Audiences no longer merely read or watch stories interactive storytelling transforms them into engaged participants. Whether it’s a choose-your-own-adventure book, a multimedia article, or an interactive website, each story version is an isolated experience. Still, with access to these interactive options, readers and viewers can explore and learn at their discretion. But to provide such experiences rapidly, professionally, and on the enterprise level, content creators need more than an intuitive perspective; they need a content system comprising flexibility, foundational elements, and reusability. Structured content provides the essential components needed to create rich, cross-channel, multi-engagement narratives.
What is Structured Content and How Does it Relate to Storytelling?
Structured content is content that exists as separate, reusable fields title, body, image, video, quote, call-to-action instead of being saved as one block of text or media. This allows for easier organization, referencing and rendering acrossvarious platforms and devices. The Storyblok platform is designed to maximize the benefits of structured content, giving teams full flexibility to scale and adapt content models to any channel. Within the storytelling environment, structured content allows for the developer/creator to dictate how each component of the story is rendered and where it sits within a larger, much more complicated universe. For example, in regard to interactively experienced stories, things like decisions, layers of media and branches of the story can be treated as renderable fields which not only makes creating a bigger overall scope easier but also more customizable.
Why Do Interactive Stories Need a Certain Level of Modularity that Content Blocks Provide?
Interactive stories need a certain level of modularity that content sections can provide even if certain ideas or scenes only happen once, the ability to redefine/reuse scenes from a larger block improves overall user experience. Structured content provides those content blocks. A content block can be an individual scene or part of a larger story or decision or interactive element quiz, poll, etc. Since these elements can come together and exist as its own identity with rendered metadata/schema language/IDs, they can more easily be rendered via platforms/devices across applications and sites. Furthermore, this enhances the likelihood that developers will work collaboratively with authors to make an engaging endeavor because there is an understanding that no matter how much of the content exists or gets rendered, it serves a purpose.
How Does It Use Conditional Logic to Enhance the User Experience?
In addition to rendering actions/ideas as they are upon completion or interaction, structured content uses conditional logic to display what’s necessary based on previous experience. For instance, in a choose your own adventure deep dive story experience, past decisions can unlock new scenes or turn characters against/or for the reader. Content driven endeavors can allow quizzes or explorations to unlock more challenging/advanced content once completed in learned environments. Furthermore, content that has structured relationships can be personally resonant or personally applicable so that when someone resolves one part of the endeavor and it unlocks another level, for example, it’s relevant and not arbitrary. This creates a robust storytelling experience.
Offering Omnichannel Storytelling Opportunities
Audiences don’t just consume stories on one channel today they use a mobile app, watch it on smart TVs, see it on social media or explore the brand’s desktop site. Structured content allows these interactive experiences to move with the user from channel to channel, changing form, not meaning. Each element of the story exists independently in a structured content landscape, allowing developers to create the necessary interface to render the content differently for each channel while still drawing it from the same truth. A scene that must autoplay in the mobile app can autoplay and look one way but then exist with interactive options on desktop. With structured content, omnichannel storytelling is not only possible but scalable which means the same story can resonate across any device.
Enabling Reusability and Iteration for Content Teams
Creating a rich experience often requires time and exploration. Structured content enables exploration to be quicker because creative teams can rely on reuse from what they already have from other experiences/projects in different projects or iterations. For example, a specific character intro, call-out animation, or infographic can be reused in another storyline branch or adapted for a different audience size. Editors can edit just one block of information without disrupting the narrative flow of the rest; developers can change logic without needing to refactor the entire experience. This modular feeling that comes with structured content allows for experimentation, A/B testing, and change over time all of which are necessary in today’s rapid-fire digital world.
Incorporating Multimedia for Deeper Levels of Storytelling
Interactive storytelling thrives on multimedia images, video, animations, ambient sound, interactive maps, etc. Structured content allows the opportunity to cement where these assets come into play and how they’re to be used in proper context. A video can be linked to a particular scene, background sound can be tied to a chapter or an image gallery can exist to enhance a character’s backstory all within the established structured content. The metadata allows for what animations are to occur, what transitions are to happen or how events are to be synchronized with user actions. Such integration facilitates deeper storytelling beyond the static narrative.
Localization and Accessibility for Global Distribution
When stories go to global markets, options for localization and accessibility are required. A structured content model allows each field to stand alone for multilingual initiatives while still reliant upon connected story logic back to the main path. The localization of the text can occur for audio, subtitling, and character/stratum interaction as separate transactions engaging translation resources without interrupting story logistics. Accessibility efforts, too alt text, audio description, or layouts requiring navigation can be baked into the content model from the get-go so that required elements are applied throughout the entire experience. Digital interactive stories can go international, and they can be made accessible.
