Notes for Game Design as Narrative Architecture
- Two different group of gamers – the Ludologists (focus on mechanics of gameplay) and Narratologists (games + other storytelling media)
- Some argue that narrative is “boring” and not entertaining
- Author wants to offer a middle ground between these two groups
- Points he wants people to agree on:
- 1) Not all games tell stories (example of dance given)
- 2) A lot of games want to tell a narrative
- 3) There is not one type of game – narrative doesn’t mean eliminating other forms of games
- 4) Playing games don’t feel like telling/experiencing a story
- 5) Games can tell stories in a very different way than other media do
- Ludologists have blind spots
- Discussion always has a very narrow definition of “narrative”
- Discussion deals with only the question of whether whole games tell stories and NOT whether narrative elements might enter games at more localized levels
- The concept of spatiality
- Game designers do a lot of world-building and sculpting spaces
- Example: what we remember in Monopoly is moving around the board and landing on someone’s real estate
- Example: Dungeon master start with designing the dungeon
- Text based games also need to describe the space
- Games can communicate things about spaces that text cannot, that is why game designers draw story elements from genres like fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, and war, which are the most invested in world-making and spatial story-telling
- Connection to environmental storytelling that Disney does with its theme parks – the goal is to evoke the right atmosphere.
- Evocative Spaces
- Spaces that build upon stories or genre traditions already known
- Remediating a pre-existing story
- McGee rewriting Alice in Wonderland’s story by relying on the fact that you already generally know what Wonderland looks like – he then makes it a dark nightmare realm
- Example of Star Wars the game, players already have context about the world and the game can add more new narrative experiences
- Enacting Stories
- Games that enable players to perform or witness narrative events
- Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories – but stories that prioritize spatial exploration over plot development
- Resolution often hinges on players reaching their final destination
- Micronarratives – meant to shape the player’s emotional experience
- A player’s participation could pose as a threat to narrative construction – game designers struggle with the balancing act of trying to determine how much plot will create a compelling network and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level
- Embedded Narratives
- Back stories
- Example: detective story – telling two stories, one is chronological and one is radically out of sequence
- In games, players need to act on mental maps and test them against the game world
- A story is a body of information, game players can distribute information across the game space
- Game world becomes information space – a memory palace
- Games are not locked in the present
- Emergent Narratives
- The SIMs represent how narrative possibilities might get mapped onto game space
- Game worlds can be seen as an authoring environment where players can define their own goals
- Ability to design skins make players create characters that are emotionally significant to them
- Even though the game is free-form, the designers of SIMs still need to make a lot of deliberate choices.
- They had to make choices what kind of actions are allowed for SIMS
IF Game
The interactive fiction game that I played was You’re Gone, which was originally made by a member of the furry community for the community. This game is an example of Kinetic Fiction. The creator of the game is Madison Rye Progress, and the platform the game is on is the web. In this game, you are a husband fox who has just lost his cat wife. You send her text messages, and the only action the player can do is send text messages and read text messages. I played the entire game, and also took a look at the non-furry version as well. You can find the game webpage here. ]
As for the 4 E’s, this game doesn’t really use evocative narratives since it doesn’t call back to any pre-existing knowledge (unless these 2 characters were referenced in the author’s previous work). I did feel like it used enacting narratives, since the player sends the texts and “acts out” being the sender. There was very little embedded narrative because there isn’t a lot of “game space” since it is just a group chat, and there’s almost no emergent narrative because you don’t get to decide what texts get sent, all you can do is press send. I think the narrative here was very fixed on purpose – the sending mechanism is simply meant to immerse you deeper into the story.
The game’s subgenre is Kinetic Fiction/Linear Narrative. There are no player choices on purpose, and I think this was done to make the narrative more poignant. There’s nothing you can do about the grief, no action you can take to change what unfolds. You just need to experience it, and experience it viscerally. I also think this was very character-driven, and you’re meant to learn a lot about the two characters. Giving the player the reigns would’ve ruined the careful characterization done by the author.
Ex. You can’t do anything even in a tense moment
As for facets of the game that act as inspiration, I really liked how they used a text chat as their background. People are familiar with sending texts, and probably have sent emotional texts or drafted long texts staring at a similar screen. I think using mediums that people already have emotional/familiar ties to is a smart decision. I also thought seeing the time stamps of the texts worked towards making the passage of time feel and makes you feel just how long he grieved.
Overall, I thought that this game was super successful at drawing empathy. The texts that are sent feel very raw and real, and even though you don’t know anything about the characters at the start, through their texts you really get to see them. It is a very intimate game, and I think the texts evoke that really well. After all, if someone were to read through my chats with my loved ones, I think they would learn a lot about me. I also like how narratively it took you through the stages of grief, and the ending of him moving on made me sad but also understanding.
