Alternate reality stories: mapping a new genre of digital fiction

The Aim of this thesis is to chart and develop a methodology for the emerging Digital Literature genre, Alternate Reality Stories, to enable future scholars to analyse social media based interactive narratives. This new genre combines the tropes of existing field to produce a wholly unique narrative experience, that can only be experienced within the moment it is created. I argue that, whilst similar forms do exist, the examples included within this thesis offer a unique storytelling experience that mobilises agency and reality to immerse readers in a new way. I state that this research is positioned within narratology, digital literature, and game studies, providing an interdisciplinary methodology that can replicated across fields of research to understand what it means to experience an ARS.