Developing a Writer’s Toolkit for Interactive Locative Storytelling

Despite the increasing popularity of locative interactive stories their poetics are poorly understood, meaning that there is little advice or support for locative authors, and few frameworks for critical analysis. The StoryPlaces project has spent two years working with over sixty authors creating locative stories. Through analyzing the stories themselves, and interviewing readers, we have developed a simple writer’s toolkit that highlights the challenges and opportunities offered by locative fiction. In this paper, we describe our approach and outline twelve key pragmatic and aesthetic considerations that we have derived from our experience and analyses. Together these reveal that the main challenge in locative literature lies in aligning the narrative text, the structural logic, and the demands and affordances of the landscape.