Mobile digital interactive storytelling—a winding path

These places (and, indeed, particular spatial orientations and vistas) are so central to the telling of stories that their names may become proxies for the stories themselves. It is not just that stories are about places, then, but that stories are about being in places. Brewer and Dourish (2008, p. 967) Stories in the physical world The idea of inscribing stories into the physical landscape is one that has been around since long before the recent developments in mobile technology. The myths of the Australian aboriginals tell about how the ‘‘Dreamtime’’ is sung, and by that, sings the very land into existence (Chatwin 1986). In that way the myths are inscribed into each Aboriginal group’s local landscape. Over the centuries, architects have been designing paths through the landscape to guide movement and direction of sight*and game designers do the same in their virtual worlds. The psychogeography movement (DeBord 1955), which aimed to explore the psychological effects of the geographical environment, created numerous forms for playful exploration targeted to reveal and transgress such designed structures. Several modern movements can trace their roots back to this movement, such as the urban exploration movement, which explores the hidden city landscape through accessing underground tunnel systems and rooftops pathways. Independently, skateboarders, Parkour runners and Flash mobs instead focus on exposing and transgressing the ordinary use of public space, through injecting alternative usages of urban space. Lynch’s (1960) age-old work on the social cityscape was extremely early in describing traveling on a road as a narrative experience. At the center of his works lies the understanding that physical movement creates a sequential experience and as such constructs a basic narrative structure. Early graphical games such as Myst) 1 offered spatial exploration of a virtual space as the primary form of activity. The free movement in such games already offers a primitive level of interactive storytelling, as the paths chosen will determine how the narrative is formed and to some extent even which plot is told.