Several projects I have seen last week have pattern recognition as a basis - the lovely Funky Forest by Theodore Watson and Emily Gobeille lets you use you use body movements to regulate the growth of trees and the ecosystem (mainly butterflies) of a forest;

Levelhead, which I mentioned some posts ago, by Julian Oliver, is a visual puzzle where a virtual man goes up and down and in and out virtual ambiances, a very generic structure that can be adapted to thousands of different story sets; and Edge Bomber, in which black tape stripes can produce hundreds of different reactions, according to the script they are related to, and to the theme (content?) projected on top of them.
.
When it comes to narrative studies, most employ spatial metaphors to describe narrative structure and development (hypertext, quest games, 3D environment games); remembering my readings of narrative theory, it struck me how all these very simple systems could very well support stories, a thought unacceptable until a few years ago, when (literary) hypertext, videogames, netart, have been gaining more and more of “story status”.
This means that the notion of “story” is definitely getting stretched out of the post-structuralist theory to adapt to new, much more fluid, story systems.
Is pattern recognition going to be the next craze in “boundary” storytelling?