Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

All narratives likely raid or steal from other narratives in some way. I think you would have a hard time creating a sci-fi Narrative without borrowing ideas about space ships and computers from other sci-fi films, though you sometimes see something innovative or at least different, such as Dark’s novel time travel apparatus via caves and tunnels. Or, is it really novel, or just a steampunk and Celtic appropriation transposed into geology?

Because narratives are always stealing or borrowing from others, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that when a film is made of a novel, it steals what it wants, usually the main constituent events, since there usually isn’t enough time to include all supplementary events.

Intertextuality — also referred to as borrowing in the context of adaptation — refers to the way in which all texts include linkages to other texts (remember, ‘text’ can also mean a film, a game, a song, etc.). Wikipedia’s definition is decent:

“Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience’s interpretation of the text. Intertextuality is the relation between texts that are inflicted by means of quotations and allusion.”

An intersecting approach to intertextuality aims for a very high degree of fidelity or closeness between the original and its version in another medium, where the world and texture are treated in a more faithful manner. The Sin City films’ use of a high contrast visual style aims for reproducing in film form the texture and feel of the original comic series, for instance.

A transformation approach aims to bring to bear the full resources of the new medium to bear on the story and doesn’t aim to reproduce the media effects of the original narrative medium. A good example of a transformative approach would be Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, called just Titus in the film version, where cars and machine guns appear in the mise-en-scene.

Paratexts are textual (meaning-bearing) elements that surround a text. A familiar example of a paratext would be the title of a painting, which usually exists outside the frame and is posted on the wall. Again, Wikipedia’s definition is fine to grasp the main concept:

“In literary interpretation, paratext is material that surrounds a published main text supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public.”

When a medium is new, the ways in which works are created for them follow familiar patterns. The first state is Repurposing, i.e. taking familiar things and simply recreating them in the new medium. We see this with Tennis for Two, since tennis was already well established as a sport and so it becomes an obvious thing to emulate in an interactive game.

Adaptation is when an established property is modified for the new medium in a way that the medium’s affordances are capitalized on to add new dimensions of experiencing the property. Finally, Original Creation approaches try to do something that hasn’t been done before in the precedent media.

Two important and related ideas are Convergence and Transmedia. The former term implies the coming together of different elements, such as combining the technologies of a handheld gaming device and mobile phones. Today’s smartphones obviously imply a lot of technological convergences, since they integrate a lot of different hardware and software such as GPS, QR codes, voice recognition, accelerometers, internet, photo/video/sound, audio beacons, data surveillance and so on.

Transmedia is when a narrative property is intentionally developed to work across many media, such as when a comic property is developed for feature film(s) which need to support later video game development and even theme park rides and spaces. The narrative property is imagined as needing to function across these different media realms to expand its commercialization potential and reach audiences in different ways.

Transmedia (also called intermedia) is all the rage today, with ancient gods and monsters long ago turned into comic books then turned into films and turned into games and eventually turned into amusement theme parks. Loki was the Norse god of Mischief, and is now a recent Disney+ series.

I don’t know if Loki would make for an exciting roller coaster concept, or an immersive hotel experience, as with the SpiderMan roller coaster, or the Star Wars hotel, but it seems we can say that the transmedia storytelling approach is no longer content with just jumping media (e.g. from book to comic to film to game) but ultimately treats real spaces and real-time experience as the final canvas on which to construct its storyworld, so that we ourselves, as loyal fans and paying customers, can actually occupy it with our bodies.

Pluramedia, or the pluramedial, refers to a narrative that employs different media simultaneously. To some extent many media do this — comics use words and images, for example, and films use music, acting, architecture, costume design, writing, cinematography etc. in a great concatenation of many individual art forms that one could isolate as being their own crafts.

In a plurimedia work, though, each medium has a certain amount of autonomy. Each medium does not necessarily fuse into a higher level medium, but instead these works produce experiences where it is more like each medium is simply juxtaposed against another.

The idea of ‘the third screen’ refers to the ways in which the ubiquity of computational media devices far exceeds the traditional divisions between television and film as the main moving image media. Today, media can address audiences on a plethora of devices in a variety of contexts, such as mobile and home computers.

Interactive narrative, as a business model, is still developing its strategies for monetization. Paying for downloading games or streaming movies have a well established economics model, but many of the ways that interactive narrative can be monetized are very new and somewhat experimental, so it’s not always clear how creators can make money from this kind of work.

Product placement is one strategy that has also been perfected in movies and games (e.g. advergaming), so a lot of interactive narratives have a strong connection to branded experiences of one kind or another.

Despite the relative newness of the technologies used for interactive narrative, a number of general practices have emerged in a stable enough way to almost be called genres of interactive narrative, such as all the ways of creating user generated content in social media, VR, Fan Fiction, video sharing sites, Machinima, and Hyperfiction.

Hybridization of forms is a constant with new media, since the nature of a technology is that it can always be bolted onto another technology (using the term ‘bolt’ here metaphorically, since software doesn’t have bolts!).

Related Articles

Origins of Narrative

Narrative in Analog & Digital Media

Interactivity in Narrative

Narrative Continuity vs Poetic Montage

Defining Narrative

Narrative Perception

The Narrative Matrix

The Structure of Narrative Time

Characters

Character Types

Narrative Identity

Visual Design of Characters

Conflict in Narrative

The Narrative Arc

Narrative Structure

Narrative Bifurcation

Dialogue

Humor

Storyworlds

Storyworlds & Characters

Facets of Storyworlds

Storyworld in Literary Theory

POV & Focalization

The Fourth Wall & Direct Address

Narratorial Devices

Themes & Tropes

Multiperspectivalism

Rhetoric & Normalization

The Limits of Narrative

Meaning & Interpretation

Fact, Fiction & Narrative Contestation

Space Time Causality Medium

Character Interactions and Narrative Progression

Focalization

Agency in Interactive Narrative

Remediation

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.

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