About Joshua
Joshua Rubin is an Emmy winning industry veteran who’s worked in Video Games, Film, TV Comics, Live Immersive and XR. He is Founder and Creative Director of Subverse Narrative Consulting, where he designs immersive worlds and interactive narratives for global IPs. His credits range from Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft) to Destiny (Bungie) to The Walking Dead (Telltale Games), and many more. In 2022, he won an Interactive Emmy for writing and producing Netflix’s You vs. Wild: Out Cold. Currently, he serves as Narrative Lead on Orion Drift, the new title from the creators of Gorilla Tag, the first $100 million VR game. He spends most of his time co-raising two feral humans and a quite civilized cat deep in the woods by the Hudson River.
The Talk
Designing immersive narratives for radical agency and human connection
Storytelling is shifting from being told to being lived. In this session, Joshua Rubin, writer of Assassin’s Creed II, Destiny, The Walking Dead and Emmy-winning interactive Netflix series, outlines the future of immersive narrative.
With a background in games, VR, AR, theatre and comics, Rubin explores how true player agency can be combined with emotional depth. He discusses themes such as radical agency through player-driven stories, reactive worlds that balance freedom and structure, and deep personalization shaped by memory and behavior.
Rubin concludes with a vision of immersive story worlds as part of human infrastructure: not just entertainment, but a way to create lasting meaning.