story worlds on the move

8/3/2019 Story Worlds on the Move

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Storyworlds on the Move: Mobile Media and Their Implications

for Narrative

Scott W. Ruston

StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, Volume 2, 2010,

pp. 101-120 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/stw.0.0001

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/stw/summary/v002/2.ruston.html





Storyworlds on the Move Mobile Media and Their Implications for Narrative

Scott W. Ruston

“And yet there was something very San Jose aboutthe lynching,” and at that moment my ears and eyes

perked up. The midday sun beating down on me in St.

James Park was sapping my interest in exploring San

Jose and making the screen of my mobile phone near-

ly impossible to see. But now the heat, the bright sun,

and the mild irritation of earlier technical difficulties

melted away as my attention shifted to finding the

two “lynching trees” described by the voice emanating

from my mobile phone. Who was lynched? Why were

they lynched? And why was this done in a typically

“San Jose” manner? I was intrigued.

As I stood in the middle of the park and listened

to Scott Herhold of the San Jose Mercury News tell the

story of the lynching of a local scion’s abductors, I was

part-way through an afternoon-long exploration of central San Jose by way of the mobile media art proj-



storyworlds volume 2 2010102

ect [murmur] (Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, Gabe Sawhney, 2003–).

First produced in Toronto, Canada, and now with additional versions

running in San Jose, Vancouver, Montreal, and other locations world-

wide, [murmur] collects personal anecdotes linked to specific locations

in a subject city that are submitted by local residents and then makes

these audio vignettes available to a participant or passerby via mobile

phone. As such, [murmur] is in the vanguard of a growing number of

art and entertainment projects that capitalize on the ubiquity, portabil-

ity, and interactivity of the mobile phone and at the same time attempt

to incorporate the practice of storytelling.

What follows is a discussion that attempts to categorize some of the

genres of this nascent media form. Drawing on my experience as a par-ticipant in as well as a creator and theorist of new mobile-media prac-

tices, I also raise some questions about how storytelling both shapes and

is shaped by mobile media; hence I am concerned with how the intrica-

cies of mobile projects might inform our understanding of narrative—

and vice versa. As our twenty-first-century, always-on/always-connected

lifestyle becomes increasingly mobile, participatory, and location-aware,

it necessitates that communicative and artistic practices be conducted in

a format that embodies those characteristics. Therefore, I think it criti-cally important to explore reciprocal, two-way influences between nar-

rative viewed as a structure for communication and understanding and

the mobile media that are altering how we engage with one another and

the world.

In characterizing the mobile-media projects discussed below as nar-

rative projects, I draw on a conception of narrative outlined by Marie-

Laure Ryan (2006). For Ryan, narrativity can be defined “as a scalar

property, rather than a rigidly binary property,” meaning that practices

that are recognizably narrative in nature will still have degrees of “stori-

ness” (7). This account allows me to consider projects like [murmur],

which consists of numerous brief anecdotes that are not organized in

any kind of overarching narrative trajectory, by focusing on what they

show about the functions and uses of narrative in a mobile and loca-

tive application. Facilitating everything from collections of more or less

discrete micro-narratives to more comprehensive and linear narrativetrajectories, mobile projects display the same variation in degrees of



Ruston: Storyworlds on the Move 103

narrativity that we find in other storytelling media. Furthermore, as an

interactive narrative form, mobile media narratives are subject to the

same dilemma that Ryan (2009) noted in her article for the inaugural

issue of this journal: granting the participant full autonomy of authorial

choices satisfies desires for agency but sacrifices a meaningful arc; con-

versely, limiting the user’s choices, as in some hypertext fiction, main-

tains a more focused narrative trajectory, but the choice mechanisms

are horribly intrusive and limiting (44–45). As I have argued elsewhere

(Ruston 2006), however, the kinds of interactivity afforded by mobile

media can be more flexible and seamless than those made possible by a

hypertext or console game. Indeed, given the close association between

mobile media and location, mobile-media projects can provide a bridgebetween real world and storyworld that features both intense interactiv-

ity and robust immersivity.

