Sketchnote: Game Design as Narrative Architecture by Henry Jenkins
Game Overview and My Play Experience for the First Time: “Night in the Woods”
Figure 1: A screenshot of the main menu of the game.
I have played Night in the Woods for around eight hours over three days on my computer (macOS). This was my first playthrough, and I had reached the part around Harfest. My analysis focuses on this experience rather than the ending.
This game was developed by Infinite Fall, including Scott Benson, Alec Holowka, and Bethany Hockenberry, and published by Finji. The game tells the story of Mae Borowski, a college dropout returning to her hometown called Possum Springs. She wants to return to her old life, but many of her friends have changed, and the town has lost some of its opportunities. The game combines exploration, platforming, dialogue, and character-driven storytelling. The target audience of this game might be older teenagers and adults interested in friendship, uncertainty, and belonging. Official game webpage.
The Town that Tells a Story
What I liked most about playing the game was exploring Possum Springs, especially the closed businesses downtown. They made the town feel like a place losing opportunities rather than simply a setting waiting for an adventure. As a player, I needed to notice details while exploring the town because the game didn’t explain everything through dialogue.
This connects to Henry Jenkins’s Game Design as Narrative Architecture. Jenkins argues that game spaces can tell stories through their environments and the experiences they make possible. Possum Springs doesn’t seem to be just a background for Mae’s story. The places she visits and the conditions she experiences help me understand her situation. Moreover, the town’s apparent decline seems to connect her personal uncertainty to the wider community.
Figure 2: A screenshot of the closed storefront in Possum Springs.
Subgenre and Narrative Affordances
I may describe Night in the Woods as a narrative adventure that combines exploration, platforming, and dialogue choices. The game has some features similar to visual novels because conversations and relationships are central, but players also move through a continuous town and participate in different activities.
This structure provides players with some control over how they experience the story. Moving to different locations in the town and visiting and talking with friends along the way makes the experience more engaging. The branch-and-bottleneck structure discussed in class helps explain this balance very well. Local interactions can vary, while the larger narrative remains authored. Players can influence parts of Mae’s experience without completely controlling her personality or circumstances.
I think this works quite well for a story about relationships because exploration creates participation without requiring every choice to lead to a different ending.
Figure 3: A screenshot of Mae walking around in Possum Springs.
Figure 4: A screenshot of Mae walking around in Possum Springs.
The 4 E’s: Narrative Strategies and Aesthetics
1) Evocative: Familiar Places, Uncomfortable Homecoming
Possum Springs draws on familiar ideas about home and small-town life. The shops, houses, and autumn atmosphere initially give players a welcoming feeling. However, the closed businesses complicate that impression. Returning home might suggest recovering a sense of belonging, but Mae also has to experience changes she cannot simply reverse herself.
This emphasizes Jenkins’s evocative strategy. Familiar settings and cultural associations can help players interpret a story. At the same time, the contrast between the town’s inviting appearance and its apparent decline makes the homecoming feel much more complicated.
Figure 5: A screenshot of the closed storefront in Possum Springs.
2) Enacting: Performing Friendship
The game also uses enacted experiences to develop relationships. When Mae walks around town, visits friends, and joins band practice, it allows players to actively engage in Mae’s everyday life instead of only reading about it.
Joining band practice is one useful example because the rhythm inputs from players make playing music an activity rather than just a fact about Mae’s past. It also clearly connects to Jenkins’s idea of micronarratives, in which smaller incidents can contribute to a larger narrative. These activities may not advance the central mystery, but they can help establish friendship and familiarity.
I think this makes the relationships feel more grounded because I believe that friendship often develops through spending time together, not just through having dramatic conversations.
Figure 6: A screenshot of the band-practice rhythm sequence.
Figure 7: A screenshot of the band-practice rhythm sequence.
3) Embedded: Reading the Town’s Past
The closed businesses in the town also show the embedded narrative. Their condition suggests that important changes happened before Mae returned. Players see the traces of those changes and interpret them alongside the conversations and other environmental details in the game.
This also connects to Jenkins’s idea of the memory palace, where spaces include information that players gradually assemble into an understanding of events. A closed storefront in the game can communicate loss without showing the moment when the business shut down. The town’s environment gives players some clues about its history and also encourages them to consider what those changes mean for its residents.
Figure 7: A screenshot of environmental storytelling in Possum Springs.
Figure 8: A screenshot of environmental storytelling.
4) Emergent: A Personal Route Through Authored Material
The emergent narrative is less prominent in my experience because most conversations and activities were written in advance, so not every choice creates a genuinely emergent story.
However, I think players can influence their experience by deciding where to go, whom to visit, and what to notice. During the game, my attention to the closed businesses influences how I interpret Possum Springs, while other players might focus more on friendships or optional activities.
This is different from the stronger systemic emergence associated with The Sims, which I played before. In The Sims, interactions can generate less predictable stories. However, in Night in the Woods, the main narrative remains authored, while exploration influences the sequence and emphasis of individual experiences.
Figure 9: A screenshot of conversations that occurred in the game.
Empathy: Understanding People Within Their Circumstances
I think the game tries to encourage empathy toward people dealing with uncertainty, changing relationships, and limited opportunities. In the game, Mae is unsure about her future, while her friends have their own responsibilities and concerns. The town’s condition also adds another layer because their personal difficulties exist within a struggling community.
Night in the Woods encourages empathy through conversations, everyday activities, and environmental storytelling. The game gives players time to explore and spend time with the characters instead of relying only on dramatic events. The closed businesses in the town are particularly effective from my point of view because they make the town’s difficulties visible. While engaging with Mae, I can begin to understand the characters’ circumstances without needing every problem to be explained directly or explicitly.
The limited player agency also facilitates this effect. In the game, I can only influence some conversations and decide how to spend time in the town, but I cannot necessarily solve every problem. I think the strategy of giving players limited agency is very successful because it can encourage understanding rather than suggesting that every difficulty has a simple solution.
My overall feeling is a combination of comfort, sadness, and unease. The colorful art style makes Possum Springs inviting, but the changes Mae encounters complicate that feeling. What I learned from the game is that coming home does not necessarily mean recovering the life we remember.
Figure 10: A screenshot of a conversation between Mae and her mom.
Figure 11: A screenshot of environmental storytelling.
Inspiration and Criticism for My Own Narrative Design
After playing Night in the Woods, a feature that I would love to borrow is the relationship between movement and personality. Mae can explore freely even though she cannot control everything happening in her life. I also love how dialogue choices let players participate in Mae’s conversations without turning her into a completely different character. For my own IF game, I would like to design choices that reveal different aspects of a consistent protagonist.
However, I have noticed a potential weakness in Night in the Woods. It’s the repetition of familiar locations. For me, revisiting the same streets can build attachment, but it can also make exploration feel routine. In my own IF game design, I would keep recurring locations and introduce noticeable changes in dialogue and environmental details, as well as character responses.
I also plan to use a branch-and-bottleneck structure to keep my IF game project manageable while preserving meaningful choices. Instead of creating a separate storyline for every decision, choices could influence relationships or reveal different perspectives.
My key takeaway from playing Night in the Woods is that exploration can tell a story without relying entirely on dialogue or major plot events. The closed businesses really stood out to me because they made Possum Springs feel like a place that had lost some of its opportunities. For my own IF game design, I want to create settings worth exploring and characters whose lives extend beyond the player’s control. Sometimes, encouraging empathy means helping players understand other people’s circumstances rather than giving them the power to fix everything.
Figure 11: A screenshot of dialogue choices in Night in the Woods.
Figure 12: A screenshot of dialogue choices in Night in the Woods.
