Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

Bakhtin’s concept of ‘chronotope’ is a narrative equivalent of what in physics these days is called spacetime (one word) which is the geometric ‘fabric’ of reality originally theorized by Einstein. The chronotope highlights the intense interconnections between time and space in a narrative in a way that is more modern or contemporary compared to earlier eras.

In the earlier days when radio plays were popular, listeners were asked to turn off the lights in their homes in order to more fully immerse themselves in the radio-based narrative. A similar thing happens even today when in theaters we are all reminded to turn off our cell phones so as not to break immersion in the film experience.

Space in storworld can range from ‘impoverished’ (barely there — think of the claustrophobia films where the character is stuck the whole time in the back of a car trunk or underground in a grave) — to ranging over vast spaces like galaxies, multiverses — or more down to earth roaming on quests and road trips. Narratives often involve a ‘mental cartography’ (Marie-Laure Ryan’s term) where we generate our own internal mental map of the spaces depicted in a narrative or even not depicted (all the spaces not shown but implied).

Most narratives involve nested storyworlds. Not only might a storyworld have degrees of scale — e.g. a dungeon, in a castle, in a kingdom, on a continent, on a planet with other continents, with other dimensions where there are spirits and demons and gods — but characters also have inner worlds. Any narrative can instantaneously shift perspectives and cross into any of these other worlds.

In particular, characters have ‘possible worlds’ (and so do we), worlds we imagine could exist ‘if only.’ What would your life be like if you won a lottery ticket? That’s a possible world. What would the galaxy be like if all the Jedi were defeated and the Sith won? That’s also a possible world. A good metaphor for these nested storyworlds within storyworlds would be the Russian Babushka dolls. However, moving outward, one eventually does come to a final limit — our actual reality (the real world of the audience) and narratives cannot really exceed that — they can only nest other realities within them, which themselves are nested in our ‘real reality.’

Sometimes stories have vague outlines of other stories, which are called shadow stories. These are different from embedded narratives because they have a higher degree of vagueness or incompleteness. “Well, if she didn’t kill them, maybe it was that odd guy walking down the street some neighbors said they saw….” There’s not much of a story there, but there’s a shadowy hint of one, and that suffices for it to be called a shadow story. A shadow story has more extreme gaps compared to regular narratives.

Sometimes shadow stories will rely heavily on masterplots and types in order to give some kind of outline and plausibility in the gaps they create. In my example in the previous paragraph, that type might be ‘the itinerant drifter,’ some wandering presence who does not belong, like a vagabond who is not part of the neighborhood community.

Analepsis is leaping across time, e.g. a flashback, and a metalepsis is a leaping across spatial boundaries, e.g cameos of famous people. If you’ve seen any Marvel movies and you know anything about Stan Lee, every time Stan Lee shows up in a Marvel movie, that’s a metalepsis — a leap across the boundaries of the storyworld to the actual guy who invented a lot of the heroes in the comics. ‘Analepsis’ might remind you of the term ‘anachronistic’ which means ‘out of time.’

I find that Christopher Nolan’s films are full of metalepsis — in fact, this is often that main effect aimed for (it seems to me at least) — where you may have a parallel narrative moving backwards in time, or shifts between the real world and a dream world, or where the future impinges directly on its past (the film’s present). In these examples, what makes these metalepsistic is that these different storyworlds of the narrative are constantly intruding upon and criss-crossing each other (but you also have to be familiar with his films to perhaps see the connection to this concept).

Narrative always seems to exist prior to the narration. Most narratives are told in the past tense, as though the storyworld and actions/events happened first, then someone told the story about it. Sure, one can write in the present tense, which is ‘the historical present’ but perhaps because of ancient traditions where people told stories that happened ‘a long time ago’ as with myths and Star Wars, storyworlds have this sense of ‘being in the past’ relative to the narratorial perspective.

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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.