We recently connected with Emmett Furey and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Emmett thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

One of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on was “The New Adventures of Peter and Wendy,” a vlog-style webseries adaptation of “Peter Pan.” My role on the project was transmedia producer, and in that capacity I played all of the major characters from the show on Twitter and other social media platforms, in real-time, as the series was being released. It was a lot of me talking to myself as the various characters, and me talking to the fans as those characters as well, a kind of online performance art. I would begin a scene with an idea in mind, but very few of those scenes were pre-scripted, because whenever you’re roleplaying in real-time with other people, their input becomes a wildcard that is impossible to fully plan for.

But what I think made this project truly special was that we also encouraged the fans to create their own roleplay characters who lived in Neverland, Ohio, and the social media accounts to go with them. So, throughout the show’s three seasons, our most avid fans were playing characters and telling stories on social media in parallel to our story, and oftentimes, in ways that overlapped. Broadly, I work in interactive – or what I’ve been calling lately, participatory – projects. And I think one of the reasons that “New Peter and Wendy” was so meaningful to me was that it was one of the purest distillations of audience agency that I’ve been able to facilitate in any of my projects. What’s more, whenever possible, we referenced the fan-created stories and incorporated them into the official ongoing story. In effect, we solicited them to create fan-fiction, and by canonizing their contributions we turned it into fan-fact.

I was able to connect with the fans out-of-character after the project was complete, and I learned that, for many of them, playing a character who lived in the magical world of Neverland, Ohio, was a transformative experience, and one that helped many of these fans through some of the darkest times in their life. The participatory transmedia component of “New Peter and Wendy” was truly a collaboration with the fans, and some of the most intensely meaningful stories that resulted were the ones we could never have predicted, the ones that emerged organically from the narrative sandbox that we created together.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I moved out to Los Angeles in 2004, originally intending to break into the traditional entertainment industry as a writer. But along the way, I organically discovered participatory storytelling, projects like “New Peter and Wendy” that I mentioned above. And I quickly realized that creating participatory art was what I was best at, and that those kinds of stories were the ones I most enjoyed telling. It is the role of every artist to create experiences for their audiences, but the work that I’ve created over the years is work that explicitly cannot be consumed passively. Participatory art is any kind of narrative experience in which the audience has agency to affect the story itself, or at the very least to affect their experience of the overall work. Immersive theater, alternate reality games, tabletop roleplaying games, live-action roleplaying games, and video games are all forms of participatory art, and all are forms that I have worked in at one time or another in my career. My philosophy to creating participatory art is to be both audience-first and anti-auteur. Audience-first in the sense that the audience experience is what I keep first and foremost in mind at every step of the creative process. And anti-auteur in the sense that I believe the stories that each member of the audience experience are more important than the stories that I’m telling. I don’t create participatory art for my own enjoyment, I create it for theirs. Every bit of art that I create is designed for audiences to not be a passive observer, but an active participant. And by inviting the audience to be active participants in this kind of work, participatory art endeavors – to quote dancer Anna Halprin – to “evoke the art within us all.” And as a result, participatory art has the potential be more transformative than traditional, lean-back media ever could be.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

In recent years I’ve created participatory experiences for big IP like “Dungeons & Dragons” and “Silent Hill,” and for big companies like Niantic (best known for PokemonGo), but at the outset of my career, I cut my teeth on projects that were decidedly more indie, like “New Peter and Wendy.” There are of course pluses and minuses to the great internet experiment, but one thing it has certainly done is democratized content creation. Even if you can’t afford to go to film school, or to buy a camera and hire actors, the only thing you need in order to tell interactive online stories is a computer and a stable internet connection. And those two things are also all that your prospective audience needs to be able to engage with your online story. You don’t necessarily have to use Twitter like I did (I refuse to call it X), it’s a bit of a dumpster fire now. But there’s nothing stopping you from pushing other boundaries, experimenting with different platforms and formats that were never designed to be used for fiction, and subverting them to your own narrative ends. In those early days, it was difficult to predict where my profession journey would take me, but it all makes sense now in retrospect. All of the skills I first cultivated working on those early, indie projects are skills that I still use to this day. If you use whatever tools you have at your disposal to create the most engaging participatory fiction that you can think of, someone is bound to take notice.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I think that the more that we as storytellers focus on the experience of our audience, the more engaging and meaningful the art that we create can be. That, ultimately, is what I’m always chasing, both as a consumer of stories and a creator of them: transformative narrative experiences that put the audience in the driver’s seat, and that teach us more about the world around us and more about ourselves. All of my thoughts on this have coalesced into a philosophy of art that I call narrative correlationism, and which I am currently exploring in a series of articles on my LinkedIn page. The series represents an even deeper dive into the fundamentals of my audience-first, anti-auteur philosophy of creating participatory art, and later entries will include deep dives into some of the work I’ve created along the way. If you want to lean more about that, or to connect with me professionally for any reason, LinkedIn is a good place to find me.