Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

Let’s say there’s a Narrative. Ok cool, some narrative is there. But wait, don’t most narratives have sub-narratives within them, and aren’t there also external narratives around them which also help us to make sense of them? That seems pretty obvious.

Books have front and back covers. Is the title part of the narrative? The image on the front or the summary on the back? What about the reviews of well-known readers in the first few pages? On Netflix all movies have short paragraphs explaining them. These are all examples of paratext, other narrative elements immediately outside of the narrative which have some kind of impact on it. “A True Story” as a subtitle will certainly impact the narrative, while it is not really part of it, either. Paratext is an example of a framing narrative — i.e. some other narrative that frames or sets up some additional context for the narrative to unfold.

And within a narrative, don’t characters tell stories within the story? If a news program is playing in the background, that’s a story itself, within the enveloping story. These narratives-within-narratives are embedded narratives. Luke wants to know about his father and wants to hear stories about him from Obi Wan Kenobi. In literature there are some famous examples like A Thousand and One Nights or The Decomeron in which the ‘narrative’ is a kind of vehicle or structure for many other narratives.

These examples and questions probe at the limits of narrative, and understanding the limits of something is a good way to know that something. If I buy a car in winter time, I want to test it right away in the snow, to understand its limits which also is a way of understanding its capabilities.

There are many narratives which generally are called ‘experimental’ or even ‘anti-narratives’ because they push at the boundaries of narrative so much. Interactive narrative doesn’t have to be digital of course — you can unbind the pages and make a game out of how to read them, like with Hopscotch or Composition №1. One thing these contrarian or experimental narratives do is challenge the overall linearity of what we expect from narratives. You might end up with something more like a complicated game with some narrative elements in it.

Some forms like role playing are hard to distinguish from general life. With role playing, there is a general story premise and then people improvise (this is with real role playing games, not computer RPGs with databases of stored dialogue). Narratives with these real life play/improv aspects have been theorized as ‘ergotic’ to characterize how they are different from other narratives. ‘Ergodic’ is a theoretical term for needing to do a lot of extra work to obtain the narrative experience.

Hypertext narratives are an example of ergodic stories. Hypertext relies on links embedded throughout which we use to jump into new sections of the narrative. One issue that often arises with hypertext is that they are often not online for very long because they are made in technologies that may become obsolete, like Flash.

Related Articles

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.

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