In 2018, a group of ten academics and media professionals spent a year creating role-playing games on WhatsApp. They called themselves the Secret Story Network. Ten stories were made, each designed and led by a different writer, each running between sixty and ninety minutes. The stories ranged from tight puzzle-driven games to loose improvisational collaborations. None of them followed a fixed script.
This paper analyses what happened. Its central question is not whether the stories were good, but what kind of storytelling was taking place. Who was the author? How did meaning emerge? What were the mechanics that made collaboration work, or break down?
To answer these questions, the paper applies and extends an existing framework for role-playing games, arriving at four modes of collaborative story-making. Each illuminates a different way that participants create, inhabit, and negotiate a shared fictional world.
"Engagement levels and most importantly the FUN factor greatly increased as we relinquished control and let those formerly known as the 'audience' become collaborators."
— Lance Weiler, cited in How We RoleSome stories worked like games: puzzles to solve, obstacles to navigate, outcomes to unlock. Writers used breadcrumbing, funnelling, and voting mechanics to give structure and forward momentum. These were the most polished stories, because so much could be planned in advance.
Other stories were more like improvised theatre. Participants contributed to an unfolding narrative in real time, acting as co-authors rather than players. The story master set a world and a premise, then stepped back. What emerged was never quite predictable.
In simulation mode, participants commit to the internal logic of the story world above all else. The goal is not to win or to invent, but to behave consistently with the shared fiction. This creates a kind of collective ethos, a social contract between participants that governs what is real inside the story.
At its most fully realised, participation tips into something closer to performance. There is no separation between creator and audience. Participants are simultaneously performing, spectating, and co-creating. This is what the paper calls a state of liminality: betwixt and between, simultaneously inside and outside the story.
Traditional storytelling places the author at the centre. They write, others read. Collective storytelling dissolves this arrangement. When ten people are all contributing to a story in real time, no single person controls the outcome. Something else emerges: a negotiated narrative, shaped by the group and constantly in motion.
WhatsApp turned out to be a surprisingly fertile platform for this. It is familiar and low-friction, which removed the technical barrier. It allows text, images, audio, and video, which opened space for creative contributions of all kinds. And its group chat format meant that everyone could see the story being made, in real time, by everyone else.
The paper finds that neither too much structure nor too little serves collaborative storytelling well. Rigid rules limit invention. No rules at all produce chaos. The most productive stories were the ones that created enough of a world, enough of a premise, to give participants something to push against, without prescribing what they had to do next.
The shift this paper describes has been underway for decades, but digital platforms have accelerated it. Fan fiction, collaborative games, social media narratives, interactive television: these are all forms in which audiences have claimed authorial power. The question is no longer whether this is happening, but how to design for it well.
What the Secret Story Network explored was how to create conditions in which collective authorship becomes genuinely meaningful, rather than merely participatory. Not just clicking a button to choose an ending, but actually shaping a world alongside others, with real creative investment.
The four modes (games, drama, simulation, immersion) are not a taxonomy so much as a toolkit. Real collaborative stories tend to move between them, sometimes in the course of a single session. Understanding which mode is operating, and when to shift between them, may be the most important skill a story designer can develop.