Mobile entertainment projects that incorporate the salient for-

ward-looking features of the medium (interactivity, mobility, location-

awareness) fall into three broad categories: Spatial Annotation Projects,

Location-Based Games, and Mobile Narrative Experiences.1 Spatial An-

notation Projects, as the name suggests, provide information about a

space, either in the form of text, audio, or image or video, accessible by personal digital assistant (PDA) or mobile phone in the space in ques-

tion. Location-Based Games offer a focused, rule-based, and goal-ori-

ented experience using the real world as a game board and story ele-

ments to facilitate play. Mobile Narrative Experiences offer a more

comprehensive narrative structure than Location-Based Games, weav-

ing together fiction and locale, real world and storyworld.

Spatial Annotation Projects

To date, Spatial Annotation Projects comprise the majority of mobile

art projects that incorporate a narrative component to a significant de-

gree. The projects often have a participatory or contributory compo-

nent in that audience members are invited to add to the annotations at

a given space, by contributing text, audio, or other information. Yellow

Arrow (Counts Media, 2004–), for example, uses bright yellow stickersin the shape of an arrow to identify a space of significance.2 Any indi-




vidual can place an arrow sticker, which contains a unique preprinted

code, and upload a text message about the location or landmark that

the arrow identifies. Subsequent individuals encountering the yellow

arrow sticker can send the code via text message to the Yellow Arrow ser-

vice number and receive the stored message. Participants can upload an

additional message, and in the process each space marked by a sticker

collects layers and layers of anecdotes, illustrating the simultaneous ex-

istence of temporally separated engagements with the environment and

creating a side-by-side network of intersections between participants

and places. Operating as an elegant street art project bringing togeth-

er individual feelings, comments, and observations mapped onto the

landscape, Yellow Arrow positions the mobile phone as an interface toa database of locations and anecdotes, with the function of connecting,

across time and space, the location a person inhabits with the experi-

ences of a previous visitor. However, owing to the brevity of each bit of

content associated with a given arrow (text messages are limited to 160

characters), as well as the completely unstructured and free-form na-

ture of the project, Yellow Arrow barely registers on any narrativity scale,

no matter how capacious.

The Canadian project [murmur] operates in a similar vein, but ow-ing to more extended anecdotes (two- to six-minute audio clips) and

more editorial oversight, this project illustrates the role that narratives

play in the construction of place. The project designers “collect and cu-

rate” contributors’ stories (memory sketches, anecdotes) regarding spe-

cific areas of the city.3 The oral stories are recorded and given a code

assignment. In the space of the city, visitors notice green signs with the

[murmur] logo indicating audio stories associated with that location

are available and dial the number displayed on the green sign to listen

to the stories (see figure 1).

Armed with a hand-drawn map, downloaded from the [murmur]

website, my San Jose afternoon adventure began at a neighborhood

park, at the corner of 6th Avenue and William Street. Despite the corner

park’s relatively small size, it took me a few minutes to find the iconic

green ear indicating the location as a [murmur] site and containing the

phone number and location code. Dialing the indicated phone number,I encountered what is all too common with cutting-edge media proj-




ects: technical difficulties. Patience, apparently, is a necessary character-

istic for participants. A short time later, I dialed the [murmur] phone

number again and heard a hip, inquiring voice say, “This is Murmur . . .

What’s the code?” I was in.

This particular location has three audio clips associated with it, de-

scribing a neighborhood’s transformation of a blighted street corner

into a park. The typical visitor sees the park as a place of leisure, beau-

ty, and play marked by a jungle gym, grass field, and manicured land-

scaping. The visitor sees the location as it is, at that moment in time: of course there is a park there, why wouldn’t there be? Accessing the per-

Fig. 1. The author finds a [murmur] marker in San Jose and dials in

for the audio clips. Photograph by author.




sonal anecdotes, however, enables the [murmur] visitor to experience

the park as a place of community concern, cooperation, and action; in

this case mobile media reveal the park’s history and context and its arc

of development. One anecdote tells of the difficulty adults have drawing

water from the playground fountain, while children have no such prob-

lems. Confirming the speaker’s observation, I could not make the foun-

tain feature flow, and I took the damp sand at the base to be evidence of

a child’s recent presence.

I returned to my car and followed my map to the next site. True, the

[murmur] website suggests that the proper way to experience the proj-

ect is on foot; the instructions read: “1. Go for a walk; bring your mobile

phone and head for the red dots on the map.” But in actuality the dis-tances between markers are too great, and the markers too numerous,

for one to be able to visit them all in one day without a car. Indeed, the

website instruction, coupled with the distances between locations and

the durability of the green ear markers, indicates to me that the primary

audience is not the tourist looking to uncover the secrets of San Jose

(nor the researcher investigating mobile art projects), but rather the

local populace—residents of San Jose, maybe new transplants, maybe

old-timers, who might know of a [murmur] marker in their own neigh-

borhood and then be attentive to others—as well as the more random

visitor coming across a marker more serendipitously.

