David Millard

The StoryPlaces project ran from 2016 to 2019 with the aim of investigating the poetics of locative literature, and we have recently had the final results of the project published in ACM JOCCH.

By poetics, we mean specifically understanding how a locative literature experience works to create an effect in the reader, and our aim was to develop new theories about locative literature as well as formalising craft knowledge. The following video, ‘The Flâneur and the Psychogeographer’, explains a bit more about locative literature, the StoryPlaces project, and outlines some of our key findings:

In the ACM JOCCH article we detail the analysis we undertook of observations and interviews around the StoryPlaces deployments in Southampton Old Town, and Bournemouth.

The data showed some clear benefits and strengths to locative stories. Although readers appreciated learning new information about their locations through the stories, a stronger and more unique effect was to help them understand the relationships between places, especially through time. As a result they not only saw new parts of the city, but saw old parts of the city in new ways. The stories became more real because they were situated, and the pace of the interaction – reading and then moving through the streets – allowed them time for reflection. Hence we might characterise the reader as a digital Psychogeographer, actively engaged in the reinterpretation of the space around them. These findings back up almost two decades of research into locative stories, and show that when location and storytelling are combined they become more than the sum of their parts.

The data also revealed a key factor in the success or failure of the experiences. This came down to whether the story was in harmony or discord with its locations. Harmony can occur structurally, when the navigation and pace of the story match the navigation and pace of moving through the landscape, and it can occur within the content itself, especially when the text is thematically resonant with the location in which it is situated. During the project we developed this idea of aligning story and location into a toolkit for writers (and published here), a set of rules-of-thumb that you can follow when designing locative experiences to maximise this alignment – what we call loconarrative harmony in a nod to ludonarrative game design.

Harmony is partly serendipitous and the best moments seem to be triggered when something referred to in the story also appears in real life – the call of a bird, an astute observation of a landmark, a reference to the weather. When these moments of true harmony occur it creates what our participants called a ‘special moment’ (which have been independently reported in the literature as ‘magic moments’) and are associated with strong feelings and emotions – invoking words such as ‘powerful’, ‘uplifting’, or ‘fascinating’. You can’t force these moments (and in fact if you try to do so and fail it creates some of the more powerful moments of discord) but by following the toolkit we argue that you can maximise the chances of them happening.

Harmony, discord and the evocation of magic moments hint at what we finally saw as the underlying poetic of locative literature, which we call the balance of attention. This is essentially the balance between attending to the story, and to the place. Discord occurs when one or the other is primary, for example, when absorbed in reading a long passage, or being distracted by happening across an old friend. But locative stories come alive when the attention is balanced between the two, when the story and the location become hybridised and form a new local reality for the reader.

Research in locative storytelling systems often focuses on new technology, such as the use of augmented reality, or more accurate location sensing, but our work shows that while these features are certainly worth exploring, it is the sensitive integration of location and story, an imaginative use of landscape, and the simultaneous navigation of both the story and the real world that make the crucial differences to the success of failure of a locative experience.

StoryPlaces was one the most fulfilling projects that I have been involved with. We set out with the objective of looking beyond the technology to try and actually understood what made locative experiences work, and through the various story deployments we managed to verify many of the observations that have been made about locative storytelling, draw them together under a single significant poetic, and create a set of specific recommendations to designers and developers. Along the way we also created a new hypertext system – something that we don’t see enough of these days! It was clear from our first deployment that locative stories had unique properties, and at their best had an immediacy and an impact that was unique, and I think that our analysis had revealed some of the factors that help this to happen.

If you are interested in the other publications that have come out of StoryPlaces you might wish to look at:

• This description of the StoryPlaces Platform, a locative hypertext system based on a powerful sculptural hypertext model, published as open source.
• This longer description of the Writer’s Toolkit, which explains the dealbreakers that can sink a locative project as well as other pragmatic and aesthetic guidelines.
• This reflective account of developing a locative story on the Scottish Island of Tiree – where we first observed many of the issues that informed the toolkit.
• One of our first papers examining the hypertextual patterns that authors use in locative stories, expressed in terms of sculptural hypertext.