Non-Developers Creating Without Code
While developers may benefit from a structured content model, others who are non-developers will also create without code. A headless CMS allows for editors to interact with a UI to create story blocks and branches via drag and drop and forms while media-based selections can be edited from similar fields. Non-artists can maintain visual integrity while writers can focus on writing; developers can have their work independently to apply front-end interactions. The sum of the structured parts makes even the most complicated digital story reasonable in production since everyone on the team can contribute, irrespective of development talent.
Knowing Who Participated and How For Future Improvements
If a story is interactive, knowing how much of it interested (or didn’t interest) an audience is vital to improvement. Each piece of a structured content system can be tagged with analytics; each choice point or media gesture or content block has a tag within analytics that can determine activity. Collaborating with analytical integrations such as Google Analytics, teams will know how far down the rabbit hole someone goes, where they quit, what choices are preferred, which content blocks are most frequently active. These metrics can provide insight into critical choice-flow improvements and help teams better evaluate their content strategy for the next episode.
Franchise and Universe Storytelling Connections
When a franchise is a part of a larger universe or extended storytelling across many films, seasons, or games, it needs to connect. Structured content enables publishers to connect characters, timelines, and events and places as reference fields or relational database models. Content with branches may have history across films and connect from one branch to another, or trigger relevant backstory information when a user encounters the character based on any connections made. This fosters greater immersion and more plausible long-term storytelling within franchises and across franchises and platforms.
Support for Linear and Nonlinear Storytelling
Structured content supports linear storytelling and nonlinear navigation. Linear storytelling is where static content is developed or existed and released in a fixed order and over time. But interactive storytelling allows users to experience the same content in different navigational paths, tempos, and endings. Regardless, editors can create structured content blocks that help them find the pieces belonging to each linear section independently while aligning logical rules to determine how and when certain choices occur. This allows for creative access to all forms of blended linear and user-interactive exploration that ultimately creates experiences more effective than a static exploration can provide.
Media Storytelling with Structure Content Models Across Platforms
Viewers want their stories to exist across multiple platforms, films have associated web series, games have apps, and even podcasts compile findings. Structured content empowers storytellers to effectively keep the highly-critical assets character names, character arcs, dialogue credits, visual effects, etc. from one CMS and reallocate/reuse/resell them across secondary channels. A superhero can have an origin tale on the webcomics page, a video game flashback video cutscene, or a backstory in the video game all from the same structured source. This enables transmedia storytelling with the ultimate in scalability without losing sight of the singular narrative focus as each form can contribute its unique element to the overall experience of the story.
Conclusion: A New Era of Storytelling, Enabled by Structure
Interactive storytelling is more than a trend; it’s the power to make an audience be part of the story by engaging actively instead of passively. As stories evolve from articles and static videos to digitally accessible options, audiences seek dynamic, exploratory options that not only put them in charge of the narrative for the time being but may also give them control over the outcome. From choosing your own adventures to interactive video timelines and question and answer sessions, to an interactive interview and an explainer that becomes a game; the potential of this form of new age storytelling creates deeper engagement through emotional connections when someone is involved.
When traditional content structures are utilized to create pieces of content where information can be parsed, everything becomes the all-encompassing adaptable, scalable story that expands outside of what content delivery to a captive audience once was. Because with structured content, for example, every aspect of a story image, text, video, choice, outcome, metadata, etc. is its engaged part that can exist independently, be reused, repurposed, and edited in a unique way, presented differently based on audience device preference or situational situation. It’s a content ecosystem that can promote storytelling but also creation as new formats and experiences become available and necessary.
Stories become ecosystems with storylines guided by the structure. Stories become modular data driven, modular, and endlessly adaptable. A character’s backstory can inspire a blog, a backstory with a voice assistant, or an AR engagement. Storylines can be adjusted in hindsight based on another choice. If a character questions something in the beginning of a storyline, they don’t pay attention to it later on based on the path chosen. A piece of content can be restructured via structured content without impacting the entire experience of others teams can quickly iterate while keeping everything else the same.
Such magic comes from embedded structures within the running and operating technology that allows for scale in the first place from localization into different languages to accessibility compliance to proper API engagement regardless of platform or within software as a service applications trusted for analytics, personalization, and emerging technology capabilities. Therefore, structured content positions itself as the bridge between the potential narrative with the operational needs of technology narratives, setting itself up for communication that serves not only transformative purposes but sustainable purposes for the future.
There are numerous opportunities where storytelling and structure intersect where news becomes integrated with education and entertainment and vice versa and brand growth overlaps with marketing and promotion through similar educational foundations. Instead of outputting sets of information and frameworks based on static frames of reference and linear paths of inquiry for development, creators have opportunities to tell stories that iterate based on the audience in front of them over time potentially growing into literally anything that’s ever needed by potential audiences. In the future, the biggest stories won’t just be told, they’ll be created one block at a time, one transaction at a time through the potential of what structured content realities can offer. This is merely scratching the surface of a new reality transforming storytelling potential.