Taken together, the anecdotes weave a fabric of personal experience,

community history, and considerations of municipal design. In addi-

tion to the tales of lynchings by a newspaper columnist and vacant land

improvement by a proud neighbor, the San Jose [murmur] project also

includes contributions from a longtime Japantown resident recountingthat neighborhood’s changes, an amateur historian discussing the Na-

glee Park region, a city councilman on downtown business cycles, and

many others. While some of these contributions are well-told stories

with an intriguing hook and a tight narrative arc, like Herhold’s San Jose

lynching story, many of the anecdotes are more rambling, stream-of-

consciousness memories or simple accounts of one event after another.

This fabric of stories becomes a loose tapestry involving the broader

San Jose community, highlighting especially the influence of powerful




businessmen, the loyalty to neighborhoods felt by the local residents,

and, above all, changes to and growth of the city. To use another meta-

phor, the anecdotes are like the bits of bone fragments, pottery shards,

and building materials found at an archeological dig site: small clues

that must be combined with the current appearance and use patterns of

a given location to tell the whole story of that place. In this way, stories

made available via mobile media are retrofitted by visitors onto the ex-

perience of particular locations, producing a narrative system that helps

transform spaces into place (see below). Micro-narratives and even

smaller chunks of information provide the data for the narrative recon-

figuration of the spaces of San Jose into neighborhoods, places filled

with individual as well as community histories.Whatever their degree of narrative complexity, and despite what

seems to be in some cases a lack of coherence, the anecdotes, replays,

and other contributions to the project all participate in connecting per-

sonal human experience with particular locations and transform the

locations from the abstract space of an address, map grid, or even the

three dimensions of a park or building, to a place of lived experience.

Accordingly, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) terms, by participating in a Spatial

Annotation Project like [murmur], whether as a reader/listener, record-

er, or both, one engages in a meaning-making practice that produces

place out of a space. As I discuss more fully in the final section, in the

tradition of human geography that Tuan helped pioneer, space refers

to that which can be defined by boundaries and dimensions; it is an ab-

stract concept, definable in mathematical terms as a system of coordi-

nates. Place, on the other hand, refers to locations imbued with human

experience. Spatial Annotation Projects like [murmur] link a mobilenarrative with a particular place, shaping understanding both of the ex-

perience of a place and of the self that has that experience. The narra-

tive structure of the individual contributions depends on the individual

authors, while the project as a whole becomes a sort of collaboratively

authored anthology of situated stories. Such Spatial Annotation Projects

draw on memory and detail to enrich the location in which the partici-

pant stands, while allowing the participant to create connections among

a network of similarly annotated locations.




Location-Based Games

While the Spatial Annotation Projects are nearly always community,

university, or public art projects, another genre of mobile practice spans

both the arts and entertainment industry: games. Portable and hand-

held devices are, of course, nothing new to the game industry. Since the

1970s, most major electronic game companies manufactured handheld

versions of their popular games, from Waco’s Electronic Tic-Tac-Toe

(1972) to Mattel’s Basketball (1980) to today’s Sony PSP and Nintendo

DS systems. Thus portability and gaming have a long association.4 The

early games have little or no connection to narrative beyond the mar-

keting elements on the packaging; most were manipulations of LEDlights or crude LCD graphics. The modern handheld game devices, by

contrast, reprise many of the titles available for their console cousins

and thus warrant consideration as more or less full-fledged narratives

in their own right. Here I focus on a genre of games that integrates nar-

rativity with key traits associated with mobile media, including porta-

bility, connectivity, and location-awareness.

