Spatial Storytelling for Emotional Engage ment in Location-Based Games for Young People

Sammanfattning

Location-based games and augmented reality (AR) experiences integrate physicalmovement and real-world environments into interactive narratives. This thesis investigates how spatial story telling narrative communicated through the arrangementand discovery of story elements in space can enhance young people’s emotional engagement. The study is situated within a cultural collaboration at HDK-Valand,University of Gothenburg, connected to an AR interactive documentary about thevillage of Jörn in northern Sweden.Using research through design, the thesis combines theoretical synthesis, prototypedevelopment in Unity, and a formative qualitative evaluation with contextual informants. Attention capture and sustained engagement are treated as enablingconditions for emotional involvement. Rather than claiming that young people lackattention spans, the thesis argues that attention is situated and shaped by design.Drawing on literature from location-based games, interactive documentary, interaction design, cognitive psychology, and youth media studies, the thesis develops aframework of attention-sensitive spatial storytelling. This framework is translatedinto provisional design principles such as attentional handshake, spatial episodes,lightweight agency, and support for interruption and re-entry for location-based interactive media for teenagers. Since the final prototype was tested with youngadults rather than teenagers, the principles are presented as research-grounded andformative, not as statistically generalisable claims.