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

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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 about the 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 nearly impossible to see. But now the heat, the bright sun, and the mild irritation of earlier technical difculties melted away as my attention shifted to nding 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 scions abductors, I was part-way through an afternoon-long exploration of central San Jose by way of the mobile media art proj-

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 worldwide, [murmur] collects personal anecdotes linked to specic 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, portability, 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 participant in as well as a creator and theorist of new mobile-media practices, I also raise some questions about how storytelling both shapes and is shaped by mobile media; hence I am concerned with how the intricacies of mobile projects might inform our understanding of narrative and vice versa. As our twenty-rst-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 critically important to explore reciprocal, two-way inuences between narrative 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 narrative projects, I draw on a conception of narrative outlined by MarieLaure Ryan (2006). For Ryan, narrativity can be dened as a scalar property, rather than a rigidly binary property, meaning that practices that are recognizably narrative in nature will still have degrees of storiness (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 locative application. Facilitating everything from collections of more or less discrete micro-narratives to more comprehensive and linear narrative trajectories, mobile projects display the same variation in degrees of
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narrativity that we nd 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 satises desires for agency but sacrices a meaningful arc; conversely, limiting the users choices, as in some hypertext ction, maintains a more focused narrative trajectory, but the choice mechanisms are horribly intrusive and limiting (4445). As I have argued elsewhere (Ruston 2006), however, the kinds of interactivity afforded by mobile media can be more exible 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 bridge between real world and storyworld that features both intense interactivity and robust immersivity. Mobile entertainment projects that incorporate the salient forward-looking features of the medium (interactivity, mobility, locationawareness) fall into three broad categories: Spatial Annotation Projects, Location-Based Games, and Mobile Narrative Experiences.1 Spatial Annotation 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 question. Location-Based Games offer a focused, rule-based, and goal-oriented experience using the real world as a game board and story elements to facilitate play. Mobile Narrative Experiences offer a more comprehensive narrative structure than Location-Based Games, weaving together ction 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 signicant degree. The projects often have a participatory or contributory component 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 stickers in the shape of an arrow to identify a space of signicance.2 Any indiRuston: Storyworlds on the Move
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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 identies. Subsequent individuals encountering the yellow arrow sticker can send the code via text message to the Yellow Arrow service 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 existence 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 together individual feelings, comments, and observations mapped onto the landscape, Yellow Arrow positions the mobile phone as an interface to a database of locations and anecdotes, with the function of connecting, across time and space, the location a person inhabits with the experiences 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 nature 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 owing 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 curate contributors stories (memory sketches, anecdotes) regarding specic 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 gure 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 parks relatively small size, it took me a few minutes to nd 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 proj104

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Fig. 1. The author nds a [murmur] marker in San Jose and dials in for the audio clips. Photograph by author.

