Research participants undertook the experiment in either a controlled setting (left), or an experimental setting (right).
My graduate thesis, Mythospace: Storytelling Mechanisms and the Built Environment, studied how the built environment influences a user's immersion in a story. An excerpt from my thesis follows:
Abstract
While architects and designers have a long history of using storytelling to guide the conceptual design of built environments, using storytelling to guide user experience has become more common in recent years. In contrast to didactic information, storytelling works on an affective level, increasing a user’s understanding, engagement, and persuasion. Two mechanisms for measuring a story’s affectiveness are narrative transportation and identification, psychological processes that occur when users undertake a narrative. Studies have concluded that a user’s personality, knowledge, and experiences are mediating factors in both narrative transportation and identification. Despite the trend for using storytelling in built environments, few studies have researched the physical environment’s impact on these mechanisms. An experiment was undertaken to bridge this gap. During the experiment, 41 subjects watched a short film and completed empirically reviewed transportation and identification rubrics. Twenty-one subjects completed the experiment in a typical classroom environment, while 20 completed the experiment in a room with modified temperature, lighting, and airflow. While results were inconclusive in regard to environmental influence on these mechanisms, the data support previous findings that a person’s psychology and experiences are mediating factors on the mechanisms, and also indicate that environmental factors may enhance a user’s affective engagement.
"The truth of the matter was, stories was [sic]
everything, and everything was stories."
– Harry Crews, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
everything, and everything was stories."
– Harry Crews, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
The Importance of Storytelling
Researchers have long noted storytelling’s effect on memory. Good stories are memorable because they connect to the user in incisive, personal ways. Stories weave information into a narrative with emotional impact and context, allowing users to personally connect with stories in ways they cannot with mere facts. Simply, emotions and contextual identifiers make stories memorable. Schank calls these identifiers indices. The more indices a narrative has, Schank argues, the more opportunities users have to personally engage with the story, thus making it memorable (Schank, 1999). Busselle and Bilandzic note a similar effect in their explanation of mental models. They argue that in order to understand a story, readers use mental models to represent a personalized version of the story. “The models, represent settings, characters, and situations, and are created by combining information from the text with knowledge the reader or viewer already possesses . . .” (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).
Because of their affectiveness, narratives are often used to educate and persuade. Slater et al. found that nutritional information communicated narratively rather than didactically was rated more believable (Slater et al., 2003). Narratives have also been used to promote voter turnout, reduce prejudices (Shaffer et al., 2018), and aid public health campaigns (Hinyard & Kreuter, 2016).
While narratives are most often associated with text and film, they may be communicated through myriad media. Hamby et al. define narrative as “communication efforts that vary across facets such as modality, format, length, emotional depth, and plotline complexity” (Hamby et al., 2017). Hinyard and Kreuter suggest that a story must encompass certain elements: a beginning, middle, and end; scene, characters, and conflict; unanswered questions or conflict; and a resolution (Hinyard & Kreuter, 2016). Due to these expansive definitions and their associated manifestations, this article will adopt the term “user” in lieu of reader, watcher, player, or any other participant, except when referring to a study that references a specific medium.
Why People Seek Out Stories
Taking the reader-response theoretical stance, van Laer et al. argue that users are active participants in constructing narratives. Narrative itself, they contend, is only part of the experience. A complete narrative is necessarily partially constructed by each user’s personality and experiences in combination with the narrative itself (van Laer et al., 2018). This internally influenced perspective of narrative fits with Knutson et al.’s determination that experiences are internal and unique, and therefore difficult to measure (Knutson et al., 2007).
According to van Laer et al., people seek out stories for five primary reasons: to understand the outer world, to understand the inner world, to investigate the outer world, to forget the inner world, and to look after a lonely and suffering self.
The category “understanding the outer world” concerns knowledge in which the user has a personal stake. Similarly, “understanding the inner world” allows users to better comprehend their own emotions and reactions via a similar character. In contrast to “understanding the outer world,” van Laer et al argue that this category transcends a person’s direct experiences. It allows users to vicariously experience unfamiliar emotions, places, and lives.
“Forgetting the inner world” is largely concerned with escapism. Though escapism generally has negative connotations, it is not always harmfully invoked. Fiction writer Neil Gaiman notes escapism’s benefits:
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? . . . Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with . . .
Among their interviewees, van Laer et al. found that narratives provided distractions from issues ranging from the routine annoyances of life to more dire issues like alcoholism. Two interviewees, in fact, mentioned alcoholism. Interestingly, one used escapism positively, by watching horror movies in lieu of drinking, and the other used escapism negatively, to avoid dealing with her alcoholism (van Laer et al., 2018).
The last category, “to look after a lonely and suffering self,” builds upon the escapism inherent in “forgetting the inner world.” It can offer users solace that their circumstances aren’t unique to them and provide tools to navigate difficult situations. Gaiman’s epistle to escapism ends appropriately, “. . . during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour, real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real” (Gaiman, 2013).
[end excerpt]