Ludonarrative on location: Telling stories with locative play.

Abstract

“Ludonarrative”, “Game Poetics”, “Mechanics as Metaphor”; all these terms and more have been used to describe the capacity of game mechanics and interaction design to convey narrative or poetic qualities. As our medium matures, and our understanding of these design phenomena increases, it has given way to an avant-garde of game design experimenting with novel forms of storytelling and poetry which employ play and interaction itself as its medium rather than the conventional forms of dialogue and visuals that games share with other mediums. Ludonarrative is fundamentally connected to the medium and the means of understanding and designing for ludonarrative in a shooter or RPG are very different to that of a mobile puzzle game. For this chapter, we principally concern ourselves with the seldom explored ludonarrative of locative games. We seek to unify existing approaches to ludonarrative in a model that is focused on the anatomy of a game mechanic – identifying elements of a mechanic that may carry narrative. We then survey and identify the mechanics intrinsic to the locative mixed reality form, so that we can demonstrate, using our model, the ludonarrative potential of the medium.