ects: technical difculties. Patience, apparently, is a necessary characteristic for participants. A short time later, I dialed the [murmur] phone number again and heard a hip, inquiring voice say, This is Murmur . . . Whats the code? I was in. This particular location has three audio clips associated with it, describing a neighborhoods transformation of a blighted street corner into a park. The typical visitor sees the park as a place of leisure, beauty, and play marked by a jungle gym, grass eld, and manicured landscaping. The visitor sees the location as it is, at that moment in time: of course there is a park there, why wouldnt there be? Accessing the perRuston: Storyworlds on the Move
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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 parks history and context and its arc of development. One anecdote tells of the difculty adults have drawing water from the playground fountain, while children have no such problems. Conrming the speakers observation, I could not make the fountain feature ow, and I took the damp sand at the base to be evidence of a childs 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 project 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 distances 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 populaceresidents of San Jose, maybe new transplants, maybe old-timers, who might know of a [murmur] marker in their own neighborhood and then be attentive to othersas 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 addition 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 recounting that neighborhoods changes, an amateur historian discussing the Naglee 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 Herholds San Jose lynching story, many of the anecdotes are more rambling, stream-ofconsciousness 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 inuence 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 metaphor, 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 retrotted by visitors onto the experience 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 reconguration of the spaces of San Jose into neighborhoods, places lled 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 personal 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 Tuans (1977) terms, by participating in a Spatial Annotation Project like [murmur], whether as a reader/listener, recorder, or both, one engages in a meaning-making practice that produces place out of a space. As I discuss more fully in the nal section, in the tradition of human geography that Tuan helped pioneer, space refers to that which can be dened by boundaries and dimensions; it is an abstract concept, denable in mathematical terms as a system of coordinates. Place, on the other hand, refers to locations imbued with human experience. Spatial Annotation Projects like [murmur] link a mobile narrative with a particular place, shaping understanding both of the experience of a place and of the self that has that experience. The narrative 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 participant 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 handheld 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 Wacos Electronic Tic-Tac-Toe (1972) to Mattels Basketball (1980) to todays 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 marketing elements on the packaging; most were manipulations of LED lights 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-edged narratives in their own right. Here I focus on a genre of games that integrates narrativity with key traits associated with mobile media, including portability, connectivity, and location-awareness. In Location-Based Games, the location of the mobile phone is ascertained through cell tower triangulation or by GPS technology and coincides with the assumed location of the mobile phone user. This combination is a key part of game play, game-world navigation, and narrative structure. The now-defunct game Botghters (Its Alive!, 20012005) 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 players mobile phone represents a robot in a futuristic world that is correlated with the real world. As a players mobile phone moves through the real world, a corresponding movement of the players robot occurs in the game world. Players engage in battles via SMS messages with other players they nd on the streets. On the other end of the production spectrum, the games of the UK-based art troupe Blast Theory, 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-world creation.5 Online players have access to the location data of the street
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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 rst-person shooter console games that Ryan describes as a type of ludus activity with clearly dened states of winning or losing, [such that] their pleasure resides in the thrill of competition (2009: 45). Described as a mobile version of Counter Strike (Struppken and Willis 2007: 226), Botghters players roam the city looking for enemies to ght. Results of daily battles are narrativized on the game website, along with details about new missions and information concerning the whereabouts of useful items. These masquerade as story elements, but their story role conceals their game function (establishment of the next level, recording of success/score, distribution of rewards, etc.)a feature of Ryans narrative games. But Botghters 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: 4647). Like the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) that grew out of Dungeons & Dragons and its kin, Botghters had a constantly evolving game universe with 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 articial intelligence (AI) creates ctional universes that adapt to participant involvement, such as Captain Janeways Bront-like romances in Star Trek: Voyager or Commander Datas adoption 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 Botghters and Mobile Narrative Experiences offer alternative methods of balancing user input and an adaptable narrative universe with the need for some degree of authorial direction, some framework that can afford coherent narrative experiences.
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One of the problems Ryan does not cite in her critique of the hypertext 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 selection activitythe point and click of the mouseforegrounds the layer of mediation that stands between the user and the ctional experience. This disruption is most evident in hypertext, because it is directly associated with the random pursuit of textual fragments. However, the variety of virtual world controllers (joystick, D-pad control, text commands, virtual reality goggles, etc.) are all cumbersome and introduce a range of mediating activities that are situated outside the immersive ctional realm but critical for the users ability to participate in the storyworld. Thus, these media control requirements impede the spatial and temporal immersion that Ryan characterizes as a hallmark of narrative experiences (5356). By contrast, a Location-Based Game such as Botghters 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 gamethat is, the fact that it is always running, and players are always in the game provides a level of temporal immersion, enhanced by the unpredictability 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 framework 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 dexteritya combination 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 brings the 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 features 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 components, 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 Projects, 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 project resides in how the participant acquires the story elements and engages with his or her surroundings in the process. In this way, Mobile Narrative Experiences highlight the recursive and multilayered nature of narrative itself. Even as the projects story components constitute a narrative or at least a constellation of narrative elements, participants engagement creates an additional narrative trajectory, putting their own actions into a narrative context that intersects with the context containing the pre-authored story components. These projects vary greatly in terms of their narrative structure. In some cases, such as the early locative ction 34N118W (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, Hights brief ctions 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 Central Park, weaving story and binaural sound effect into a narrative experiRuston: Storyworlds on the Move
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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 Divisions Tracking Agama (20042006), a multilayered narrative weaves a ctional mystery with urban legends and the participants pursuit of the title character. The design team, of which I was a member, specically 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 interactivityin a manner suitable to the features of the mobile medium. To describe Tracking Agama in the vernacular of the Hollywood pitch, where a writer describes his project by relating it to existing lms 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, lms, video games, or hypertexts, I provide in what follows a detailed description of the Tracking Agama project and the events a player might experience. Players begin their engagement with the project by visiting the Tracking 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 ctions 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 nding his friend Agama, who may be in danger. To aid in the players 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, ctional 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 nd Agama would be to follow the trail of his researchby unlocking the audio recordings.
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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 le contains some story information 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 rst 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 Station. The sculptures 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 skylight), and a ctional story arc (Agama is assaulted or kidnapped). The project facilitates all these experiences by requiring players to complement the audio vignettes with on-site exploration and discovery. In all, there are eight keywords at Union Station and ve other locations around downtown Los Angeles for a player to exploreincluding the Bradbury Building, which I discuss below. As a player unlocks more AgamaNotes he or she discovers that they include Agamas thoughts about locations and urban legends as well as key events in Agamas life; these events include his discovery of a mysterious object, his sighting of ghosts, conversations with Shufelt, and Agamas 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 players movement from place to place and pursuit of Agamas 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 Agamas are inuenced by the players physical engagement with each site, which in turn affects his or her understanding of Los Angeles history, urban legends, and the ctional narrative centering on Agamas abduction. Once the pattern of exploration, discovery, and story acquisition is rmly established, the player unexpectedly receives phone calls from
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both Shufelt and Agama. Their intent is to surprise the player and disrupt his or her sense of temporality. Through this simulation of realtime action, the storyworld becomes more complex and more immersive along the temporal dimension. The narrative trajectory of following past events toward an imagined possible future (tracking Agama and potentially nding him) becomes intertwined with the present; hence the storyworld blends with the real world of the player. The narrative concludes with the players discovery of the origins of Agamas supernatural, ghost-attracting, kidnap-inducing object and a nal 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 themselves more deeply in the storyworld, spatially, temporally, and epistemically. Tracking Agama very much follows the template of the mystery story, arranging non-interactive elements within the eld of exploration and allowing players to enact the narrative of the investigation (Ryan 2009: 54), though in a way modulated by the spatiotemporal prole of the game experience. In addition, various AgamaNotes allude to avenues players might follow to pursue their own research on Los Angeles, its landmarks, and its urban legends. Following the narrative path takes players to the Central Library, for example, with pointers to archives and les full of anecdotes and legends. The Angels Flight location vignettes make the players aware of the adjacent market, a good place for players to immerse themselves in the avor of the city, both literally and guratively. Additional exploration of this sort may give players additional cultural context with which to consider Agamas story, or perhaps simply sustenance to support climbing the steep steps of Angels Flight in search of more clues.