In Location-Based Games, the location of the mobile phone is ascer-

tained through cell tower triangulation or by GPS technology and coin-cides with the assumed location of the mobile phone user. This combi-

nation is a key part of game play, game-world navigation, and narrative

structure. The now-defunct game Botfighters (It’s Alive!, 2001–2005)

is an example of such a game. This commercial venture garnered over

forty thousand players at its peak (Dee 2006) and generated revenue

via short message service (SMS) text message game commands. In this

game the player’s mobile phone represents a robot in a futuristic world

that is correlated with the real world. As a player’s mobile phone moves

through the real world, a corresponding movement of the player’s robot

occurs in the game world. Players engage in “battles” via SMS messages

with other players they find on the streets. On the other end of the pro-

duction spectrum, the games of the UK-based art troupe Blast Theo-

ry, including I Like Frank (2003) and Uncle Roy All Around You (2004),

forge a hybrid game space inhabited by street players and online players

and also use location-based technologies for game play and game-worldcreation.5 Online players have access to the location data of the street




players, and both classes of players must interact, cooperate, and contest

one another in order to achieve game goals.

In these examples, the narrative components contribute primarily to

creating a richly detailed game world and providing player motivations

and goals. In this way they seem very similar to the first-person shoot-

er console games that Ryan describes as a type of “ludus activity” with

“clearly defined states of winning or losing, [such that] their pleasure re-

sides in the thrill of competition” (2009: 45). Described as a “mobile ver-

sion of Counter Strike” (Struppken and Willis 2007: 226), Botfighters play-

ers roam the city looking for enemies to fight. Results of daily battles are

narrativized on the game website, along with details about new missions

and information concerning the whereabouts of useful items. Thesemasquerade as story elements, but their story role conceals their game

function (establishment of the next level, recording of success/score, dis-

tribution of rewards, etc.)—a feature of Ryan’s “narrative games.”

But Botfighters also incorporates some aspects of the “paidia games”

or “playable stories” that Ryan describes as more focused on story and

less on winning or losing (2009: 46–47). Like the Massively Multiplayer

Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) that grew out of Dungeons &

Dragons and its kin, Botfighters had a constantly evolving game universewith which a player would engage anytime he or she was on the move

through the city. This constant immersion in the game world, whereby

a player is surrounded by a real-world environment that doubles as a

space for story-based play, is the pervasive aspect of mobile games that

contributes to their potential for narrative immersion.

The “Holodeck” from the Star Trek television franchise is often held

up as the ideal interactive narrative medium: full sensory immersion

coupled with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) creates fictional uni-

verses that adapt to participant involvement, such as Captain Janeway’s

Brontë-like romances in Star Trek: Voyager or Commander Data’s adop-

tion of the role of Sherlock Holmes in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This level of AI and sensory immersion is currently not available, but

I think games like Botfighters and Mobile Narrative Experiences offer

alternative methods of balancing user input and an adaptable narra-

tive universe with the need for some degree of authorial direction, someframework that can afford coherent narrative experiences.




One of the problems Ryan does not cite in her critique of the hy-

pertext model of interactive narrative (2009: 43) is the problem of the

disruption of immersion at the point of the interface. Not only does the

hypertext model offer limited choices; what is more, the menu selec-

tion activity—the point and click of the mouse—foregrounds the layer

of mediation that stands between the user and the fictional experience.

This disruption is most evident in hypertext, because it is directly as-

sociated with the random pursuit of textual fragments. However, the

variety of virtual world controllers (joystick, D-pad control, text com-

mands, virtual reality goggles, etc.) are all cumbersome and introduce a

range of mediating activities that are situated outside the immersive fic-

tional realm but critical for the user’s ability to participate in the story-world. Thus, these media control requirements impede the spatial and

temporal immersion that Ryan characterizes as a hallmark of narrative

experiences (53–56).

By contrast, a Location-Based Game such as Botfighters facilitates

spatial immersion by using the most immersive environment possible

(the real world) enhanced by the most powerful VR agent available (the

human imagination). The pervasive nature of the game—that is, the

fact that it is always running, and players are always “in the game”—provides a level of temporal immersion, enhanced by the unpredict-

ability of other human players introducing surprises. The constantly

changing game universe presents new challenges to the game player and

requires adaptation of the prescripted elements that provide a frame-

work for narrative experiences beyond the more abstract game goals of

search, shoot, level up, repeat, and so on. These unique challenges and

obstacles to in-game goals require robust solutions, involving physical

interaction with the landscape as well as cognitive dexterity—a com-

bination that can make these types of experiences more Holodeck-like

than a joystick-controlled 2D screen avatar.

