ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a feature of debates about immersive media and interactive storytelling more broadly, and most authors writing on these themes touch on them at least in passing. It reviews critiques of immersive practice that circulate around questions of power in participation. These challenge the view that audience- or user-centred experiences necessarily offer more agency, and that they are more empowering as a result. The chapter examines criticisms of the ways in which immersive experiences are being ‘co-opted’ by mainstream consumer culture, using literature on the experience economy and aesthetic capitalism. It explores how discourses about immersion can be characterised as technocratic. Debates about power dynamics within participatory, interactive, and immersive contexts are complex and extensive. Some scholars are agitated by the ways in which immersive practice has been aligned with, and subsumed within, the experience economy, especially as it elides with marketing and advertising.
