altering or changing what is sensorily in front of them, we begin from the fundamental assumption that interactivity is inherent to literate activity (Eagleton [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref83">32</reflink>]).</p> <p>As we think about interactivity, it is important to consider how different textual features allow for certain interactional <emph>affordances</emph> (Gibson [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref84">39</reflink>]) that allow participants in socially situated literacy events to engage with texts in particular ways. Readers are conditioned to take up different types of texts through different kinds of interaction more than others because of how interpretive communities interpret textual features and affordances. The storytelling in many role‐playing games, for example, is commonly read as more emergent and open‐ended than the storytelling in a young adult novel. This does not mean that there are no varieties of interaction happening within both types of texts or that one text is better than another. It also does not mean that all instances of each text type include the same affordances. Within any generic category, there are many types of socially situated variety (Kress [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref85">55</reflink>]). In discussing the ways in which texts are read as interactive, then, we emphasize that readers view different texts as <emph>inviting</emph> varying <emph>interactions</emph>, and that these invitations, and the readers who take them up, are always already interacting with the cultures and histories within which they are situated.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-10">Introducing the Reader‐Player Interactivity Framework: Invitations to Interactivity</hd> <p>In order to support educators in tackling such texts with their students, we offer a continuum of textual interactivity (Table 1). We organize this paper by offering the notion of <emph>invitations to interactivity</emph>. We use this phrase to recognize the variety of ways of reading that individual readers might engage with text, while also recognizing that groups of readers often approach similar texts through shared reading practices.</p> <p>1 TABLE Interaction types in the reader‐player interactivity framework.</p> <p> <ephtml> &lt;table&gt;&lt;thead valign="bottom"&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;th align="left"&gt;Interaction type&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th align="center"&gt;Description&amp;#8212;What is the reader/player's Interaction&lt;/th&gt;&lt;th align="center"&gt;"Good&amp;#8208;fit texts"&lt;/th&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/thead&gt;&lt;tbody valign="top"&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td align="left"&gt;Physical and embodied interaction&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Turning pages, pressing play on an audiobook, using controllers to navigate a video game, sensory processing&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;All narrative texts&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td align="left"&gt;Transactional meaning&amp;#8208;making&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Readers bring the narrative to life by interpreting semiotic signs and relating them to the reader's lived and internal world&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;All narrative texts&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td align="left"&gt;Navigating and wayfinding within a set story&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Reader&amp;#8208;players have a degree of agency in how they move through a story, but their decisions do not impact the overarching narrative&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Bioshock, 2&amp;#8201;K InteractiveChopsticks, Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo CorralWhat Remains of Edith Finch, Annapurna Interactive&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td align="left"&gt;Multilinear reader&amp;#8208;player experience&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Reader&amp;#8208;players have room to explore the story&amp;#8208;world, and can choose to leave parts of the world unexplored; the order in which reader&amp;#8208;players experience different story beats or take up alliances impacts the experience of the story but leaves the story beats unchanged&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, NintendoHopscotch by Julio Cort&amp;#225;zarSleep No More, Punch Drunk Productions&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td align="left"&gt;Branching reader&amp;#8208;player authorship&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Reader&amp;#8208;players make choices across a number of options that open up pathways through the narrative&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Choose Your Own Adventure style books; Games like Telltale Games and Detroit Become Human&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td align="left"&gt;Co&amp;#8208;constructing a story&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Using a set of rules and story elements like settings and characters, often along with randomizing mechanics like dice, reader&amp;#8208;players improvise a story&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td align="center"&gt;Dungeons &amp; Dragons or one of many other tabletop RPGs&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt; </ephtml> </p> <p>We take the position that these categories should not be considered exclusive; as Linda Martell said in Beyoncé's song <emph>Spaghetti</emph>, "Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they? In theory, they have a simple definition that's easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined." We broaden this notion to varied ways of categorizing texts and interactions, including our own descriptions here. These categories should not confine a text to a single point within the framework. Aligning a text as a good fit within a particular type of interaction is intended to support analysis of that text, to understand the complex ways that a reader's experience might be shaped by the text and how that reader might, in turn, shape the text itself.</p> <p>This framework is structured around seven <emph>invitations to interaction</emph>. Within each description of the seven invitations, we outline the ways in which normative practices of interpretive communities, guidance from authors/designers, affordances of the texts themselves, and actions of the reader/player, to varying degrees, are leveraged to shape readers' experiences of narratives.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-11">Physical and Embodied Forms of Interactions Across Text Types</hd> <p>On the most basic level, all texts involve some level of physical interaction. As we think about interactivity, it is important to consider how different textual features allow for certain interactional affordances. We must consider both the intended uses by creators of such features as well as the unintended ways that readers may take up textual features. For instance, when engaging with a print book or comic, one of the features of this text is that readers must flip pages to progress forward. In digital visual novels, readers push buttons to advance forward in a story. In webcomics, readers scroll through panels, whether that be on apps that require using their fingers to swipe down vertically aligned panels on a phone screen (Lamerichs [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref86">57</reflink>]) or on websites where they must use a cursor to digitally traverse across the "infinite canvas" of a webpage (Goodbrey [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref87">40</reflink>]). Video games include keyboards, mice, or different types of controllers which allow users to click or press a button in order to inspect, jump, duck, run, punch, etc., encompassing a variety of mechanical or story‐related actions. Less constrained features may invite players to engage in texts in more expansive ways. For instance, roleplaying games like Dungeons &amp; Dragons can lead to improvisational interactions both at the table or through embodied activities such as LARPing (Live Action Role‐Playing).</p> <p>Authors, creators, and designers make choices about how to use features of the medium, often with expectations about ways they believe readers should engage with them (e.g., a tutorial in a video game or directions for reading manga panels from right to left). Though there may be expectations of how features are intended to be used for specific media or genres of texts, sometimes authors purposefully upend them. For example, the video game <emph>Immortality</emph> allows readers to unlock and watch movie clips in a random order, whereas the choose‐your‐own‐adventure novel <emph>Romeo and/or Juliet</emph> has a secret Rosaline plotline that is only accessible if readers pursue the book in order.