INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FILM AND MEDIA ARTS vol 2, n.º1
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is almost the opposite of narrative (Ad-
ams, 1999; Costikyan, 2000).
A maximum of interactivity presuppos-
es a non-linear, open story world where
the visitor or user navigates and oper-
ates freely. Yet here, story models like
the P.I.N.G. model (Passive-Interactive
Narrative-Game model) struggle with
the lack of narrative control (here with
the game Aporia) over the narrative
experience that the user makes. “In
general too few (20%) participants un-
derstood the story in Aporia. The inter-
action with key objects seemed to steal
the focus from the narrative and took
most of the participants’ focus, also
when describing the narrative” (Bevens-
ee et al., 2012).
Alternatively, my concept of spatial story
design privileges space over time and us-
ership over authorship, yet at the same
time, it gives the author some creative
control over the narrative trajectory in
space. In open world story design, every
visitor or user will experience a different
story. What we – as storytellers- can do
is to create a narrative corridor, a zone of
likelihood and probability. As storytellers,
we may have to embrace the idea that
we no longer write ONE Story, but design
a narrative corridor for potential stories.
In probability theory in mathematics as
well as in interactive story design, we
cannot predict the user’s behavior with
certainty , but we can control certain
narrative factors to estimate the prob-
able behavior of the user in an interac-
tive narrative environment. In non-linear
open story worlds, we cannot design a
protagonist, his want or need, no charac-
ter arc, no turning points – but have to
invent a different dramaturgy.
The seven step algorithm which I out-
line is a space-based tool for linear and
non-linear storytelling: user-generated
narrative, interactive digital storytell-
ing, screenwriting, 360° lm making, or
any audience-engaging narrative prac-
tice that relates to space. It is a basic
narrative tool that allows the author
to control–to some extent–the space,
the story, and the objects that lead to
objectives. Referring to Henry Jenkins
(2004) and his terminology of “environ-
mental storytelling,” (idem) the seven
step spatial story design strategy may
work in every aspect of environmental
storytelling: with evoked narratives that
have the ability to enhance an already
existing one, with enacted narratives
that provide narrative elements built up
around characters, with embedded nar-
ratives where the object and the staging
enables the plot, and with emergent nar-
ratives where the users construct their
own narrative in the story space.
Spatial story design is a narrative strate-
gy that draws from a theory of narrative
space, which emerged from the outer
frontiers of an empire; marginalized, for-
bidden, almost secret, it was conceived
in provinces of the former Soviet Union.
The concepts of Yuri Lotman and
Mikhail Bakhtin laid the ground work for
an entirely new philosophical approach
that became eminent in the late 1980s
under the label of the ‘spatial turn,’ and
include, amongst others, the works of
Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Susan
Stanford Friedman, Gaston Bachelard,
Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefevbre.
At this point, many works on spatiality
could not been taken adequately into
account, and the following concept only
outlines the basic idea of spatial story
design.
2 Spatial Semantics
2.1 Yuri Lotman
and the Semiosphere
Yuri Lotman was born in 1922, and grad-
uated at the age of only 17 years, and
with excellent grades from the Univer-
sity of Leningrad. Being Jewish howev-
er, the high potential youth was not al-
lowed to proceed with his doctorate at
the heart of the empire, and instead had
to go to Tartu, a small town in Estonia
where he stayed for the rest of his life.
Therefore his theoretical body of work is
referred to as the “Tartu-Moscow Semi-
otic School.”
In Lotman’s analysis of narrative texts,
the temporal structure of the story is not
in the foreground, but the spatial orga-
nization, the “semiosphere.” According
to Lotman (1990), a semiosphere (from