Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

There are three main kinds of narratorial devices: voice, focalization and distance. Voice imparts a sense of personality or character into the manner that narrative information is conveyed. E.g. a cynical narrator can then make the whole story seem cynical. Voice is usually in the first or second person but can sometimes be in the second, on rare occasions.

Focalization is a more technical sounding term which refers to the narrative devices being used at any given moment to make us attend to something. If the camera is showing shoes, it’s usually not because the film is about shoes, but because the focalization is depriving us of a view of the rest of the body and face, creating a sense of mystery as to who it is that is wearing those shoes! If we can hear a character’s thoughts in a novel, it’s because the text is letting us inside someone’s head momentarily, perhaps with just a few words: “And then she thought to herself, ‘I am binging way too much Netflix.’”

Narrators can be close to or far from the action, and even be participants, or alternately, disembodied ghost observers. They can be a biased or neutral witness compromised by their involvement, or a kind of all-knowing voyeur showing us what has happened.

The implied author is an interesting construct. It refers to the idea that, when we experience a narrative, the creator(s) get to assume any kind of various personas or voices or POVs that they wish, and we should not assume a narrative comes ‘directly’ from the creator/authors but instead we should acknowledge that part of the overall cultural ‘game’ of narratives is that creators get to play roles ‘in between’ the narrative and themselves. Authors mediate themselves through implied authors.

For instance, if I decide to write in the voice of a very mean serial killer, no one (hopefully!) should assume that I personally am a serial killer, but rather I take on a voice or persona which stands in between me and the narrator. That intermediary construct is the ‘implied author’ which one might understand as something like: “author takes a creative and intellectual interest in serial killers and out of this creates a narratorial voice.” In very old-fashioned ways of interpreting narratives, people used to try to get at the creator’s ‘intention’ but that has been shown to be a rather impossible endeavor.

How can anyone possibly know what my intent, as a narrative creator, actually is? All anyone can access, at the most, is the implied author behind the narratorial construction. My (personal, actual) thoughts and intentions cannot be accessed through the narrative itself. Perhaps you can ask me off the record, at a coffee shop, what my intentions were, but no one can access intent directly just through the narrative itself — there is simply no real path for doing so beyond just guessing or assuming.

This becomes much more complicated in highly collaborative media like films and games, where there are too many people at work on constructing the complex mediation. What if the cinematographer had a different intention from the director who had a different intention from the actor or the composer? For the last 100 years or so, pretty much no one academically involved in the interpretation of narratives has taken the project of understanding author intentions seriously.

Diegesis is the reality or world of the story. It is often interchangeable with storyworld as a term. In film, diegetic music is music that is part of the scene (e.g. music from an audio system in a bar), whereas non-diegetic music is the orchestral score that only the audience can hear, and which the characters cannot hear.

Thus, a story can mix non-diegetic and diegetic elements because some elements are for us in the audience. In a game, it is the player who needs to see all that information overlay about what weapons one has, how many bullets are left, how much injury has been sustained, while the zombies who are the targets presumably would know none of this information embedded in the UI.

Don’t always trust narrators, though, since they can be intentionally unreliable. In Kurosawa’s Rashomon, for example, four different people claim to be the murderer (including the dead man’s ghost, who says he killed himself!), so then what do you do and who do you believe when interpreting it?

Free indirect discourse or free indirect style is a concept mainly about the mobility of narratorial perspective. By ‘direct’ what is meant is that the character enunciates their speech directly, usually within quotation marks. By indirect, what is meant are the other ways to obtain vital information about what is going on inside characters’ minds. Interior monologue, however, may be considered direct if it is literally seeming to report out on what someone is actually thinking. Categorizing particular moments in narrative one way or the other can be tricky. A feature of free indirect style is that the interiority of a character temporarily takes over the main narratorial flow of information, without seeming to literally be someone’s real thoughts.

Usually in film, the camera lens and microphones are the main filters of narrator information (enhanced by editing of course), and we don’t usually think of cameras and mics as being human in the same way we might of a literary narrator, since they are mechanical devices recording reality. An exception is voice-over, in which a human presence clearly takes over narrator responsibilities.

The main workhorses of perspective are First Person and Third Person. Sometimes there are interesting discussions of second-person perspective, which some say happens when the POV of a virtual camera is very close to the protagonist-avatar, e.g. just over their shoulder or above their head. Second person narration is the ‘You’ perspective, versus the first person ‘I’ or third person ‘They.’ This argument, while interesting, sort of begs the question as to why the narrative You that is addressed requires the POV to be above the head or behind the shoulder, since usually a You perspective is more face-to-face, as though you are talking to someone. Bright Lights Big City is a novel using the second person, with the protagonist always referred to as You which eventually becomes pretty annoying with all the You You You You etc. Literary forms can easily pull off second person perspective — all you have to do is write,

‘You’re in a room, and you see your reflection in the window, and for some reason your beard is gray, but you remember this morning you were only ten years old and didn’t have facial hair yet.’

See, super easy to do second person POV in writing, and there’s no POV suggestion of being behind or above the character as filmic conceptions of second person perspective might suggest — and by extension, for games as well, because they use virtual cameras.

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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.

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