Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

Generally, what structures a Narrative is the conflict. Most of the narrative has to do with the conflict, but there is space in a narrative for before-the-conflict and after-the-conflict, because like many a song and symphony we usually like to ramp up emotionally to the full intensity of the conflict, then eventually glide back down gently to a state of feeling that the conflict is over, called closure.

The Closure is the wind down. All of our built up emotions (pity, terror, catharsis) complete their release as the narrative closes and we transition to a state of returning to everyday reality.

Historically authors strove for definitive closure at the level of questions especially around morality. Stories used to always have a ‘moral of the story’ (its point or argument for improving our ethical character). Usually good has to triumph and evil be vanquished and come to think about it, most narratives still conform to this ancient pattern!

One can leave a story open-ended intentionally, and that itself is a statement about closure — the closure of the story can be the rejection of the idea that closure is even possible or desirable. Artists like Checkhov argued that novels don’t answer important questions, they strive instead to set the questions up properly in their full complexity and humanness. Or, the point of resisting closure may be simply that there are sometimes no easy answers in life.

Certainly closure isn’t very ‘realistic’ because in reality things keep happening and there are always effects that follow from past events with no clear dividing lines. Sometimes a treaty may be signed — the war has ended! — but the trauma of the war lingers for generations in books and movies made in the ensuing decades, so where is the closure?

Interpreting a narrative is game-like, because it involves a degree of playfulness and creativity in the reading. Games have rules and so do interpretations — you can interpret like a feminist, a Marxist, an environmentalist, an escapist, a believer of your religion and so on. There are certainly many rules for interpreting narratives that impart this game-like quality to it.

No matter how much of a closure effect you can create in your story, narrative is always gap-filled and you can never close all the gaps. To do so would wreck narrative itself, because no narrative can show absolutely everything and also every narrative needs to rely on the imagination of its audience to complete it.

We don’t usually talk about “opener and closure” in narratives with equal frequency. Music shows have openers or opening acts, and there are opening scenes in films obviously, and opening lines. I think this language comes from the theater, where the drapes open, the play starts, and at the end of the play, the drapes close. Somehow the closing of drapes at the end of a show came to take on a psychological aspect of closure (like in our minds, we close our mental drapes…). And for whatever reason, narrative theorists appear to be more interested in closure than openers. In any event, they imply each other, as the respective ends, mouth and tail ends I guess(!), of the central conflict, which is most of the story.

Conflicts often involve an agon of some kind (the Greek word for contest, as in protagonist and antagonist). Wondering about how the conflict will resolve itself provides lots of opportunities to create tension by playing with the lack of closure, specifically around emotions like suspense and curiosity. Narratives are supposed to end, so anything open-ended causes tension. Generally we wonder about unknown things in a narrative along two lines, that of action (what will happen next), and that of knowledge (questions and answers like: what’s going on? Who did that? Why is this happening?). These two vectors, which can cause us to really want closure to happen, are known as the level of expectations (action-related) and the level of questions (knowledge-related).

Tension is an important narrative element that can be found in linear and interactive narrative. This can be created by putting characters at risk, leaving things unknown, causing uncertainty, having a countdown (the ticking clock) and similar narrative techniques.

Maybe that’s one reason why the ending of the original film The Vanishing (1988) is so commented on, because it ends with instant closure on both the levels of expectations and questions, when all our questions throughout the film are answered, through both action and knowledge related to the central puzzle.

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Bibliography & Further Reading

• A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
• Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers
• An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mayra
• Basics of Game Design by Michael Moore
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
• Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World vol 1 by Gabe Barrett
• Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: an Encyclopedia Of Mechanisms by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev
• Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon
• Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford
• Clockwork Game Design by Keith Burgun
• Elements of Game Design by Robert Zubek
• Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
• Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams
• Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design by Ernest Adams
• Game Design Foundations by Brenda Romero
• Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton
• Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans
• Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames edited by Chris Bateman
• Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp
• Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling, by Kelly McErlean
• Introduction to Game Systems Design by Dax Gazaway
• Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike Selinker, David Howell, et al
• Kobold’s Guide to Worldbuilding edited by Janna Silverstein
• Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, 2nd Edition by Scott Rogers
• Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, et al.
• Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction by Kent Puckett
• Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan, et al.
• Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Fourth Edition by Mieke Bal
• Practical Game Design by Adam Kramarzewski and Ennio De Nucci
• Procedural Storytelling in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
• Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing by Wendy Despain
• Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman
• Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Frontiers of Narrative) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon, et al
• Tabletop Game Design for Video Game Designers by Ethan Ham
• The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition by Jesse Schell
• The Board Game Designer’s Guide: The Easy 4 Step Process to Create Amazing Games That People Can’t Stop Playing by Joe Slack
• The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott
• The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, by by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson
• The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf
• The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory by David Herman
• The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten
• Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design by Gordon Calleja
• Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques by Evan Skolnick
• Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG edited by Wendy Despain
• Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince
• 100 Principles of Game Design by DESPAIN

Acknowledgement

This online courseware was co-authored with OpenAI technology in order to produce a clear, succinct writing style that will be accessible to the widest range of readers from a variety of backgrounds.

Narrative Structure was originally published in Sound & Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.