Storytelling was intelligent, interactive and inclusive. Then we digitised it.

The first in a series from ORIGINS, a Horizon Europe project on inclusive immersive storytelling.

Going back to the ORIGINS of storytelling

In the middle ages, if you wanted a story you went to hear a person tell it. The bard in the hall. The jongleur at the crossroads. The cantastorie in the piazza, the juglar in the marketplace. Different names, different languages, the same job.

These were professionals, and the job was harder than it looks. Hold a room for an hour with no script in front of you, no second take, and nowhere to hide if it isn’t landing. So they watched the room and worked it — because a performer who couldn’t read an audience didn’t eat.

Three things were true of what they did.

They were intelligent

The same tale ran long or short, bawdy or devout, depending on who was in front of them. A version for the feast day and a version for the wake. A version that cut the battle short because the children were restless, and one that stretched it out because the hall wanted blood. The story you heard was shaped by the night you heard it.

They were interactive

Audiences called out, requested, heckled, and joined in on the refrains they already knew. The performance was built around that rather than despite it — the pauses were there for the interruptions. It was something done with a room, not at one.

They were inclusive

A hall or a market square held the lord and the stablehand, the local and the traveller, the literate and the illiterate. The performance reached all of them at once through voice, gesture, music and repetition — not by requiring anyone to arrive already equipped. You could follow it without the vocabulary, because meaning was carried by more than words.

None of which makes the middle ages a golden age of inclusion. They plainly weren’t. These performers were patronage-bound, frequently censored, and often dependent on a lord’s goodwill for their next meal. But the performance itself had to work for whoever was in the room, because there was no other way for it to work at all.

And those three properties aren’t medieval quirks. They’re what storytelling has been wherever humans have done it — because a story that couldn’t adapt, couldn’t be joined, and couldn’t be followed simply stopped being told.

What scale cost us

Every technology since has bought reach and paid for it somewhere.

Writing let a story outlive its teller, and cost it the ability to change for whoever was reading. Print reached thousands and made them silent. Broadcast reached millions and fixed the story in place, identical in every living room. These were extraordinary gains and nobody sensible would trade them back. But the pattern held: each step toward reach traded away something the market square had for free.

Immersive technology was supposed to be the step that reversed it. Virtual and augmented reality promised presence instead of representation, participation instead of reception — a medium that could scale and read the room. The technology could see you, hear you, respond to you. That was the promise, and it’s worth being honest about what has been delivered against it.

What we actually built

Current immersive experiences are fragmented, impersonal, and disconnected from real human needs. Not because the technology is weak — the technology is remarkable. Because we rebuilt the reach and left the three properties behind.

We lost intelligence

Most immersive content is scripted. It runs identically for the anxious first-time visitor and the specialist who has come back for the fourth time. It cannot do the one thing the jongleur did automatically, which is notice who is actually there.

We lost interactivity

There are people in these shared spaces, but not much of the person arrives. Rigid avatars and pre-written interactions strip out expressivity, emotional depth, and social awareness. You can be in the same virtual room as someone and still be alone in it — a strange failure for a technology whose entire premise is shared presence.

We lost inclusion

This is the one that troubles us most. Immersive interfaces and assistants are typically monolingual, and typically in one standard variety of English. They are built for one kind of body, one level of technical confidence, one way of communicating. If you are a non-native speaker, hearing-impaired, neurodivergent, or simply unfamiliar with the technology, the experience often isn’t difficult. It’s closed.

The market square managed all three at once, eight hundred years ago, with no technology at all.

What happens next

Each of these three losses deserves more than a paragraph, so over the coming weeks we’ll take them one at a time — what’s actually broken, and what we intend to do about it. Subscribe if you’d like them as they land. And if you work in cultural heritage, education, tourism or rehabilitation and you think we’ve got the problem wrong, tell us now, while it can still change what we build.