What is "narratively enhanced reality"? Well, various branches of science and philosophy would answer "pretty much everything". Except maybe not "narratively enhanced", but "modified by neural patterns", "perceived through our pre-existing mental patterns", "limited by our senses", "filtered through our culture" etc.
I am thinking here of something less refined, though. I would call an empty coffee jar "narratively enhanced" if I had a story related to it, which would connect it to a narrative web and turn it from a mere object into a meaningful node. The story shouldn't be pure fantasy, and the object shouldn't be a simple pretext for the story. The story doesn't need to be fantasy at all. It just needs to generate meaning - something fundamentally absent from reality. Meaning belongs to language, or any other strategy designed to make sense of things. Things, and reality, simply are. No one thing is essentially more important than another, more relevant, or carries a purpose. The only way to assign such properties to things is to enhance them narratively.
I'm using here "narrative" in a relatively loose sense. It tends to be a story with a beginning and an ending, but it can also be open at both ends. It can be related to a wider web of stories, or simply associate a part of reality with musings and ideas.
And I'm using "reality" in a highly unrefined sense. Yes there are bits of story, or proto-stories, involved every time I "see" something - which doesn't happen unless the something already has some kind of meaning for me. But these don't necessarily make the something meaningful. I think I will operate with the sort-of-definition created by Philip K Dick in “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
A narratively-enhanced reality does and doesn't follow the same sort-of-definition. Stories do vanish when people forget them. Or at least they vanish from their awareness. I am not sure this means the story has died entirely. I want to believe it doesn't. ...This could create objects that are excessively enhanced, connected to an infinity of story webs that don't even overlap.
There are also things whose initial objectivity has vanished, but whose narrative shadow has persisted, like Excalibur, or the Holy Grail. Here we move away from NER, toward legend and myth. That is not what I am after.
What I want is something akin to the world presented in Chris Marker's documentaries, or in the musings of the fox from "The Little Prince": not a virtual reality, but an enhanced real reality. I wouldn't quite call it "tame", but it should function like so:
"My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . ."
