Interactive Storytelling in VR Games: Revisiting Janet Murray’s Legacy
Baltic Journal of Legal and Social Sciences
Abstract. This article re-examines Janet Murray’s foundational categories of digital narrative — immersion, agency, and transformation — through contemporary VR game design. It asks how these concepts change when the cinematic frame becomes a navigable space, and where a cinematic approach to interactive storytelling diverges from game-first design. The study argues that Murray’s framework remains productive for VR, provided agency is read not only as choice density but as the quality of embodied presence inside an audiovisual world.
Abstract. This article re-examines Janet Murray’s foundational categories of digital narrative — immersion, agency, and transformation — through contemporary VR game design. It asks how these concepts change when the cinematic frame becomes a navigable space, and where a cinematic approach to interactive storytelling diverges from game-first design.
The paper maps Murray’s legacy onto VR titles that prioritise cinematic pacing and spatial storytelling, arguing that “agency” in VR is as much about the right to look and linger as about branching choices.
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