Story Philosophy

The basis of how Sleepy Planet approaches story, narrative, and immersive experience.

A project like Sleepy Planet – described as a mythopoeic, interactive storytelling ecosystem – explicitly aims to build a world of symbols and archetypes that users can explore. Its design principles of nonlinearity and symbolic recursion suggest that stories can be experienced more like a mythology than a scripted novel. For instance, a player

The key is that environmental storytelling shifts emphasis from ego to eco: the hero is not a solitary victor but part of a web of life. Entangled narratives portray how a change in one part of the system reverberates through the whole – much as in reality, where, for example, the loss of a keystone species can transform an entire ecosystem (the

The reason we “need stories that mirror the mind of the world” is because stories are one of the primary tools we have to understand ourselves and our place in the world. If the world has changed – if our awareness has expanded to see the complex, fragile networks we exist in – then our stories must change too. By grounding this evolution in

Whether through imaginative engagement or literal neural synchrony, the psychology of narrative suggests that we crave stories aligning with how we actually think and remember. And how we think is often non-linear: full of associations, symbols, and relational webs. Thus, storytelling that “mirrors the mind” – with its tangents, recursions, and

Evolutionary psychologists propose that storytelling has an adaptive function: it helps us make sense of non-routine, uncertain or novel situations collectively (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). We tell stories to each other to explain the unexplainable, to find patterns in chaos, and to navigate uncertainty together. In a complex world, stories that

To my knowledge as of this writing, no one has yet combined AI with memory theatre. You could be the first. (You’re welcome.) Thinking of the sometimes monstrous imagery that generative AI can produce, this is easy to imagine. But go beyond just generating mere words and images — link them to locations (whether in a trail or a theatre) and treat... See more

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Michael Filimowicz describes many such “anti-narratives” that push the boundaries – some becoming more like games or improvisational theatre, where narrative order is disrupted deliberatelymedium.com. These forms require more work (sometimes called ergodic literature, meaning the reader/player must exert effort to traverse the storymedium.com).

The climate crisis and the Anthropocene have made it clear that our old stories – often fixated on human heroes conquering nature or extracting resources – are inadequate. We need narratives that foreground entanglement: the interdependence of humans, non-human creatures, and the Earth itself.

Some researchers even speak of “mythic cognition” in AI – using archetypal narratives as a framework for AI-generated storiesincreasinglyunclear.medium.comdegruyterbrill.com. While that’s nascent, it points to a fusion of the oldest storytelling with the newest technology. Importantly, this union can help in creating stories that feel meaningful