Extending Digital Narrative with AI, Games, Chatbots, and XR: How Experimental Creative Practice Yields Research Insights

The Extended Digital Narrative (XDN) research project explores how experimental creative practice with emerging technologies generates critical insights into algorithmic narrativity—the intersection of human narrative understanding and computational data processing. This article presents five case studies demonstrating that direct engagement with AI and Extended Reality platforms is essential for humanities research on new genres of digital storytelling. Lina Harder’s Hedy Lamar Chatbot examines how generative AI chatbots construct historical personas, revealing biases in training data and platform constraints. Scott Rettberg’s Republicans in Love investigates text-to-image generation as a writing environment for political satire, documenting rapid changes in AI aesthetics and content moderation. David Jhave Johnston’s Messages to Humanity demonstrates how Runway’s Act-One enables solo filmmaking, collapsing traditional production hierarchies. Haoyuan Tang’s video game project reframes LLM integration by prioritizing player actions over dialogue, challenging assumptions about AI’s role in interactive narratives. Sérgio Galvão Roxo’s Her Name Was Gisberta employs Virtual Reality for social education against transphobia, utilizing perspective-taking techniques for empathy development. These projects demonstrate that practice-based research is not merely artistic production but a vital methodology for understanding how AI and XR platforms shape—and are shaped by—human narrative capacities.