Mobile Narrative Experience

Another type of mobile entertainment and arts practice that combines

elements of the narrative game and the playable story, and that bringsthe resources of storytelling to bear on issues of place and subjectivity,




is what I call the Mobile Narrative Experience. This type of project fea-

tures a mobile media device, such as a cell phone, laptop, or PDA, as the

primary interface for accessing a story, and participants access that story

while moving through space. The projects may have game-like compo-

nents, such as puzzle solving or spatial navigation, but the emphasis is

on immersion both in a place and in a story that centers on that place.

The story components may be delivered by audio, image, video, text,

or any combination. Further, in contrast with Spatial Annotation Proj-

ects, Mobile Narrative Experiences involve a comprehensive thematic

and narrative structure. They usually have a core narrative authored by

the project creators, thus depending less on participants’ contributions

to plot or story elements. Instead, the interactive aspect of the projectresides in how the participant acquires the story elements and engages

with his or her surroundings in the process. In this way, Mobile Nar-

rative Experiences highlight the recursive and multilayered nature of

narrative itself. Even as the project’s story components constitute a nar-

rative or at least a constellation of narrative elements, participants’ en-

gagement creates an additional narrative trajectory, putting their own

actions into a narrative context that intersects with the context contain-

ing the pre-authored story components.These projects vary greatly in terms of their narrative structure. In

some cases, such as the early locative fiction 34 N 118W (Jeremy Hight,

Jeffrey Knowlton, Naomi Spellman, 2002), short vignettes comprise

most of the story content while deeper connections between place, story,

and theme are left to the participant to construct. Participants explore

a small area in downtown Los Angeles, carrying a tablet PC showing

a neighborhood map circa 1905. An icon indicates participant location

(updated by GPS); navigating to other icons on the map triggers audio

clips authored by project team member Jeremy Hight. Participants are

left to construct a sense of the place by triangulating between the 1905

era map, Hight’s brief fictions imagining the life of local residents, and

the present state of the locale. Another project falling under the rubric

of Mobile Narrative Experiences is Janet Cardiff’s soundwalk Her Long

Black Hair (2005). Rather than allowing participants to choose their

own paths, this project leads the participant on a path through CentralPark, weaving story and binaural sound effect into a narrative experi-




ence. At the same time, an interactive dimension remains, since it is by

engaging with the environment that the participant can piece together

connections among soundtrack, narration, and place.

In another project, the USC Interactive Media Division’s Tracking

Agama (2004–2006), a multilayered narrative weaves a fictional mystery

with urban legends and the participant’s pursuit of the title character.

The design team, of which I was a member, specifically set out to create

a project that engaged with mobile media and narrative entertainment

in a way that would offer the pleasures of a well-formed narrative while

also accommodating user participation and interactivity—in a man-

ner suitable to the features of the mobile medium. To describe Track-

ing Agama in the vernacular of the Hollywood pitch, where a writer de-scribes his project by relating it to existing films or genres, one might

describe Tracking Agama as part scavenger hunt, part radio play, part

mystery story, and part Alternative Reality Game.6 In order to tease out

how this type of creative practice draws on the resources of narrative,

but in ways that contrast with its use in novels, films, video games, or

hypertexts, I provide in what follows a detailed description of the Track-

ing Agama project and the events a player might experience.

Players begin their engagement with the project by visiting theTracking Agama website, which is cast as the personal blog of the titular

character Agama, a student of Los Angeles and its stories.7 Many of the

entries deal with locations in Los Angeles of interest to Agama, either

as settings for his fictions or as related to the urban legends he sought

to understand. The astute player notices that an individual named

“Shufelt” authored the most recent post, a direct appeal to blog readers

to aid him in finding his friend Agama, who may be in danger.

To aid in the player’s search for Agama, Shufelt provides a phone

number and explains the operation of a voice memo system that Agama

used to record his thoughts about locales, urban legends, fictional story

ideas, and the like. Agama assigned each recording a keyword that could

be used to replay the linked recording. Shufelt suggests to the player

that Agama chose keywords that are visible in the location about which

Agama recorded information, and that the only way to find Agama

would be to follow the trail of his research—by unlocking the audiorecordings.




Two keywords are available on the website and introduce the player

to the pattern of discovery contained in most of the recordings (called

“AgamaNotes” in the game): each audio file contains some story infor-

mation as well as clues to other keywords. To begin, the player must

travel to Union Station (located in downtown Los Angeles) and explore,

looking for an artwork that contains artifacts, which is a clue mentioned

in one of the first recordings. Near the eastern entrance to the subway

within Union Station is a sculpture that incorporates bottles, crockery,

and other artifacts uncovered during the excavations under Union Sta-

tion. The sculpture’s title, Riverbench, is another AgamaNote keyword.