</p> <p>Embodied interaction with texts creates emotional and sensory experiences that shape the way readers make meaning of their interactions with textual features. Engaging the body shifts the experience of the story, and the literary effects of texts can be intensified by certain design elements even if the plotlines remain exactly the same. For example, consider the experience of playing the video game <emph>The Last of Us</emph> vs. watching the TV show. In the video game, players are expected to engage by taking physical control of the protagonist Joel carrying his daughter while navigating a chaotic street full of erratic people and explosions. Watching this same scene in the TV show produces a different embodied experience, as readers are neither able nor expected to make decisions about where to turn or whom to avoid. When playing a video game, a player can fail a task and experience a negative consequence and accompanying emotional reaction, especially if positioned as responsible for the outcome. This array of impacts highlights the role of physical interactivity on the most basic level (e.g., page flipping that must happen for a story to progress) and in ways that more substantively shape our personal experiences and interpretations of narratives.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-12">Transactional Meaning‐Making</hd> <p>Narrative texts require readers' interactions to bring the text to life as they read, building a story world through visual simulation inside their minds in the case of alphabetic text. Readers use their imaginations to relate and connect to characters and generally use the semiotic signs presented by any given text to simulate internal experiences (that are, as we will discuss later, also socially situated). Narrative only becomes intelligible and meaningful in relation to the viewers' pre‐existing conceptions and understandings of a lived world.</p> <p>Reader response theory is particularly helpful for conceptualizing this layer of narrative interactivity. Rosenblatt ([<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref88">72</reflink>]) describes the dynamic human practice by distinguishing between readers' various stances. She highlights how that process varies depending on purposes for reading (e.g., efferent and aesthetic). A reader draws on their own experiences, cultures, and worldviews, as well as the words contained within the text, to make meaning as they read. In this way, the meaning of the text changes depending on who is reading it and the environment in which they are reading; the text cannot be said to have one meaning for all readers or for all time. At the same time, readers do not arbitrarily assign meaning but construct it as they transact with the text.</p> <p>Although this form of interactivity does not allow readers to shift the narrative itself, it does invite them to actively contribute to the construction of its meaning. For instance, consider how students with different social identities and unique personal experiences have engaged with the American canon, superhero comics, or action movies over the last half‐century. Despite the closed nature of the way these narratives are often taught, inviting students to form personally meaningful responses and interpretations of novels offers far more space for interactivity than requiring the recitation of shallow but popularly held beliefs about their themes.</p> <p>When engaging with explicitly multimodal texts like graphic novels or films, the reader/viewer does not create the multisensory world inside their head as they would with printed text. However, the same transactional (Iser [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref89">48</reflink>]; Rosenblatt [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref90">73</reflink>]) and sociocultural (Gee [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref91">38</reflink>]; Heath [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref92">43</reflink>]; Vygotsky [<reflink idref="bib90" id="ref93">90</reflink>]) principles that dictate the reader's central place in story‐building in print‐based texts apply to <emph>meaning‐making</emph> in multimodal text. Those who engage with multimodal narrative content still situate what they are seeing and hearing inside of figured worlds (Holland et al. [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref94">44</reflink>])—implicit constructions of the world built on the basis of their past experiences.</p> <p>As a simple example, a reader of the novel <emph>The Hate U Give</emph> uses alphabetic symbols to simulate a story world inside of their own heads, drawing upon previous felt, sensed, and embodied experiences to bring it to life. They also engage in a range of other internal simulations as a means of experiencing a text that would otherwise exist as lifeless and uninterpreted symbols. When viewing the film version of the same story, the reader (now a viewer as well) is provided with many additional audiovisual stimuli—they do not construct, in the same way, an imagined version of Smog the dragon or passageways around the mountain, elements conveyed via alphabetic language in the printed text and experienced via the imagination of readers. Film viewers, and other readers of texts that provide audiovisual stimuli, do, however, still transact with texts because those stimuli connect to prior experiences, thoughts, frameworks and ways of understanding the world. They land upon each reader and live inside them in different ways, leading to different transactional experiences and thematic interpretations.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-13">Navigating and Wayfinding Within a Set Story</hd> <p>Although engaging with any kind of text, readers retain some level of agency in how they navigate that text, and in so doing, they wind up creating their own form of textual experience. With traditional texts conveyed via alphabetic print, the majority of comic narratives, films, and television shows, there is a prescribed or suggested means of engaging the text that prescribes a reader's journey through that text. In interactive narrative media such as digital games or virtual reality media, reader‐players are invited to interact in more explicit ways with a story, moving their avatar and taking actions within story worlds. Although many accounts of interaction with digital game stories emphasize player agency over the progression of storylines, with readers positioned as heavily impacting the events of the story (e.g., Ebert [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref95">33</reflink>]; von Gillern [<reflink idref="bib89" id="ref96">89</reflink>]; Williams [<reflink idref="bib93" id="ref97">93</reflink>]), such agency is often limited through prescribed boundaries of larger story arcs outlined by the texts' authors. In this section, we delve into how reader‐players navigate and wayfind within texts. We use the terms <emph>navigating and wayfinding</emph> as a conjoined concept that refers to a form of interactivity by which readers have a great degree of agency over how they navigate within texts, but do not influence the larger narrative arc of the text, which remains largely static.</p> <p>Texts that afford readers this kind of interactivity include <emph>Myst</emph> (Cyan Worlds [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref98">31</reflink>]), <emph>Bioshock</emph> (2K Games [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref99">1</reflink>]) or <emph>Gone Home</emph> (The Fullbright Company [<reflink idref="bib84" id="ref100">84</reflink>]), narrative interactive experiences in which reader‐players, a term we employ to describe how players of narrative games also function as readers, are invited to move through story worlds at their own pace and with some agency as to what happens moment‐to‐moment, with varying levels of puzzles and other game‐like interactions included within the narrative experience.