The Wave-crest: Narrative Complexity and Locative Narrative

Locative narratives transform landscapes, city streets, and buildings into fictional places. These augmented and mixed-reality experiences use sound, image, and text, with mobile devices and low-tech materials. While these practices within arts and games have been documented by Martin Rieser, Rita Raley, Jason Farman, and others, this chapter asks how the formal and experiential narrative complexity of locative narrative can be conceptualized. The writings of William James and experimental pragmatism inform the explanation of experience, an experiential story world model, and an analysis of case studies based on a six-point framework of complexity: (1) the integration of the story world within an existent place; (2) a narrative structure linked with the mode of interaction; (3) participants’ actions within their surroundings and the fictional place; (4) the spatial-temporal complexity of partaking; (5) perceptual ambiguity resulting in ontological ambiguity; and (6) experiential and epistemological questions.