Congratulations to Professor Sylke Rene Meyer, Professor of Theatre and Art+Design, on her new book Soviet Narratology and Spatial Story Design: The Unintentional Storyteller published by Routledge Press.

Routledge Press writes, “This book offers a genealogy of spatial, user-centric story design and its current applications, situating spatial story design as medium sui generis that evolved as a counternarrative to agonal games on the one hand, and in distinction to linear narrative such as classical novels and cinema on the other hand….[The author] demonstrates that cybernetical research in the United States contributed to the development of agonal (shooter) games, while cybernetical research in the Soviet Union had a massive influence on role-playing games, and consequently interactive storytelling and spatial story design. Delineating how Soviet narratology had a formative–yet somehow unnamed–influence on the development of structuralist and post-structuralist narrative theory, this book will be an essential read for academics and artists in performance art, game design, interactive storytelling, narratology, philosophy, but also AI research, and human-machine interaction.”

Sylke Rene Meyer is a writer, director, media artist, performer, educator, and co-founder of the performance group Studio206 [Berlin/Los Angeles]. In 2018, she also co-founded the performance group ‘The Family Room Collective’ in Los Angeles (2018-2020).

Before joining Northeastern University, she has been a professor at the University of Technology, Arts and Sciences, Cologne, Germany, and at California State University in Los Angeles, where she also founded and directed the Institute for Interactive Arts, Research, and Technology (InArt).