Game Design as Narrative Architecture

Notes on reading:

• Not all games are stories (Tetris)
  • Pure systems
  • Sensations
  • Simulations
• Games go for story and borrow from narrative theory
• Studying stories doesn’t mean that games have to be movies
• “Play”
  • Never just story
  • Mechanics, UI, feel
  • MDA matters still
• Games tell stories differently from movies, and the medium makes a difference
• “Story”
  • Definition too narrow
  • Author-centric
  • ignores small bits
  • transmedia worlds ignored
• Designers as narrative architects
  • building spaces that make stories possible
• Type of space in a story:
  • Evocative
    • Using what people already know
      • Pirates
      • Star Wars
      • Wonderland
  • Enacted (Kathryn Yu from immersive media group “No Proscenium” calls this “Embodied”)
    • Goals mapped onto geography
      • The player is “playing through” a story
      • Physical reaction
      • VR
      • Walking through the steps of the story as the character
        • Like ready player one War Games scene
  • Embedded
    • Clues, props
    • environmental changes
    • revealing the backstory, instead of forcing it to the player
    • memory palace
    • hidden elements of narrative
  • Emergent
    • systems for letting players construct their own narratives
    • MMORPG
    • Sims
• Environmental storytelling
  • textures, sounds
    • reinforce premise, don’t contradict
      • ludo-narrative dissonance
  • Staging areas
  • sightlines
• Micronarratives
• Plots can be like accordions
  • anchors with expandable set-pieces
• Redundancy helps
  • Important info should be spread across the world, not just in one place
• Flashbacks
• Design
  • spaces should be legible
    • objects should have a clear function
  • consequence encoded in environment
  • geographical pace
    • safe rooms
    • choke points
  • Conflict/Romance is seeded in systems
• Worlds should invite story.

For my game, I played a few hours into “NORCO,” a point-and-click “southern gothic” narrative/dialogue-focused game by Geography of Robots. The game’s target audience seems to be people interested in story-based games, as well as point-and-click games, because it was marketed that way to me, that’s how I found it. The reviews also mention the story quite a bit as much of its appeal. I played it on Steam on my Mac with a controller.

The game is about a light-apocalyptic USA (as in, not post-apocalyptic, and not very heavily apocalyptic), in which we meet a man who has moved away from his home town, but upon news of his mother’s (apparent) death, he moves back home to find out more about what happened, and try to reconnect (and locate) his brother. These games often take me a long time, because I like piecing together all the embedded elements, and the game encourages this. Mechanically, I really love a game that doesn’t stay stuck in one medium (shoot-em-up, rogue-like, IF, etc.), and it seems to be a trend these days that games are heading in where they don’t want to fit in just one of those boxes, and this game used that framework as a very interesting way to tell the story. It’s hard to say what the subgenre was, really, but it was a point-and-click game first and foremost. You look around locations in the game, clicking on things on the walls and in the environment and gaining information about them.

It begins with a very simple VN approach to storytelling, you’re just clicking through information provided by the game, but you’re able to make choices within these long stretches of text—seemingly making a difference in the long run. I do often wonder what would have happened if I made a different choice in these scenarios, as there were a lot of options for choices to be made.

Looking on Reddit reveals there are indeed more than one ending, and I wonder how these early-game decisions impact that, both like and unlike Emily is Away, which I also played.

As the game continues past the intro, you finally get onto the ground, and are able to meet characters and interact with the space, combining the enacted and embedded narratives together. Emily tells its story through a screen; NORCO tells it through rooms and minigames. There were simple social puzzles, you need to talk to one person to get info about another person in order to get to the next place, but the game wasn’t about these puzzles, and that’s something that I’d like to bring into my game. I love simple puzzles that allow you to broaden the satisfaction of the player, and that really supports the narrative more than a complex puzzle you’re stuck on for a long time. A problem I often have with these games (I felt this way with Stray, too) is that if you can’t figure out what you’re supposed to do, it totally takes you out of the immersion of the game. Any sense of urgency presented before you is immediately shot down when you can have what feels like an infinite stretch of time between lock and key. I didn’t feel that egregiously with NORCO, and in fact, I never felt stuck, often I felt ahead of the curve, having explored on my own before going back into what “needed to be done.”

A key mechanic in this game was the “mind map.” This was an in-game notebook made of clickable bubbles—each bubble is a person, place, lead, or idea you’ve learned. You open it to reread short notes, follow links between bubbles, and keep track of the mystery without scrolling through walls of text. This was especially impactful, because not only was it a place to store the massive amounts of information you were coming across, but also a meter for understanding what was important and what was just color. You pieced together memories in this game about memories through choices (and you could go back and complete all of the choices, so none of them are locked in), and they help you inform what you need to do next.

There were so many other moments that I said “Oh my God” out loud, including minigames I wasn’t expecting, gore/horror elements, and a full protagonist swap.

I think the game tries to draw empathy toward families and communities living in the shadow of extractive industry, and toward a landscape that’s been damaged and loved at the same time. It does this by keeping you close to everyday spaces (kitchens, strip-malls, bedrooms, levees), letting you listen more than declare, and showing consequences directly in the environment. For me, it worked: I felt protective of the people and the place. Overall, the game evoked melancholy, curiosity, and a steady ache—melancholy from the palettes and matter-of-fact tragedy, curiosity from the Mind Map’s “one more thread,” and the ache from seeing a home that can hurt you and still be home.