How many people experience any given narrative? How do those individuals relate to each other in the context of their shared narrative experience? When creating a story for an audience, how can one structure that audience's relationship with the story - and with each other?
             There are three major paradigms for how people experience a narrative. The first is that of most conventional media: a solitary experience that is shared only in extra-narrative contexts. Though thousands or millions of people may read a book or see a film, the experience of reading the book or watching the movie is one that each person has alone. Two hundred people in a movie theater are not a single community of movie-watchers. In fact, community intrusions into the narrative experience, such as heckling or talking during the movie, detract from the individual's experience of the story. Two million people reading the same book do not read it together - each reads it alone, even if they later decide to discuss it. (Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, such as The Egyptian Jukebox and community movie experiences like Star Wars, but in general this rule holds.)
             The second major paradigm is that of the MMORPG - the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. In this paradigm, the context of the story contains large groups of people who all interact with each other as part of the story. All players exist in the same world, and their existences influence each other. For example, when one player in Everquest kills a particular dragon, that dragon is not available to other players to be killed, because the world is both shared and persistent. The world that exists for one player is the same world that exists for any other, and all players can affect each other within that world.
             The third paradigm is to create parallel structure. Instead of creating one large world that everyone participates in together, or having each user's participation be a solitar...