Monsters in Our World: Rethinking Narrative Transportation in Pokémon Go’s Mixed Reality: An Abstract

Abstract

Mixed reality media, which blend digital content with aspects of the physical world (e.g., IKEA’s AR-enabled catalogue, Snapchat filters, etc.), provides new opportunities for marketers to tell brand stories. While previous research on narrative transportation theory explains how consumers are immersed into and persuaded by brand stories (van Laer et al. 2014), central assumptions of the theory are called into question when such stories are told through mixed reality media in consumers’ everyday environments. In our research, we explore how the experience of narrative transportation differs when brand stories are emplaced in the physical world amidst a nexus of spatial and social relations, instead of in a separate imaginary story world. We draw on qualitative data from the case of Pokémon GO to develop a conceptual model that explains how narrative transportation functions in mixed reality storytelling. Under these conditions, transportation morphs from being a mental journey in an imaginary, external world to being a joint cognitive and embodied process that interacts with the lifeworld of the consumer. Consumers take on character roles as they move about the hybrid story-physical world, interacting with fictional characters while simultaneously engaging with other players and bystanders. Transportation is borne by effectively enmeshing the narrative across the physical world and validating it through spatial and social means. Narrative transportation in mixed reality thus requires researchers and marketers to rethink the environment in which a story is consumed, as well as how the story is produced. It emphasizes environmentally propping mental imagery (Kuzmičová 2015), which is typically ignored in narrative transportation research. It also conceptualizes the consumer as an active story co-creator, rather than simply a story receiver, which is typically overlooked in studies on narrative transportation (van Laer et al. 2014). Marketers should be aware that emplacing stories into everyday environments requires high levels of consumer cooperation, which might be more reasonable to expect for iconic brands such as Pokémon than for newer and more obscure brands such as Ingress.