Tiree Tales: A Co-operative Inquiry into the Poetics of Location-Based Narratives.

Abstract

In a location-based story a reader's movement through physical space is translated into movement through narrative space, typically by presenting them with text fragments on a smart device triggered by location changes. Despite the increasing popularity of such systems their poetics are poorly understood, meaning limited guidance for authors, and few authoring tools. To explore these poetics we present a co-operative inquiry into the authoring of an interactive location-based narrative, `The Isle of Brine', set on the island of Tiree. Our inquiry reveals both pragmatic and aesthetic considerations driven by the locations themselves, that affect the design of both the Story (narrative structure) and Fabula (events within the story). These include the importance of paths, bottlenecks, and junctions as a physical manifestation of calligraphic patterns, the need for coherent narrative areas, and the requirement to use evocative places and to manage thematic and tonal discord between the landscape and the narrative.