Role-playing games involve even more audience participation as do MUDs and MOOs. The main points in the new literature are that we must move from Additive to Expressive Forms. The main story lines in the web soaps mimic the current available technology and do not take advantage of the multiple views and archiving features computing allows. You should be able to attack each story line from each character's viewpoint, and have enough background materials to fill in all the gaps. Digital environments are procedural.
Computers create a series of rules that the programs follow.
The challenge for the future is how to make such rule writing as available to writers as musical notation is to composers. Digital environments are participatory in that they require input from the user. If a program is both procedural and participatory, it is said to be interactive. Digital environments are spatial, they have the feeling that movement is possible, from mazes to MUDs that require navigation cues like Go North. Finally, digital environments are encyclopedic, with huge amounts of quickly accessible memory.