ABSTRACT
Janet Murray's proposal of the Holodeck as an immersive environment for interactive digital storytelling has served as a guiding metaphor for researchers in interactive digital narrative since it was proposed. This chapter explores the current state of interactive digital narrative practice that relates to physical space. It focuses on four influential projects that feature an approach to interactive storytelling in which geolocation mechanics play a crucial role: Parallel Kingdom, Shadow Cities, our own platform Haunted Planet and finally Ingress. Parallel Kingdom adopts a typical massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) narrative structure, with the notable difference that it does not propose a main storyline and leaves players the freedom to construct their own narratives through role-playing game (RPG) game mechanics. Shadow Cities is essentially social, as it is intended to be played with friends exploring and conquering nearby neighbourhoods. Ingress is developed by Google game studio Niantic Labs and shares many similarities with Shadow Cities.
