Most immersive designers think of themselves as storytellers. Kathryn Yu, co-founder of the Immersive Experience Institute, argues they should think of themselves as architects. The distinction has real consequences for how stories are built, experienced, and ultimately felt.

AI is typically associated with its ability to generate the media that came before, whether images, video or text. But the next frontier is in how AI creates NEW media, experiences and ways to engage fans and audiences.

It might be in how the lessons from games, VR, live theatre and AI intersect that we find new forms of creative expression, with AI playing a supporting or leading role.

Writing for No Proscenium, Yu draws on a 2004 essay by Henry Jenkins, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture", to propose a four-tier taxonomy that applies as much to escape rooms, immersive theatre, and location-based VR as it does to video games. The framework gives practitioners a shared vocabulary for a field that has long struggled to describe what it actually does.

Evocative: borrowing a world that already exists

The first tier relies on pre-existing narrative competencies in the audience. Experiences built around known IP (Star Wars, Westworld, Stranger Things) or familiar genre conventions (haunted houses, sci-fi labs, museum heists) are evocative.

The audience arrives pre-loaded with expectations; designers sculpt an environment that activates them. Disneyland's themed lands are the canonical example. The risk, as the HBO Westworld SXSW pop-up demonstrated, is that a richly detailed evocative space can inadvertently signal interactivity that wasn't designed in. Visitors began literally digging for puzzle clues that weren't there.

Enacted: the body as narrative instrument

The enacted tier puts physical action at the centre of story progression. Rather than pushing a button to advance a plot, participants are the mechanism. They swing a lightsaber in ILMxLAB's Vader Immortal, press an ear to a wall in Wolves in the Walls, or crawl under a table to advance a scene.

Yu cites scholar Yotam Shibolet's "embodied narrativity framework," which argues that the most direct expression of enacted narrative is in VR environments capable of capturing real-time gesture. The design principle she draws out: focus on the verbs of the world, not just the nouns.

Embedded: narrative hidden in space

Embedded narratives are pre-authored stories that participants discover rather than receive. The story exists in the environment: in objects, architecture, and spatial arrangement. This is the logic of the escape room at its most sophisticated, and of environmental storytelling in games like Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. The author's hand is present but concealed; the participant's sense of discovery is the emotional engine.

Emergent: stories that arise from rules, not scripts

The fourth tier is where the framework becomes most consequential and where AI may play an increasing role.

Emergent narrative isn't authored at all in the conventional sense. It arises from the interaction of system rules and participant choices, from the conditions the designer creates rather than the plot they prescribe.

Jenkins draws on Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin to illustrate how discrete, apparently unrelated micronarratives accumulate into profound emotional impact without requiring a macro-level plot.

In immersive design, emergent narrative is what happens when participants don't follow the intended path and the experience remains coherent and meaningful anyway.

Why the taxonomy matters now

The four-tier model does more than classify existing work, it clarifies the design challenge at the frontier of the field. The tension immersive creators consistently describe, between authorial control and player interactivity, maps directly onto the spectrum from evocative (maximum authorial control, minimum participant agency) to emergent (minimum prescription, maximum systemic responsiveness).

For practitioners building experiences powered by dynamic AI world models (systems that simulate causally coherent fictional realities rather than scripted story branches) the emergent tier is the operative one. It describes what such systems make possible: stories that no author wrote, arising from the logic of a world that behaves consistently whether or not anyone is watching.

Jenkins' vocabulary, developed in the context of game design two decades ago, turns out to be precisely the language the next generation of immersive storytelling needs.

Yu's full essay, including discussion of micronarrative theory and the design implications for VR and themed entertainment, is published at No Proscenium.