Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

One of the capabilities of interactive Narrative is to afford exploration of different perspectives of the characters in a story. However this is not limited to digital narratives, but can be found in literature as well. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, for example, is a series of four novels that tell the ‘same’ story through the perspective of four different characters. In film, Rashomon and The Thin Blue Line are famous examples of exploring multiple perspectives in narrative.

As a narrative strategy, multiperspectivalism will typically put the idea of a central and knowable truth in question. After all, what can we readers/viewers/interactors know of the ‘truth’ when all we have available to us is contradicting narratives?

Most crime-based narratives present the notion that a clever crack team of forensic experts can eventually use science and technology to trace events back to a truth that is objective and which can cut through all stories of the characters. Whole franchises have been built on this premise, such as in the various CSI TV series.

Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line subverts our expectations that we can trust those responsible for law enforcement by presenting different accounts of a murder, using the re-enactment of the accounts to highlight a situation where someone was wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. These re-enactments show discrepancies in the various accounts.

However, what often happens in real life is that there is clear objective evidence available, but two stories are told of the same event by the opposing sides in court. An historically important American example where there is objective evidence and divergent narratives are with the video clips from the encounter between Rodney King and the LA police. The video is clear evidence of what happened — except that it can be read in two different ways. Does the video show police brutality, or a motorist resisting arrest? The jury acquitted the officers, which sparked race riots in LA.

The film classic which is usually referred to in the context of multi-perspectivalism is Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), in which a murder and rape in the woods is told through the perspectives of a bandit, the woman, a woodcutter, and the dead man’s ghost animating a spiritual medium. It is based on the short story “In a Grove.” The ‘Rashomon effect’ refers to the way that ‘the truth’ can be impossible to get at when all we have are conflicting accounts, referring to the phenomenon in which different people have different interpretations or recollections of the same event.

The Rashomon effect highlights the subjectivity of human perception and the role that personal biases, prejudices, and motivations can play in shaping an individual’s interpretation of events. It also highlights the difficulties that can arise in trying to objectively understand or reconstruct the truth about a past event, as different people may have different accounts of what happened.

The Rashomon effect serves as a reminder that people’s perceptions of events are not always reliable, and is often used in narrative strategies that want to call the idea of there being a final truth into question.

The Wholphin DVD Magazine issue no. 3 has a whacky take on multi-perspectival strategy. Here the approach is to play off language and subtitles. On this DVD, different editors create variations on the meaning of the same episode by radically altering the subtitles while all the other audio remains the same.

This form of humor plays off the idea that the intended audience will not understand the original Japanese. This creates an opportunity to generate alternate stories just by changing the subtitles! I should mention that the subtitle changes are in the direction of some ‘perversity’ and ‘political incorrectness’ since that is the approach they’re going for.

A more readily accessible medium-based approach to changing meaning in a story by playing the connection between image and sound can be found on YouTube (search The “Friends” Theme Song (STAR WARS: ROGUE ONE EDITION)), where the music from the Friends TV show replaces the soundtrack to a montage of Rogue One which causes us to hold in our minds perspectives on two very different kinds of narrative worlds.

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.

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