Here Tracking Agama exposes the participant to lesser-known histories

(Union Station sits on the site of the original Los Angeles Chinatown),art and architecture of public spaces (Agama notes the intricate sky-

light), and a fictional story arc (Agama is assaulted or kidnapped). The

project facilitates all these experiences by requiring players to comple-

ment the audio vignettes with on-site exploration and discovery.

In all, there are eight keywords at Union Station and five other loca-

tions around downtown Los Angeles for a player to explore—including

the Bradbury Building, which I discuss below. As a player unlocks more

AgamaNotes he or she discovers that they include Agama’s thoughtsabout locations and urban legends as well as key events in Agama’s life;

these events include his discovery of a mysterious object, his sighting

of ghosts, conversations with Shufelt, and Agama’s abduction. In this

way the AgamaNotes consist of a linear sequence of story elements

(each AgamaNote has a date-time stamp) that the player encounters out

of sequence and out of context. The player’s movement from place to

place and pursuit of Agama’s clues make physical the narrational action

that links story components into a narrative logic of initiating event,

goal, obstacle, climax, and resolution. The distances between sites and

their topography are an important element of Tracking Agama, since

thoughts represented as Agama’s are influenced by the player’s physical

engagement with each site, which in turn affects his or her understand-

ing of Los Angeles history, urban legends, and the fictional narrative

centering on Agama’s abduction.

Once the pattern of exploration, discovery, and story acquisition isfirmly established, the player unexpectedly receives phone calls from




both Shufelt and Agama. Their intent is to surprise the player and dis-

rupt his or her sense of temporality. Through this simulation of real-

time action, the storyworld becomes more complex and more immer-

sive along the temporal dimension. The narrative trajectory of following

past events toward an imagined possible future (tracking Agama and

potentially finding him) becomes intertwined with the present; hence

the storyworld blends with the real world of the player. The narrative

concludes with the player’s discovery of the origins of Agama’s super-

natural, ghost-attracting, kidnap-inducing object and a final phone call

from Agama wrapping up loose ends of the story.

The project offers multiple opportunities for participants’ activity

to shape their experience and yet through that process immerse them-selves more deeply in the storyworld, spatially, temporally, and epistem-

ically. Tracking Agama very much follows the template of the mystery

story, arranging non-interactive elements within the field of exploration

and allowing players to “enact the narrative of the investigation” (Ryan

2009: 54), though in a way modulated by the spatiotemporal profile of

the game experience. In addition, various AgamaNotes allude to ave-

nues players might follow to pursue their own research on Los Angeles,

its landmarks, and its urban legends. Following the narrative path takesplayers to the Central Library, for example, with pointers to archives

and files full of anecdotes and legends. The Angel’s Flight location vi-

gnettes make the players aware of the adjacent market, a good place for

players to immerse themselves in the flavor of the city, both literally and

figuratively. Additional exploration of this sort may give players addi-

tional cultural context with which to consider Agama’s story, or perhaps

simply sustenance to support climbing the steep steps of Angel’s Flight

in search of more clues.

Exploring the Place-Making Potential

of Mobile-Media Narratives

Conceiving of mobile narrative practices as the construction of, par-

ticipation in, and sharing of storyworlds opens up new questions for

narrative inquiry itself. In this concluding section I outline one of thekey issues facing research on storytelling via mobile media: namely, how




such storytelling has the potential to transform abstract spaces into

richly experienced places. Along the way I sketch out directions for fur-

ther study that will require the collaboration of scholars based in fields

ranging from media studies and communication theory to narratology

and cultural geography.

As suggested in the foregoing discussion, mobile-media projects of-

fer an interesting engagement with narrative not only by balancing user

activity with prescripted story elements but also by fostering, in the

process, specific and literal connections to place. To be sure, narrative

has always had a close relationship with the spaces and places of human

experience. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, is an illustration of how

memory and identity are tightly interwoven with the locations wherelife-shaping events unfold. Not only is the character of Leopold Bloom

defined through his perambulation through Dublin; what is more,

Joyce also wrote the novel in exile from his native city. Thus, both the

process of narration and the content of the story are rich with spatial

associations. In this way Ulysses could serve as a prime artistic exam-

ple for Philip Ethington’s spatial theory of history. Ethington contends

that history, rather than being reducible to a sense of the past (a mental

construct that exists only in the present), exists in locations—locationswhose historical dimensions transform them from abstract spaces into

places of lived experience (2007).

