Technical Innovations in the Interactive Storytelling of Jon Ingold’s All Roads

Eldiasty, Amany Abdullah; Mansour, Eman Ebeida

doi:10.21608/ejlt.2025.425152.1120

Technical Innovations in the Interactive Storytelling of Jon Ingold’s All Roads

Document Type : Research in linguistic and literary studies

Authors

¹ Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Damietta University

² Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Education, Mansoura University

10.21608/ejlt.2025.425152.1120

Abstract

Digitalization has contributed to all fields of human experience, including narratives and narratology, and Interactive Fiction (IF) is a case in point. Technically, Interactive Fiction (IF) has revolutionized readers’ roles in narratives by creating an adventure and/or a text game in a narrative literary work via a digitalized platform that allows a live author-reader interaction. This paper approaches Interactive Fiction as a discrete literary genre that revolves on the role of the interactor in developing the storytelling process, by investigating the technical innovations that Jon Ingold has employed in his narrative All Roads. By deciphering the main pathways in the selected narrative, the paper aims at defining the parameters of Interactive Fiction as a literary context, through highlighting the role of the interactor as a co-author of the text on evidence of Roland Barthes’s theory of “The Death of the Author.” The analysis of Ingold’s All Roads reveals immense descriptions, spatial chronotope and crucial pathways that need to be conquered through the reader’s imagination, which is one of the main ends of fiction. Use of a choice-based narrative, richly detailed setting, branching pathways, tension and suspense, non-interactive plot revelation, cinematic techniques and well-developed characters has created a truly engaging experience. The use of POV masking is not simply to confuse the player/interactor, but to philosophically stage the crisis of the modern subject: the self as unstable, constructed, and mediated by language and power. It is in this sense one can say that Ingold's All Roads helps in advancing the genre.

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