Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

The general concept of a Narrative Storyworld has been gaining prominence in recent years, no doubt due to the rise of photorealistic real time rendering afforded by game development platforms like Unreal Engine in which world building, whether for video screen-based or AR/VR/MR/XR media, has exploded in importance due to the high levels of sophistication available to creators today.

Reality can be extended in many kinds of ways these days. Perhaps the most important recent revolution in media production has to do with what’s called virtual production whereby the green screen wall is replaced with a wall of curved LEDs streaming high resolution virtual content from Unreal Engine. This allows the actors, director and crew to more fully immerse themselves in the storyworld which becomes more sensorially present during shooting. Increasingly, green screen production techniques are being replaced by virtual production methods that use LED volumes behind the actors for in-camera effects, a technique pioneered with The Mandalorian Disney+ series.

Prior to emergence of these (much more) convincingly immersive computer graphics media, narrative theory seems to have generally contented itself with less flashy terminology such as ‘story setting’ which traditionally might just refer to props on a stage — e.g. backdrops and furniture — reinforced by a few lines of dialogue: “Oh, here we are at Troy, the city is about to fall…”

Virtual world design can run the gamut from the ultra-minimalist (as with Pixel Detective) to cinematic (as with L.A. Noire). Usually when games aspire to the highest level of ‘realism,’ the media reference is going to be ‘cinema’ and not necessarily ‘reality’ itself because of how dominant film has been as a major entertainment form with the highest quality visuals.

These terms I’m using, ‘ultra-minimalist’ vs ‘cinematic’ are general headings which we can use for general analysis of design choices made to involve us in the storyworld. Pixel Detective gives us (in addition to an aesthetic of pixelation throughout):

simple geometries
no shading or lighting — shapes, surfaces and volumes are 2D-flat
words are conveyed through text, so character presence is abstracted (less physical/emotional)
funny bobbing body movements (non-mimetic stylization)
simple sound effects
music as a general wallpaper approach to scoring
some basic UI information overlays like arrows are circles around character
in terms of media censor warnings, this is pretty G-rated stuff

By contrast L.A. Noire presents:

a lot of bad language! (if you watch it for long enough or in the right places)
violence
complex and highly detailed objects and spaces, with shading, textures, physics
minimal UI overlays — sometimes there’s a map element and this walkthrough has subtitles
characters have very distinct personalities
dialogues is spoken with real acting
it’s not meant for kids, for sure
more nuanced music editing
rich sound design
more believable (mimetic) human gestures and movement

There are a lot of other contrasts one can draw between these two very different approaches to detective narratives but these give a general idea.

Storyworld imply populations of characters that make sense of them, and characters require a storyworld to in a sense ‘justify’ to an audience why they are the way they are. There is a reciprocal relationship between the two. Characters populate storyworlds just as cities, neighborhoods or countries have populations and the relationship between the two is not arbitrary — i.e. probably ninjas won’t show up during a runway show in mid-20th century Paris, and gritty bar bouncers won’t show up in Pixel Detective because with that stripped-down pixel aesthetic it’s hard to make anything seem gritty!

We can add additional analytic layers to this outline of the relationship between characters and storyworld by highlighting the following, using Roland’s bar fight scene from season three of True Detective as an example (it is easy to find this on YouTube):

Characters are agents in the narrative — they make things happen, or maybe they don’t and things happen to them instead, as influenced by the storyworld. Roland has a certain agential capacity for starting bar fights.

It is mainly through the character’s actions and speech that we ascertain not just who they are, as characters, but how they make sense in the particular storyworld. Roland behaves like a detective in rural Arkansas, not like Sherlock Holmes in Victorian England, even though they are both detectives!

The audience will have certain associations with the storyworld. Myself, having been born in Missouri, I happen to have personally visited rural Arkansas, but maybe you haven’t. Roland’s bar fight scene will either confirm, challenge or establish certain ideas you might have about rural Arkansas and the kinds of people there.

Character actions, as we know, can drive the plot (as constituent events) or illustrate their traits (as supplementary events). Roland’s bar fight really has more to do with showing us that he’s the kind of guy who has this way of blowing off steam — starting bar fights. This scene doesn’t really have major plot significance in the overall story arc.

Places are typically associated with certain languages, slang terms, vocabulary and regional accents so character dialogue reflects the storyworld in that way, too.

The storyworld sets overall parameters or conditions for what we expect. In none of the three seasons of True Detective do we expect aliens to land or Bollywood dancers to suddenly show up and do some bhangra, though the Netflix Fargo series does introduce aliens sans song and dance in its second season, if you want to have your genre expectations played with and get a nostalgic classic rock throwback feeling by listening to Billy Thorpe’s Children of the Sun.

Aside from setting up these overall genre limits of what’s possible or impossible, storyworlds also define each particular situation concretely, setting us in a house, a rooftop, a factory, a parking lot, an interrogation room, a bar, etc.

Just as characters can be designed Mimetically or Non-Mimetically, so can the storyworld. These aesthetic choices imply each other, since you normally wouldn’t have a mimetic character set in a non-mimetic storyworld, or vice versa. Typical exceptions to this are when live actors are mixed into animated worlds (or vice versa), as in Cool World. Usually the overall approach to the narrative has its mimetic or non-mimetic creative strategy and everything else falls into line behind that.

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.

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