</p> <p>Narrative video games serve as a premier example for highlighting this form of interactivity, though some analogue texts fall into this category as well. Visual and graphic novels, for example, often promote a more diffuse array of reading patterns, with less linearity in how readers comprehend and interpret them as visual attention is diffused across a more open‐ended textual field (Jimenez and Meyer [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref101">51</reflink>]; Orbán [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref102">67</reflink>]). This diffusion of attention and the loosening of prescriptive movements allow for more fluid navigation and wayfinding through the text. Texts such as Anthony and Corral's <emph>Chopsticks</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref103">8</reflink>]) explicitly invite readers to navigate the text in their own bespoke ways; there are multiple paths readers can take through a story told primarily through visual images and artifacts (Figure 2); the omission of page numbers further invites freedom in the process of navigating the text, all while presenting a static story that remains physically the same for all readers. A more embodied version of this kind of interactivity is many narrative escape rooms in which there is a larger storyline but little opportunity for reader‐players to alter that storyline.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jan26/rrq70079-fig-0002.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70079-fig-0002.jpg" title="2 An image from a story told through ambiguous visual artifacts (Anthony and Corral [8])." /> </p> <p></p> <p>Readers interacting in this way, navigating and wayfinding through analogue or digital worlds, do not leave behind the physical, cognitive, and social interactivity described in the prior segments of this framework. Texts that invite more open‐ended navigation build on these types of interactivity by inviting reader‐players to engage in bespoke experiences that often allow reader‐players to "to feel an enormous sense of freedom" (Walker [<reflink idref="bib91" id="ref104">91</reflink>] n.p.) even while the larger story within the text remains static. Although narrative interactivity is not reducible to a binary, it is helpful to introduce two categories for what constitutes a story: (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref105">1</reflink>) the <emph>precrafted story</emph> presented by the text's established author via text, visuals, cut scenes, etc. and (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref106">2</reflink>) the unique, <emph>emergent story experience</emph> of each person as they move through a textual world, which creates a form of story experience on its own, even in games where players' actions have no impact over the developer‐authored story (Skolnick [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref107">79</reflink>]). These conceptions of story are not mutually exclusive, and co‐exist in every interactive narrative experience. Recognizing the mixture of agency and control at the heart of digital game narratives, Beavis et al. ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref108">16</reflink>]) explained, "what constitutes 'the game' is itself in some ways different for every player, at the same time as games are both fixed and fluid, interactive and predetermined, with agency functioning in paradoxical ways" (p. 165).</p> <p>The wider the virtual world in which the reader‐player exists, the more agency they have to construct a bespoke narrative experience. The actions of the reader‐player lead them to encounter different semiotic stimuli for different periods of time; they, and their avatar or character, have different actual experiences which change the nature of the narrative. Their decisions, whether to go left or right at a crossroads, or whether to spend time exploring a mysterious room, have a real impact on the progression of the reader‐player's experience (von Gillern [<reflink idref="bib89" id="ref109">89</reflink>]), even if the major story beats and ending remain the same. Each person moves through these narrative worlds at their own pace, making their own choices, and determining the specifics of how the story becomes enacted. The individual conflicts that emerge, the choices that reader‐players make, and the particular, never‐to‐be‐exactly‐repeated sequence of their experiences constitute its own form of narrative within a larger authored narrative (Skolnick [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref110">79</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-15">Multilinear Reader‐Player Experience</hd> <p>In addition to navigating or wayfinding in unique ways that advance a narrative, some texts afford reader‐players the ability to engage in more wide‐ranging decision‐making that significantly alters their experience of the storied world. We refer to this as <emph>multilinear reader‐player experience</emph>. The difference between this invitation and <emph>navigating and wayfinding</emph> relates to scope and scale; in the prior category, reader‐players move through story worlds with agency on the moment‐to‐moment level, whereas this category describes open‐ended exploration and agency across larger arcs of plot. This kind of interaction is more thoroughly afforded by newer game texts such as <emph>Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild</emph> and <emph>Elden Ring</emph>, in which player choices drastically alter what happens within a play‐through or reading of the game, even as there remains a larger, more static story arc as well. These texts have embedded narratives—story beats that do not change regardless of reader‐players' actions and choices; yet they also offer ample opportunities for emergent narratives—experiences that arise through the particular choices and experiences of reader‐players (Juul [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref111">53</reflink>]). The movement through the text, in which a reader‐player determines order, explores the world, takes up opportunities, gathers resources, and compiles information, creates meaningful difference to the experience of the text without altering the embedded narrative.</p> <p>In some texts, reader‐players make choices that alter outcomes and major plot points of a story, opening some doors while closing others (we will discuss those in the next section). In multilinear reader‐player experience, a reader‐player can experience the narrative in a variety of ways, but the skeleton of the narrative remains relatively unchanged. Although a reader‐player's experience of any narrative will <emph>always</emph> depend upon the unique experiences and knowledge that a reader brings in to the transaction (Rosenblatt [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref112">73</reflink>]) and all texts are on some level a multivariate collection of codes (Barthes [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref113">13</reflink>]), we are talking, here, about texts designed by authors with the intention that they can be experienced in different ways by different readers. The reader‐player may encounter potential textualities (Jennings [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref114">50</reflink>]) in the narrative in which new pieces of the story can be uncovered, or may choose to stick to the main story path and leave such emergence undiscovered. There may be limited options for completing a set objective, or opportunities for the reader‐player to decide on a sequence of events within a limited set of choices. However, the story's main plot points are not impacted by the reader‐player's choices.</p> <p>In <emph>The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild</emph>, the player is Link, a legendary hero called to save the kingdom of Hyrule from a great upheaval that has brought chaos to the land. The world of the game is open, inviting players to roam across a vast map, encounter monsters and villagers, complete side quests, and gather resources. The game encourages exploration and discovery through mechanics that reward, through health, stamina, and inventory slot upgrades, the discovery of 152 puzzle shrines and 800 forest spirits called "koroks". Other storylines can be followed to gain additional boons or pieces of lore. However, although such mechanics encourage engagement with these potential textualities of the game's world, a player may choose to ignore them. Alternatively, a player might invest in them wholly, at the expense of pursuing the main story. In the end, however, a player's choices do not impact the primary narrative.