Interactive imagination: Tapping the emotions through interactive story for compelling simulations

Most compassionate parents, teachers, or coaches will echo the belief that you must spark the imagination or touch the heart to teach the mind, train the body, or inspire a sense of wonder. This is also the storyteller's craft. How can we use story within interactive simulations to better teach, train, or inspire? Now that science and technology can make simulations more realistic, how can art make them more compelling through interactive fiction? The key is to use story to tap the depths of emotions, engaging the user's desire for exploration, learning, challenge, and adventure. In the new domain of training, story becomes the means more than the end. Can the compelling art of story transition from the passive media of motion pictures to the nonlinear interactivity of simulation? This is venturing beyond the reactive branching of cause-and-effect games or choose-your-own-ending adventure stories. This process is about the unpredictable expressiveness of audiences exchanging discourse with the author mediated through the digital media - the story engine.