“The avalanche, in Washington’s Cascades in February, slid past some trees and rocks, like ocean swells around a ship’s prow. Others it captured and added to its violent load. Somewhere inside, it also carried people.”

These are among the gripping opening sentences of the New York Times’s interactive story Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. The 2012 story of an avalanche that killed five skiers in Washington State, the six-part feature took more than six months to produce and successfully wove together text, graphics, video and photography. It was viewed by more than three million people in the first few weeks after it was published.

The journalist behind Snow Fall, John Branch, won a Pulitzer prize for his engaging account of the incident. Most interesting though, was the way in which the story was told, a presentation of words and pictures that went beyond a linear format; which has seen it become a much-quoted, oft-admired benchmark for digital-age storytelling. Post-Snow Fall, many new mediums are shifting controlover to readers and viewers with experimental new formats. News stories, music videos, and even traditional books are all receiving interactive adaptations.

The band Arcade Fire has invited interaction using all manner of devices for music videos, created under the direction of filmmaker Vincent Morisset (featured in Protein Journal issue 11). Reflektor, for instance, let the viewer cast a virtual projection on the screen by holding their mobile phone up in front of it. The National Film Board of Canada’s Bear 71, described as a “fully immersive, multi-platform experience”, enables viewers to explore the world of a grizzly bear via augmented reality, webcams, geolocation tracking, motion sensors, a microsite, social media channels and a real bear trap. The iPad version of The Waste Land zooms up close on the famous T S Eliot poem, using performances from famous actors, videos of Seamus Heaney discussing crucial passages, and a host of other interactive devices to help elucidate a sometimes impenetrable poem.

According to Janet H Murray, interaction designer and author of Inventing the Medium, these slices of interactive storytelling are examples of how the media landscape is changing forever. Each gives users the opportunity to get as involved in the story as they want to – skimming over the top or drilling down into detail as the fancy takes them. They all deliver an enriching complexity to already compelling stories. “The author is still in control, but the audience has agency – they can choose how deeply they want to get involved,” says Murray. “The story is not non-linear; it still works as a story. But it is multi–sequential, and you can choose how you navigate through it. That is what we mean by interactive storytelling.”