</p> <p>Punchdrunk's immersive theater Macbeth adaptation, <emph>Sleep No More</emph> (2011–2025), provides an example of an invitation to multilinear experience from the theater. The play, set amidst an indoor explorable, elaborately detailed set the size of a city block, allowed theater goers to wander through elaborate sets and discover portions of the story for themselves. <emph>Sleep No More</emph> presented a larger narrative performed by actors (largely without spoken dialogue) while allowing attendees to explore three‐dimensional spaces and in effect, construct their own narratives through engagement with hundreds of artifacts or potential experiences within the theatrical space. The actions of attendees did not influence the actions of the performers; however, the skeleton of the story remained unchanged. This narrative structure is mirrored in Meow Wolf's three interactive art installations (one each in Denver, Las Vegas, and Santa Fe), which invite attendees to follow potential textualities by exploring three‐dimensional spaces. Within these three‐dimensional narrative worlds, there are multiple narrative threads that participants can pursue. Even though participation in <emph>Sleep No More</emph> and <emph>Meow Wolf</emph> does not substantially impact the narrative outcomes, the performances contain multiple storylines that participants are free to explore. This is why <emph>Sleep No More</emph> performances loop three times per night to allow attendees to pursue alternate narrative pathways, and <emph>Meow Wolf</emph> attendees have no limits on the time available to engage in the space.</p> <p>This type of text is not unheard of in the realm of experimental novels, which play with the form and features of book text to invite readers to explore, or ignore, digressions and complexities in addition to the primary narrative. For example, Julio Cortazar's <emph>Hopscotch</emph> (Cortazar [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref115">28</reflink>]) opens with a page of instructions, and the statement "In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all" (Cortazar [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref116">28</reflink>], p. i). The text may be read straight through, from chapter 1 to 56, and upon reaching the end, the author says, "the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience." Or, the reader may begin at chapter 73 and, upon the ending of each chapter, hop to the numbered chapter in parentheses to continue reading. An essence of this kind of story design is Cortazar's encouragement that, in only experiencing the more bounded version of the story, one might conclude "with a clean conscience." This text type encourages exploration and some degree of improvisational play, but it does not demand it of its reader‐players. Still, in this type of text, the reader‐player is often aware that stones are being left unturned.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-16">Branching Reader‐Player Authorship</hd> <p>Although in texts like <emph>Zelda, Sleep No More</emph>, and <emph>Hopscotch</emph>, readers may interactively determine how they move through a single, preset narrative, other texts offer variable narrative outcomes depending on reader‐players' actions. These texts have branching narratives (Riedl and Young [<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref117">71</reflink>]), consisting of numerous moments when reader‐players are confronted with moral conundrums and high‐stakes decisions that determine the unfolding trajectory of the story. Branching narratives are common in video games, such as <emph>Fallout: New Vegas</emph>, <emph>Until Dawn</emph>, and <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph>. Video games with branching narratives can include dozens of alternate endings that reflect the consequences of players' actions. Thus, players have a degree of textual control that extends beyond the manipulation of avatars and the open exploration of virtual worlds—their actions impact the conditions of the narrative and characters therein. In a single playthrough of games like <emph>Until Dawn</emph>, for example, players will only encounter a fraction of the possible narrative outcomes of the text. As such, texts with branching narratives often inspire reader‐players to experience the text multiple times to experiment with new decision‐making paths and their corresponding effects on the story.</p> <p>To understand how branching narratives unfold, let us explore the textual content and processes of <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph>—a popular action‐adventure video game. In <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph>, players follow a series of characters living in Detroit, Michigan. The story takes place in the year 2038, and technological advancements have resulted in the widespread sale and ownership of androids. Androids look, sound, and think like humans, but they do not have the same rights as humans and are often subjected to inhuman living conditions. Throughout the game, players control the actions and decisions of three androids: Connor, Markus, and Kara. These three characters are a police detective, an activist, and a housekeeper, respectively. Each character's unique social position provides players with different viewpoints into the unjust treatment of androids. Although Connor, Markus, and Kara's stories begin separate from each other, their lives slowly intersect and entangle throughout the narrative. Across the game, players encounter multiple events that prompt them to make morally weighty decisions that determine the fate of their characters, companions, and android society writ large. When playing as Kara, for example, players must determine how she escapes her abusive owner, Todd, and the degree to which she protects Todd's vulnerable young daughter. Kara's character arc is determined by dozens of decisions that players make throughout the 12‐h video game adventure.</p> <p>The <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph> narrative unfolds across 32 chapters. After each chapter, the game displays a diagram of the decisions and consequences that players negotiated (see Figure 3). The diagrams reveal that each chapter has multiple alternate endings that players could have encountered if their decision‐making had been different. Moreover, the diagrams aggregate data from every <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph> player, displaying the statistical frequency of each possible storyline. These data highlight how individual players' decisions compare to the popular trajectories of play among users around the world. These diagrams also highlight opportunities for different or revised game trajectories if players decide to replay the game.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jan26/rrq70079-fig-0003.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70079-fig-0003.jpg" title="3 Branching player decisions in Detroit: Become human." /> </p> <p></p> <p>Reader‐players' sense of agency is magnified when they are able to make decisions in video games that appear to be substantial and consequential (Murray [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref118">64</reflink>]). <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph> seeks to elicit these feelings of agency and interactivity through weighty narrative choices—such as the option to peacefully protest the degradation of androids, or incite a violent revolution. There are limits, however, to the degree of player interactivity in branching narratives. Even though <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph> has over a dozen different storyline endings, there are countless play trajectories that are not permitted in the game. Schubert ([<reflink idref="bib75" id="ref119">75</reflink>]) argues that <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph> reifies an individualist understanding of civic action, one that celebrates the actions of a few select heroes rather than exploring the nuanced development of social movements with distributive leadership. By centering the stories of heroic individuals, <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph> caters to audiences of solo gamers who want to accomplish valiant deeds in virtual worlds. Since the outcomes of interaction in branching narratives are predetermined by their designers, games like <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph> do not permit playstyles that reach beyond the narrative and ideological constraints imposed by the game developers.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-18">Co‐Constructing a Story</hd> <p>In contrast to texts like <emph>Detroit: Become Human</emph>, some texts invite open co‐construction from participants. For these texts, there might be a sourcebook or guidebook that helps one participant, functioning as a narrator, help everyone to collaboratively construct the story. Perhaps the genre of texts that are most squarely in this category is role‐playing games such as <emph>Dungeons &amp; Dragons, Vampire the Masquerade, Kids on Bikes, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark</emph>, or <emph>Good Society</emph>. In these kinds of reading interactions, players might read and consult a set of rules for what kinds of actions they are allowed to take as they collaboratively build the story. Often, one player takes on the role of the Game Master (GM), a position that has that participant act as a narrator‐like storyteller as well as a rules adjudicator for the game. The other participants each play a key character in the story. Although the GM may have a sourcebook that tells them about major plot points they could follow or other characters with whom the characters can engage during the story, these kinds of resources can also be treated as guideposts, allowing for meaningful agency among both players and the GM to collaboratively create and change the story while telling it together.