Exploring the Place-Making Potential of Mobile-Media Narratives

Conceiving of mobile narrative practices as the construction of, participation in, and sharing of storyworlds opens up new questions for narrative inquiry itself. In this concluding section I outline one of the key 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 further study that will require the collaboration of scholars based in elds ranging from media studies and communication theory to narratology and cultural geography. As suggested in the foregoing discussion, mobile-media projects offer an interesting engagement with narrative not only by balancing user activity with prescripted story elements but also by fostering, in the process, specic and literal connections to place. To be sure, narrative has always had a close relationship with the spaces and places of human experience. James Joyces Ulysses, for example, is an illustration of how memory and identity are tightly interwoven with the locations where life-shaping events unfold. Not only is the character of Leopold Bloom dened 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 example for Philip Ethingtons 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 locationslocations whose historical dimensions transform them from abstract spaces into places of lived experience (2007). Mobile-media narratives, for their part, at once recruit from and enhance 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 specic locations, they represent, 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 provides affordances for uniting narrative and placeor rather for using narrative 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 experience. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, suggests that the constant presence 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 nd purchase, 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 mediations by means of which humans transform spaces into places. Thus Tuan (1977) argues that what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place 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 pattern, 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-specic means for navigating the world via linked but spatially and temporally distributed stories. Site-specic or location-based mobile narratives privilege the place of their telling and of their reception and participate in the production 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 activates pieces of local narratives, which in turn constitute a location as a 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 history of community displacement and social unrest. Interweaving ction, history, and exploration of their present environment, players can recontextualize the original Art Deco design responsible for the stations new image of retro, hipster coolspecically by situating that image within 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 Blooms thoughts as he walks through Dublin; yet the player of Tracking Agama physically walks up the steep Bunker Hill as he hears Agamas stories of past riders on Angels 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 geographic separation. In this way, mobile narratives capacity for multidimensional evocation of placeby interlinking body and mind, real and ctional scenarios, and physical and virtual spacesaffords 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 trajectories that turn a space into a place; de Certeaus 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 frameworks guiding them with each turn away from a planned thoroughfare, each
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Fig. 2. Two players try out keywords in Tracking Agama. Photograph courtesy of Jen Stein.

jay-walking episode, each conscious avoidance of an advertisement or an enticing storefront. This movement transforms city spaces into places for pedestrians on at least two levels: the level produced by the pedestrians own practice and the level produced by other social practices intersecting 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 buildings 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 lmmaking enriches the place and motivates some of the tourists, while a legend citing the building designers 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 gure 2), and it also highlights the utopian vision that inspired the buildings design. More generally, the mobile project both engages with existing narrative layers while adding a further layer of its owna layer that con118

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sists of the players 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 Certeaus concept of place as a polyvalent unity of conictual 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 simplication (Malpas 1998: 38). Narrative, a method of understanding that also affords aesthetic experiences that are potentially transformative, can both express this complex connection between place and subjectivity and produce new ways of investigating it. The participant in 34N118W can experience a small area of downtown Los Angeles as an engaged student of its history, as a visitor 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 activities 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 informing worlds: the virtual storyworld and the real world of everyday experience. 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 achievable 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 the real worlda 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 Morgans 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 eventsfaxes, phone calls, Web pages, etc. An example is The Beast, a game created and managed by Microsoft and afliated with the lm 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 wellknown lms with signicant scenes lmed at the famous Bradbury Building.

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