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An Excerpt from The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World

by Charles Melcher
An excerpt from The Future of Storytelling by Charles Melcher, published by Artisan Books and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Innovation & Creativity category

These days we don’t want to just watch our media—we want to be a part of it. To touch, feel, and test our surroundings, to make decisions that directly affect the story’s outcome. Immersive events—such as the Stranger Things Experience and productions like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More—are growing at such a staggering rate that their revenue will soon outpace film and television combined. Investors, creators, and technology leaders from the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Netflix have quietly invested billions of dollars in this new medium.

But what makes immersive experiences so appealing, and why? What does it say about us as a culture? And who is behind this revolution in entertainment? For more than ten years, Charles Melcher, founder and director of Future of StoryTelling (FoST), has been invited into the studios, garages, offices, and academic corridors where the rules of storytelling are being rewritten. And in this eye-opening book, he has curated a selection of the very best immersive experiences from around the world—Meow Wolf in the United States, teamLab in Japan, Hobbiton in New Zealand, and many more. It’s a celebration of both the projects themselves and the extraordinarily creative people who have brought them to life, and a clarion call to better understand and appreciate this paradigm-shifting moment and the opportunities immersive entertainment offers for the next generation of creators, businesspeople, and audiences.

The Future of Storytelling has been longlisted in the Innovation & Creativity category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is about the changing role of audiences—or actiences—in storytelling.

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The word audience, from the Latin root for hearing, audientia, dates back to an age when stories were mostly oral and therefore experienced through listening. Even as media diversified and evolved, the word was appropriate enough—whether listening, watching, or reading, the audience has largely the same role. But living stories are not only about listening, watching, or reading. They are about doing; they both offer us agency and demand that we take action in order to complete the narrative. Those experiencing a living story should no more be called an “audience” than those eating food at a restaurant should be called “observers.”

For fifteen years, I struggled to come up with a term that encompassed what this new kind of audience was. Taking a note from Janet Murray’s brilliant book on narrative in the digital age, Hamlet on the Holodeck, I tried out “interactors,” then “players,” then “guests,” and even—after reading Jay Rosen’s article—“the people formerly known as the audience.” None of these terms felt like an exact fit.

I finally realized that this new concept needed a new word. I coined the term actience to reflect that they are taking an active role in the work. You’ll see me use this term throughout the book to talk about the audiences who come to living stories—audiences with agency who help co-create these narratives.

This new experience of possessing agency can be incredibly fun, engaging, and impactful. But aside from eliciting profound emotional responses from the individual audience member, having agency changes the role that the creator expects of the audience. Lyn Gardner, theater critic for The Guardian, noted in 2014 that in performances where the audience has a role, “perhaps we can no longer hide behind our passivity, claiming that what is happening has nothing to do with us. If the relationship between artists and audiences is built on a different kind of contract perhaps we, the audience, have to take responsibility.”

As we, the actience, take on new roles, we will discover and build new skills. We are just beginning to learn our lines, to become familiar with these new avenues for self-expression.

CREATING FOR AGENCY

For millennia, storytellers have exerted near total control over their stories. These stories had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and their narratives did not offer the audience any say in the matter. Now a growing subset of storytellers working in forms such as VR and immersive theater has begun to rethink that old approach. They are letting their audiences make decisions, leaving room for them to create something new within the work, and providing opportunities to see a story from multiple points of view. This new paradigm requires creators to cede some power and control to the audience but at the same time depict their worlds in more detail than ever before.

 

Excerpted from The Future of Storytelling by Charles Melcher (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2025.

 

About the Author

Charles Melcher is a creator, curator, and thought leader in the storytelling and technology space, as well as an early- stage investor and advisor to media and technology companies. In 2012, he founded Future of StoryTelling (FoST), a multidisciplinary story studio committed to creating transformative stories and experiences that bring people together, inspire curiosity, and enact positive change. FoST began as an invitation-only summit that drew a mix of thinkers and practitioners from diverse fields who are shaping storytelling in the twenty-first century. Inc. magazine named it one of the “10 most Innovative Conferences of 2016,” Adweek named it among the “7 Emerging Conferences Every Advertising Professional Should Know About,” and Forbes named it one of the top “Global Events Getting Immersive Right.” The FoST Summit expanded from a one-day event for 300 people to a week-long summit and festival that drew upwards of 6,000 people. Now, following the recent pandemic, the FoST Summit has shifted to a year-around membership program that includes virtual and in-person programming and networking opportunities—ranging from tours of the most cutting-edge immersive story worlds, to world-class speakers, to small-group meetings and social gatherings. FoST also produces content throughout the year, including apps, websites, films, and immersive experiences; storytelling workshops; curated exhibitions with local and international organizations; a monthly newsletter, “FoST in Thought”; and the bi-weekly FoST Podcast, which Melcher hosts. FoST also developed and teaches a storytelling curriculum and consults on storytelling best practices for companies such as Microsoft, Ford, NBCUniversal, and others. In 2019, FoST was engaged as the official Executive Storytellers for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, which is currently scheduled to open to the public in 2025. Melcher also helps to run the Content Studio for the Library.

Melcher is also the founder and CEO of Melcher Media. Launched in 1993, the company helps international brands (Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, PepsiCo, GE, and Lexus), media companies (Netflix, HBO, Time Warner, NBC, USA, TBS, and Condé Nast), and individual authors (Oprah Winfrey, Al Gore, Lin-Manuel Miranda, J.J. Abrams, Kobe Bryant, and Eminem) to tell their stories via beautifully illustrated and produced books. Melcher Media has more than 15 million books in print, including 31 New York Times bestsellers. Melcher speaks regularly on the intersection of storytelling and technology at conferences, festivals, and conventions worldwide. Past engagements have included SXSW, C2 Montréal, EY Innovation Realized, the Milken Institute Global Conference, and Phi Centre’s The New Storytellers.

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Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World

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The first, foundational book on the next media renaissance, from one of the foremost thought leaders at the intersection of storytelling and techno...
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