</p> <p>This kind of text is also often mediated by material objects or digital resources. Most of these RPGs have times when the GM may instruct players to roll a number of dice in order to see if the outcome that they narrate is able to come to pass. For example, in <emph>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</emph> characters may face an evil mage who casts a powerful spell that shoots a fireball at the player characters. Each character may have to roll a 20‐sided die to determine if the fireball does a small or a large amount of damage to their character. These kinds of events of chance are built into the mechanics of many of these games. Thus, engagement with these kinds of material objects is expected, and the outcome of the dice shapes how the story unfolds. Roll poorly throughout a session, and the story may even conclude with an unhappy ending.</p> <p>Some RPGs are even set up so as not to have any GM at all. Texts approached through these interactive practices include RPGs such as <emph>Cosmic Patrol, Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars</emph>, and <emph>The Quiet Year</emph>. In these RPGs, players may feel that they have even more agency as there is no narrator‐like participant but rather a group that shares responsibility for emergently building the story together.</p> <p>Regarding understandings of interactivity, people typically approach these texts through agentive stances that allow them to build their own stories. Recent research suggests that these texts not only afford opportunities for players to create stories about the fictional world in which they are playing, but also to reimagine the real world through the stories. For example, Storm and Jones ([<reflink idref="bib81" id="ref120">81</reflink>]) followed a group of queer youth and allies playing <emph>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</emph> over a year‐long youth participatory action research project. In their storytelling, youth interacted with the game mechanics, the story world, and the real world. With regard to game mechanics, the GM, who was a person of color, wanted to demonstrate the unfair ways that systemic racism functioned in both the real world and the story‐world, so she had characters who had darker skin roll two dice and take the lower number when they interacted with characters who represented racist law enforcement. This mechanic is not in the rulebooks, but the DM explicitly noted that she added this mechanic as a way to illuminate how systemic racism operated in subtle and unfair ways. This helped the group to take a more critical stance toward issues of systemic racism in their lives. The D&amp;D story was also a way to create more utopian visions of society. For example, the group explicitly banned homophobia from their storied world, telling everyone that they have to deal with enough homophobia in the form of bullying and unwelcome comments in their own lives and that they wanted to imagine what a world would look like without that kind of oppression. Similarly, one participant played a character that felt inaccessible to them in the real world. They told the group that they wanted to play a character who identified as a lesbian but also went by they/them pronouns. Catalyzing this concept through the use of a portmanteau, they said they wanted to be a "Theythemsbian." To this player, a "theythemsbian" was a sexual and gender identity that they wanted to exist, but that they did not have the language for in the real world. Thus, they created this kind of character in the storied world as a way to write themselves into existence even when the real world seemed ignorant of or perhaps even hostile to this particular identity. Similarly, the group expanded their meaning‐making in the story world to consider how they might change their school context to also make it more liberatory (Jones et al. [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref121">52</reflink>]). Thus, co‐constructing the story together was not only about reading the words of source books, material objects, and other players' actions, but also was about contextualizing these understandings into further reading the world.</p> <p>Reading as collaborative storytelling allows for a great deal of agency on the part of readers/players. They actively build and change the story from what is written on the page. Thus, not two enactments of the text will likely be exactly the same. Players manipulate game mechanics, narrative elements, and real‐world ideologies to construct their stories. They can work within these mechanics, narratives, and ideologies, or they can reject any of these to take the story in new directions. Ultimately, the possibilities are only curtailed by players' critical imaginations.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-19">Interaction Always Occurs Within Socially Constructed Communities</hd> <p>Drawing from the sociocultural aspect of our conceptual framework, we emphasize how each of these forms of interactivity is embedded within larger community contexts (the outer layer of Figure 1). As has been made clear by decades of sociocultural research in literacy studies (Street [<reflink idref="bib82" id="ref122">82</reflink>]; Heath [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref123">43</reflink>]), meaning‐making is inherently embedded within social, cultural, and discursive contexts. Interactivity, from these perspectives, is dialogic, communal, and situated within specific communities of practice. Within these communities, readers engage with texts as discursive participants who share interpretive frameworks, cultural resources, and literacy practices, which grant a wider variety of practices and semiotic resources with which readers can interpret, imagine, and respond to narrative texts. This form of interactivity goes beyond reader and text to include tools and practices from particular communities that provide even more expansive potential for readers to interpret and respond to texts.</p> <p>Teachers often consider how young readers' histories, cultures, languages, and racial identities might inform how they make sense of the themes and topics of literature and other texts (Wetzel et al. [<reflink idref="bib92" id="ref124">92</reflink>]). This also applies to making meaning from and decisions about interactions with expansive multimodal texts. As we discussed previously, game studies attend to the potentialities of such texts and the many ways that players can navigate through (Jennings [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref125">50</reflink>]); these methods of navigation are often shaped by social practices of metagaming (Boluk and Lemieux [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref126">19</reflink>]), which can include community resources for navigating multilinear narratives or choosing desired pathways in branching narratives, and extend to communal endeavors to play games in non‐normative ways, such as hacking or speedrunning narratives. The ways that players engage with texts, as well as sharing and discussing such engagement with others, reciprocally shape larger social and cultural worlds.</p> <p>The proliferation of digital tools and technologies further expands the possibilities for interaction with closed narratives. Although traditional interpretive communities operate within specific contexts and develop shared interpretive practices, interpretive ecosystems represent broader, more dynamic digital networks of readers, texts, and media that transcend spatial, temporal, and discursive boundaries. These ecosystems are the product of multiple communities engaging in the ongoing creation and circulation of interpretations, adaptations, fanfiction, media, and criticism.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-20">Discussion</hd> <p>In this theoretical essay, we sought to complicate and unflatten the concept of interactivity in literacy studies, to recognize that interaction can unfold and be taken up in different ways, and have a range of impacts on both the experience of reading and on the narrative being read. We did so by introducing a framework for understanding the varied forms of interactivity readers engage in across different reading experiences, ranging from embodied interactions and transactional meaning‐making to more extensive forms of reader agency such as navigation, branching authorship, and collaborative storytelling (Table 1). In providing a framework with a working taxonomy for narrative interactivity, we equip scholars and educators with nuanced ways to name and discuss the qualities and functions of different types of narrative interactions.