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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
Access Provided by National University of Ireland, Galway at 10/10/11 1:16PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/stw/summary/v002/2.ruston.html
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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-
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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
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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-
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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-
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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Ruston: Storyworlds on the Move 109
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.
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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,
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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-
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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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