Mobile-media narratives, for their part, at once recruit from and en-

hance the place-making power of storytelling. Such narratives afford

unique opportunities for dovetailing the imaginative construction of

storyworlds with the process of navigating the world in the here and

now. By being interactively coupled with specific locations, they repre-

sent, connect, and contribute to the lived experiences of places; and in

turn their distribution over space and their geographic traces contribute

to the constant process of development and exchange that is narrative.

But what is it, exactly, that makes storytelling via mobile media such a

powerful resource for place making? To address this question, we must

explore the participatory elements of mobile-media practices, together

with how the immersive and interactive nature of those practices pro-

vides affordances for uniting narrative and place—or rather for usingnarrative to co-construct places.




Mobile media are often cited as the crystallization of the fragmentary

social, emotional, and mental landscape of contemporary human expe-

rience. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, suggests that the constant pres-

ence of the multichannel mediascape (TV, Internet, mobile media) has

disrupted traditional, linear notions of space and history (2003: 122). In

this account we live in a landscape where narrative struggles to find pur-

chase, displaced by forms marked by brevity, modularity, and numerous

but shallow interconnections. However, work in the tradition of human

geography, and in particular its theorization of place, can help situate

mobile-media narratives within a broader array of technologized me-

diations by means of which humans transform spaces into places. Thus

Tuan (1977) argues that “what begins as undifferentiated space becomesplace as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6) and that

“place is an organized world of meaning” (179). Narrative is a process

of understanding, of ordering events and actors into a meaningful pat-

tern, endowing data with value. Narrative is also a recursive process,

constantly mutating and changing with each re-engagement, whether

through replay of a narrative game or through the constant reinvention

of self we all undergo. In this way narrative in general provides crucial

resources for place making.But mobile-media narratives afford new, medium-specific means for

navigating the world via linked but spatially and temporally distributed

stories. Site-specific or location-based mobile narratives privilege the

place of their telling and of their reception and participate in the pro-

duction of place as a simultaneously physical, social, and psychological

construct. The participant in projects like [murmur] or Tracking Agama

produce a new understanding of place as he or she hears, interprets, and

absorbs the story with a freedom to explore the surroundings that is

uninhibited by a controlling narrator or cinematic frame. In the case of

[murmur], annotated sites contribute to the construction of a broader

and more nuanced narrative, a trajectory of becoming that is activated

by story. The audio project [murmur] will never (nor is it meant to)

achieve the type of narrative immersion imagined in the Holodeck or

hoped for by the designers of Tracking Agama, but nevertheless it ac-

tivates pieces of local narratives, which in turn constitute a location asa place. Meanwhile, in Tracking Agama, imagination and speculation




about the characters combine with the audio clues and the rich array of

ambient sights and sounds, suggesting themes and associations between

narrative, history, legend, person, and place.

Rather than being dislocated from the here and now, the participant

in a mobile narrative project produces a new here and a new now, not

merely occupying a generic space but actively producing a particular

place. The Tracking Agama players combine the present experience of

the activities of transport and commerce at Union Station with its his-

tory of community displacement and social unrest. Interweaving fic-

tion, history, and exploration of their present environment, players can

recontextualize the original Art Deco design responsible for the station’s

new image of retro, hipster cool—specifically by situating that imagewithin a longer historical record. This process of recontextualization, in

turn, has implications for participants who co-enact it. Tim Cresswell

argues that “rather than viewing place as an outcome of our subjective

appropriation of space . . . we should view place as a precondition for

the very possibility of subjectivity” (2002: 7). But the multiple modes of

mobile narratives such as Tracking Agama and [murmur] create another

turn of the screw. Granted, in Ulysses Joyce can paint a vivid picture of

Bloom’s thoughts as he walks through Dublin; yet the player of Tracking Agama physically walks up the steep Bunker Hill as he hears Agama’s

stories of past riders on Angel’s Flight, and the [murmur] listener can

multimodally experience the “wrong side of the creek” and its opposite,

simultaneously imagining and witnessing the effects of social and geo-

graphic separation. In this way, mobile narratives’ capacity for multidi-

mensional evocation of place—by interlinking body and mind, real and

fictional scenarios, and physical and virtual spaces—affords not just

new storytelling practices but also new ways of experiencing embodied

agency.