</p> <p>As researchers, this was a language we sought ourselves. We have all had firsthand experience, in classroom, digital, and interest‐driven contexts, with readers who had embodied interactions and transactions with texts; we have also seen ways that readers have navigated through texts, engaged in multilinear and branching co‐authorship, and co‐constructed stories. With many of our colleagues, we take an expansive stance toward what types of reading and texts "count"; the language provided by this framework helps us find common threads and patterns in an inclusive tapestry of texts in order to understand more about the function and narrative impact of different kinds of invitations to interact.</p> <p>We referred to each type of interactivity as an "invitation" in order to highlight that a text's genre, medium, affordances, or histories of use do not automatically determine how readers interact with that text. Moreover, the conceptual categories we have discussed here are not rigid, nor are they delineated from one another with absolute boundaries. Many of them overlap during the same literacy event and at the same time. They are porous and emergent categories that attempt to describe and put language to complex, overlapping phenomena. Rather than positioning these forms hierarchically, the framework acknowledges that all texts require interactivity, but different texts invite specific forms of engagement through their affordances. This nuanced understanding of interactivity can help literacy educators and researchers better approach both traditional and emerging narrative forms, particularly game‐based and digital texts, while bridging in‐school and out‐of‐school literacy practices not only by inviting texts students might traditionally engage with outside of classrooms, but also by inviting students to think about reading in ways that are more reflective of the literacy practices "in the wild" (Curwood et al. [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref127">30</reflink>]).</p> <p>In the remainder of the discussion, we first consider the import of this framework for literacy research before exploring implications for teachers and teacher educators. We then step outside of the framework to consider ways of reading outside of the invisible and ill‐defined boundaries of normative reading practices that are important to recognize, in addition to the more normative ways of engaging with text emphasized within the framework. Finally, we conclude by exploring how this framework might contribute to democratic and socially just pedagogies.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-21">Equipping Researchers to Tackle Narrative Interaction in Future Studies</hd> <p>This framework can support researchers in studying readers' engagement with texts that invite different kinds of interactivity. We wonder, how are such engagements supported in and out of school? How do readers experience different invitations to interact? How are their interactions informed by socially mediated practices in classrooms, digital spaces, and other communities of practice?</p> <p>As more and more U.S. states move toward the adoption of curricula defined as "high quality" by state boards and independent agencies, the framework we offer can support those reviewing instructional materials in assessing whether the narrative interactivity represented in the curriculum is keeping pace with the range of texts that learners will encounter in the world beyond the classroom. Where and how in current curricula are young people invited to interact with narratives? What affordances would there be to increase the diversity of narrative interaction across disciplines? Further, this work asks researchers to consider how youth and educators are taking up, remixing, and recontextualizing different poses toward interactivity, and toward what ends. How are invitations scaffolded by educators? How do students take up invitations to interact? As we have demonstrated across our analysis, readers taking up invitations to shape narratives create a great deal of complexity. There may be no single story, no single theme, no neatly packaged message to write essays about. Emergent and co‐constructed narratives foreground possibility, multiplicity, and polyvocality. Our framework can help shine a light on the ways educators might guide conversations about texts that are likely to be thematically, morally, and experientially divergent and complicated. Studying classrooms that take on such texts could provide valuable insights into practical approaches toward facilitating such discussion and analysis, as well as deeper understandings of how students learn from and apply such dialogue.</p> <p>Coleman ([<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref128">25</reflink>]) noted that, within current literacy research, the dominant method and mood of critical reading is suspicious critique. Although that is <emph>one</emph> method of reading, grounded in the influential legacy of Freire, it is not the <emph>only</emph> method. Indeed, narrow definitions of mood and method constrain the types of power to which a critical reader can attend. Heightened awareness of expanded possibilities for texts, readings, and for social futures draws the attention of critical literacy researchers to the liberatory and democratic elements of the structures of narratives, to the ways in which readers are invited to share power with, or enact power upon, or wrest power from texts and textual structures. This awareness of possibility can help researchers see how readers are building, unbuilding, or rebuilding stories and worlds; how authors, through invitations crafted into their texts, invite such interaction; and how social communities can guide readers in the uptake of such invitations or, in the absence of such invitations from authors, how communities can guide readers to crash the narrative party, so to speak, by inviting themselves to reshape stories.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-22">Considering Normative and Disruptive Textual Interactions</hd> <p>The invitations described in this framework detail different forms of narrative textual interactions. In this section, we discuss some of the tensions and possibilities that arise from looking in tandem at how ways of reading are normalized and at some ways in which readers step outside of normalized practices to form more bespoke interactions with texts. The affordances of the textual features available in the medium shape readers' embodied interactions with texts and transactional meaning‐making. Both authors/creators, as well as communities of readers, have certain expectations about how people will interact with certain types of texts. The embodied interactions that are expected from various text types are normalized and laminated through the ways they are introduced in social settings, online, school contexts, etc. Consider how we teach early readers how to hold a book and read it from beginning to end, or ways that a game tutorial teaches players how to push certain buttons to make desired actions. Choose‐your‐own‐adventure novels like <emph>Give Yourself Goosebumps</emph> provide instructions on how to make choices to flip through the novel, and even reverse decisions if something goes wrong (you die!). Roleplaying communities often share normative or desired practices on forums like Reddit, creating shared practices of engaging with such texts that do not even originate from the manuals (e.g., using safety and consent tools in <emph>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</emph>).</p> <p>As we said, the normalization of these practices is evident in the ways that authors who push the boundaries of our expectations take care to introduce the reader to the new terrain they are presenting: through forewords, notes to the readers, or through guided gameplay tutorials. Yet readers, too, push boundaries, whether or not an author invited or intended them to do so. Here, we will discuss some of those reader‐led pushes as a way of considering how interactivity resides beyond the texts and authors, and how inviting themselves to interact with texts in new ways can help readers make meaning with texts.