Story Philosophy

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

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

Some researchers even speak of “mythic cognition” in AI – using archetypal narratives as a framework for AI-generated stories​increasinglyunclear.medium.com​degruyterbrill.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

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

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

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

In emergent storytelling systems, authorship is distributed. The designer or writer creates a system of possibilities and symbols rather than a fixed sequence. Then the player’s presence and choices in that system bring about specific story moments. Researcher Hartmut Koenitz, for instance, argues that interactive digital narratives demand new