Michel de Certeau (1984) offers a framework for understanding the

simultaneous, multimodal intersections of individual and social trajec-

tories that turn a space into a place; de Certeau’s framework also throws

light on the individual and community narratives that mobile media

bring together in projects like the ones I have discussed. For de Certeau,

pedestrians write their routes, contesting the institutional frameworksguiding them with each turn away from a planned thoroughfare, each




jay-walking episode, each conscious avoidance of an advertisement oran enticing storefront. This movement transforms city spaces into places

for pedestrians on at least two levels: the level produced by the pedestri-

ans’ own practice and the level produced by other social practices inter-

secting the space. The Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, for

example, is a tourist place produced by the visitors who everyday marvel

at its skylights and wrought-iron railings. Engagement with the build-

ing’s architecture, however, is only one practice that transforms the space

(four walls and a ceiling on Broadway Avenue) into a place. Beyond this,

the practice of filmmaking enriches the place and motivates some of the

tourists, while a legend citing the building designer’s occult connection

offers a further layer.8 Tracking Agama calls up the cinematic history of

the building by drawing players’ attention to the Charlie Chaplin statue

in a side entryway to the Bradbury Building (see figure 2), and it also

highlights the utopian vision that inspired the building’s design.

More generally, the mobile project both engages with existing nar-

rative layers while adding a further layer of its own—a layer that con-

Fig. 2. Two players try out keywords in Tracking Agama. Photograph courtesy of

Jen Stein.




sists of the player’s physical and imaginative engagement not just with

Union Station but also with other places, such as the Bradbury Building,

whose histories intersect. Activating multiple routines for place making

simultaneously, the project supports de Certeau’s concept of place as a

“polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities”

(1984: 117).

Understanding place and subjectivity requires a recognition and an

experience of their “interconnection rather than their reduction . . .

their complexity rather than their simplification” (Malpas 1998: 38).

Narrative, a method of understanding that also affords aesthetic experi-

ences that are potentially transformative, can both express this complex

connection between place and subjectivity and produce new ways of in-

vestigating it. The participant in 34 N 118W can experience a small area

of downtown Los Angeles as an engaged student of its history, as a visi-

tor complicit in a history of community displacement, and as a reader

connected to the stories, secrets, and histories that the mobile narrative

makes available to him or her. Together these various positions and ac-

tivities underscore how mobile-media narratives recruit from the basic

place-making capacity of storytelling but also enhance that capacity by

immersing the participant simultaneously in two mutually informingworlds: the virtual storyworld and the real world of everyday experi-

ence. Mobile-media storytelling unites these two worlds by allowing

the participant to co-produce, through the process of exploration and

discovery, emergent connections between the storyworld and the actual

world in which it is embedded. The Holodeck may not yet be an achiev-

able goal, but arguably our storyworlds are moving toward it.

Notes

Some of the research for this article was conducted during my tenure as Mellon

Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the University

of California, Los Angeles. I thank both UCLA and the Mellon Foundation for

their support.

1. This essay omits any discussion of mobile video services and casual games for

mobile devices (Tetris, Solitaire, Sudoku, etc). Whereas these mobile-media

practices may have narrative elements, they are generally self-contained and do

not result in the creation of a storyworld that dynamically intersects with thereal world—a critical component of all projects discussed here.




2. See Yellow Arrow, http://global.yellowarrow.net.

3. See [murmur], http://www.murmurtoronto.ca and http://sanjose.murmur.info.

4. See Rik Morgan’s Handheld Museum website for a comprehensive collection of

electronic handheld games: Handheld Games Museum, http://www.handheld

museum.com.5. See Blast Theory, http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/index.php.

6. An alternative reality game is one in which game content appears to the players

as real-life events—faxes, phone calls, Web pages, etc. An example is The Beast ,

a game created and managed by Microsoft and affiliated with the film A.I.

7. The Tracking Agama website is no longer active.

8. Bladerunner (Warner Bros, 1982) and D.O.A. (United Artists, 1950) are two well-

known films with significant scenes filmed at the famous Bradbury Building.

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story worlds on the move

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