</p> <p>Even with actions as simple as turning a page or advancing forward, readers have a choice to take these features up in more normative ways or "hack" (remix or disrupt) them. For instance, many readers confess to reading the last page of a book before starting, which is rarely intended by authors or publishers. Authors may suggest different reading orders than how they published the series, such as C.S. Lewis's suggestion to a young reader that the series might be enjoyed chronologically instead of in its canonically published order. Readers may create suggestions around how to engage with texts, such as the <emph>Star Wars</emph> Machete order which intersperses the prequels with the sequels, or tandem reads where readers switch between two books in a series chronologically occurring at the same time.</p> <p>Readers may also read or play through a text multiple times in order to fully experience all possibilities that a text affords. This might look like reading through a CYOA novel to find multiple different endings, or it might look like "save scumming" in a video game, where players save their games at important decision points in order to return and make different decisions in subsequent playthroughs. Players may play through the same game multiple times, but with the intention to be a different character or make choices with different ethical valences (e.g., <emph>Undertale's</emph> pacifist vs. genocide route).</p> <p>Readers, especially in more open texts like table‐top roleplaying games, can also choose to what extent to align with or diverge from the story, script, or module provided. Players may choose to make "house rules" or allow certain actions to occur that align with the "rule of cool" (interpreting a proposed move as allowable because it seems fun or interesting, even though it does not strictly align with the rules as written). On the flip side, some Game Masters are known for "railroading," or keeping the players on the straight and narrow so that they follow all the plot points exactly. We also point toward practices of "restorying" (Thomas and Stornaiuolo [<reflink idref="bib86" id="ref129">86</reflink>]) where readers will reimagine certain endings through fan texts like fanart or fanfiction. For instance, publishers often encourage reader interaction with a series by arguing about what characters should date during the course of an unfolding serial text like a book series, movie trilogy, or TV show (e.g., Team Edward vs. Team Jacob).</p> <p>Readers may engage in practices of metagaming (Boluk and Lemieux [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref130">19</reflink>]), which can include digitally mediated practices such as hacking and glitching or analog practices such as changing or reinterpreting the rules of a medium (Cortez et al. [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref131">29</reflink>]; Corbitt and Becker [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref132">27</reflink>]). Video gamers often share hacks or glitches they have discovered through playing the game that allow other players to traverse in unexpected ways or gain unintended rewards. Players of tabletop roleplaying games may reinterpret or change characters, worlding elements, or even rules in order to better achieve their personal or collective goals.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-23">Implications for Teachers: Starting by Learning From Diverse Literacy Practices</hd> <p>The array of texts available to youth today, which invite such varied forms of interaction with narrative, open a world of possibilities for meaning‐making. In order to support youth in accessing those possibilities, educators can start by learning about this array of texts and their associated literacy practices, looking both outwardly to youth and other readers; reflecting inwardly on their own experiences with texts, and thinking critically about the implications of bringing texts rooted in particular interpretive contexts and communities into the context of the ELA classroom. It is also important to consider how the social context and valued outcomes of the classroom might shift the interactions that are possible, comfortable, or joyful for readers of interactive texts—making sure to center what is important for the learners in the classroom and check in regularly with them about their experiences. Though the pedagogical implications of this framework could be manifold and the subject of future scholarship, we begin with suggestions for learning from and about diverse interpretive practices often taken as the domain of youth, even as these literacies are practiced across age groups.</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> <bold> Learning from and with youth: </bold> Teachers can create space in classrooms to learn <emph>from</emph> students about their diverse, multifaceted, interactive literacies. One teacher asked students to conduct inquiries into their literate lives, using her knowledge of critical literacy to help the students pose critical questions of what had and had not been included in their schooling (Skerrett and Bomer [<reflink idref="bib77" id="ref133">77</reflink>]). More recently, Nash ([<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref134">65</reflink>]), for example, detailed middle school teachers building upon these practices, teaching a unit in which teachers and students together explored their own contemporary, culturally diverse, interactive and algorithmically mediated literacy practices. Such inquiry‐driven classroom experiences can provide the foundation through which varied forms of interactive literacies can emerge within classroom spaces.</item> <p></p> <item> <bold> Exploring adult literacy practices: </bold> However, interactive reading experiences are not exclusively the province of youth. All reading experiences are on some level interactive, and readers, viewers, and players of many ages engage with more explicitly interactive stories. Garcia ([<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref135">37</reflink>]), for example, detailed the literacy practices of multiaged groups engaged in longitudinal <emph>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</emph> experiences. Teachers could take note of their own and their friends' and peers' varied interactive reading experiences, building on the sociocultural tradition of New Literacy Studies by thinking deeply and creatively about how nontraditional literacy practices find a home in English courses.</item> <p></p> <item> <bold> Drawing on digital environments: </bold> Digital environments make it easy to access and learn about situated communities of readers interacting with texts. On streaming platforms such as <emph>twitch.tv</emph> , streamers broadcast and narrate their play while observers in the chat react and comment. On online fan communities for books, games, and other media, it is possible to observe the dynamics of readers engaging in interactive texts within a discourse community. These largely open digital spaces create opportunities and could provide inspiration for shifting the kinds of texts and practices teachers invite into classroom spaces.</item> <p></p> <item> <bold> Learn from informal learning spaces: </bold> Teachers could also look to third spaces such as libraries, museums, facilitated D&amp;D programming, or other community programs and events to see what expansive designs for textual engagement look like outside of schools. Teacher educators can also plan visits to such spaces to help teachers reflect on how programs are designed to engage youth literacies.</item> <p></p> <item> <bold> Reflecting on and exploring our own literacies: </bold> Finally, teachers can reflect on their own existing practices with myriad texts, or engage in these practices anew: pause during escape room night with your grade level team to think about what's happening; consider your own favorite games and how you shape the narratives; try a journaling game or visit a game shop or library when these spaces are hosting TTRPG nights and join in; lurk in digital communities to find out more about how fans engage with and share about interactive texts Teacher educators can support teachers in reflecting on how their interpretive practices might align or differ from youth they teach, particularly when they have different intersectional identities (e.g., youth may enjoy or frequent different communities than adults).</item> </ulist> <p>These recommendations are not meant as endpoints, but as starting points. In our own scholarship (Batchelor et al. [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref136">15</reflink>]), we are working to apply and explore conceptions of narrative interactivity within classroom spaces, and we intend for the ideas offered here to serve as starting points for innovative curricular exploration that extends our thinking.