What are some truly innovative advances in the art of storytelling?

Video games. Seriously.

The degree (and nature) of interactivity afforded by video games isn't comparable to any other medium so far. No choose-your-own-adventure-book or improvisational theater can reach the level of narrative customization afforded by, for example, the Mass Effect games.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories does some very cool stuff along those lines as well - and goes way further than simple fork-in-the-road decision trees. The appearance/mannerisms/presentation of virtually everything - from essential characters, to locations, to notes/videos/phone calls (by the way, every phone number shown anywhere in the game can be dialed by your character's in-game phone), down to the appearance of the enemies themselves, varies depending on your character's aggregate behaviors throughout the game.

Imagine how many pages a choose-your-own-adventure book would need to be to achieve a story where the description of nearly every person, place, or thing would vary based on audience input. Imagine just how many questions the performers in an improvisational theater would have to ask you constantly in order to render that much audience input in their performance. But a computer processor is capable of doing all this at once, without having to interrupt your play experience whatsoever.

As far as the art of storytelling goes, that sort of stuff is brand new.

And these are just two examples, from big-budget studios.

Just to give a few more recent examples of games that overtly play with storytelling in ways that other mediums cannot, that are inexpensive and readily available:

• Braid
• The Stanley Parable
  
• Dear Esther
  
• Journey
  
• Bastion

This isn't to say that "art-games" are the only places where this kind of innovation happens in video games, either - even your linear Zelda title gives you a story experience that other media cannot.

I could even argue that the very experience of exploring a virtual world through a simulated avatar (or whatever apparatus the game uses to take your input) is something fundamentally new in the experience of telling a story.

This post is long enough now, but there are some other innovations beyond video games that I at least wanted to mention:

• Documentaries
• "Edutainment"/faux-news
• "Multi-source"/viral stories (for want of better term) like The Dionaea House
• Truly multi-media stories, e.g. the Matrix movies' storyline was officially continued in The Matrix Online, an MMORPG.

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Mani Cavalieri on Quora:

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