The main research field, I work in, is "interactive storytelling". There are also lots of other names for it like "interactive narrative" or "digital storytelling", but they all mean roughly the same thing: A new computer-based narrative medium which is not consumed passively (like novel, film or theatre) but where the audience can participate in the story. Current video games are usually not interactive storytelling, because all the interactivity in most games has none to very little effects on the underlying story.

The research community for this field is growing and there are many approaches on how interactive storytelling should be realized. A lot of different disciplines are involved for example artificial intelligence, narrative theory and psychology.

For people interested in this, I can recommend the following books, the first one being more theoretical and the second one more practical, as a good starting point into the whole field:

Janet h. Murray - Hamlet on the Holodeck
Chris Craword - Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

In the eCircus project, we used a character based approach (emergent narrative) to interactive storytelling and applied it to education. For my PhD I am looking into intelligent authoring systems for emergent narratives. I try to define and build a system, that allows authors/writers to efficiently create believable autonomous characters, that act according to their role in a story world.