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-24">Conclusion: Interactive Texts, Civic, and Critical Literacy Practices</hd> <p>Narrative texts have always been expected to carry the weight of moral education in schools, with set narratives being a presumed method for didactic and, in some cases, critical education (Applebee [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref137">10</reflink>]). As we consider how changing texts have altered the objectives of literacy education, do topics like theory of mind, critical literacy, social imagination, or democratic citizenship, all of which have been framed as central to literacy, shift across an array of texts that proffer readers varied modes of interaction? The increasingly interactive, fluid, and multi‐branched nature of narrative reading today opens new directions for literacy research, curriculum, and pedagogy. Bakhtin ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref138">12</reflink>]) argued that reading narrative discourse is uniquely aimed toward liberation because (in contrast to authoritarian discourse) narrative is "not finite, it is open" and characterized by a quality of "unfinishedness" (p. 346). From this view, narrative reading allows readers to sense the mutability of narrative and meaning, seeing new and different meanings and configurations, a characterization echoed in Greene's ([<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref139">41</reflink>]) argument that narrative art, among other forms, helps readers bring new social worlds into imagination and into being (see also Love [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref140">60</reflink>]). In this exploration of emergent types of narrative interactivity, we have sought to catalog the ways contemporary readers are treating narratives as both "plastic" and "unfinished" (Bakhtin [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref141">12</reflink>], 364), open to reader intervention and modulation in some ways that have both historical precedent and in some ways that are entirely new.</p> <p>Fluid, co‐authored storytelling may help bring into being democratic conceptions of subjectivity and promote the kinds of epistemologies of pluralism so central to multiliteracies and other forms of culturally oriented democratic pedagogy (The New London Group [<reflink idref="bib85" id="ref142">85</reflink>]). We have also seen how multi‐voiced digital spaces with competing narratives have been manipulated, leading to democratic backsliding across the world (Tripodi [<reflink idref="bib87" id="ref143">87</reflink>]). As researchers and educators continue to construct and uncover new variations of how readers construct understandings of the world in relationship to new forms of media that present different affordances and invitations, it is essential to consider how the narratives we consume and construct are foundational for our thinking, feeling, understanding, and action in the world.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-25">Disclosure</hd> <p>This is a theoretical article and not a report of empirical research.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-26">Ethics Statement</hd> <p>All relevant ethical procedures and guidelines were followed.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-27">Conflicts of Interest</hd> <p>The authors declare no conflicts of interest.</p> <hd id="AN0191105819-28">Data Availability Statement</hd> <p>Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.</p> <ref id="AN0191105819-29"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref99" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0191105819-30"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibtext> 2K Games. 2007. 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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts? – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Brady+L%2E+Nash%22">Brady L. Nash</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8693-5912">0000-0001-8693-5912</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Virginia+Killian+Lund%22">Virginia Killian Lund</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4027-3615">0000-0002-4027-3615</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Karis+Jones%22">Karis Jones</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Scott+Storm%22">Scott Storm</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Alex+Corbitt%22">Alex Corbitt</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Beth+Krone%22">Beth Krone</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Trevor+Aleo%22">Trevor Aleo</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Reading+Research+Quarterly%22"><i>Reading Research Quarterly</i></searchLink>. 2026 61(1). – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 17 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2026 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Reading+Processes%22">Reading Processes</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Navigation%22">Navigation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Narration%22">Narration</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Reader+Response%22">Reader Response</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Games%22">Educational Games</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Video+Games%22">Video Games</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Films%22">Films</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Interactive+Video%22">Interactive Video</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Interaction%22">Interaction</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Play%22">Play</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Literacy+Education%22">Literacy Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Multimedia+Materials%22">Multimedia Materials</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1002/rrq.70079 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0034-0553<br />1936-2722 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Stories unfold across a varied landscape of mediums, including video games, tabletop games, interactive films, and traditional literary texts. As that landscape continues to diversify, educators and scholars face growing challenges conceptualizing reading in a way that captures the multifaceted, consequential ways that readers interact with and shape those stories. Building on New Literacy Studies, scholarship from games studies, and reader response theory, this theoretical article proposes a cross-disciplinary model for understanding narrative interactivity in contemporary reading experiences: The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework. The authors analyze seven layers of narrative interactivity: embodied interaction, navigating and wayfinding, transactional meaning-making, two forms of reader authorship, co-constructing stories, and socially embedded meaning-making. These categories provide a language for analyzing how readers, viewers, and players co-construct stories in both fixed and variable narrative texts. The framework illuminates how meaning arises not only in explicitly interactive media, but across all forms of narrative, and provides literacy teachers and researchers with theoretical tools and explicit language for navigating varied types of texts and interactions. The article concludes by outlining implications for research and pedagogy in literacy education. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2026 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1494541 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1002/rrq.70079 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 17 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Reading Processes Type: general – SubjectFull: Navigation Type: general – SubjectFull: Narration Type: general – SubjectFull: Reader Response Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Games Type: general – SubjectFull: Video Games Type: general – SubjectFull: Films Type: general – SubjectFull: Interactive Video Type: general – SubjectFull: Interaction Type: general – SubjectFull: Play Type: general – SubjectFull: Literacy Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Multimedia Materials Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts? Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Brady L. Nash – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Virginia Killian Lund – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Karis Jones – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Scott Storm – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Alex Corbitt – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Beth Krone – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Trevor Aleo IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2026 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0034-0553 – Type: issn-electronic Value: 1936-2722 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 61 – Type: issue Value: 1 Titles: – TitleFull: Reading Research Quarterly Type: main |
| ResultId | 1 |
