Narrative Theory Series
Defining Narrative
Designing Games & Interactive Stories
We mean a lot of things by the term ‘narrative’ and intellectuals — scholars, researchers, artists etc. — have produced many (sometimes conflicting) definitions of what a narrative is. Narrative is many things. It can refer to cultural products we normally think of as narratives, e.g. novels, movies, sagas, folk tales, myths, i.e. things that basically label themselves, “This is a story!” But we also generally make sense of the world through narratives, e.g. how we understand ourselves and construct our identity has a lot to do with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Narrative is also an aspect of cognition, and we use it to make sense of reality in general. The Big Bang theory is in part a story of how the universe began. Did you know that the Covid vaccines have microchips in their doses, so that Bill Gates and big tech CEOs can use mind control technology on us?
Sigh. The pandemic years have been rather embarrassing for narrative, since it shows how social media can make really bad stories circulate globally, quickly, and make millions of people believe dumb things. Why do people believe these narratives? Well, why do people believe that a long time ago, a supernatural all powerful being felt lonely (usually depicted as a male-father type), so he created the universe and living things to worship him and keep him company, and maybe give him something to do, like judging good and bad behavior. Many billions of people believe that kind of story.
Narratives convince people on many levels, e.g. emotionally and cognitively, or by relating to our memories, or authoritatively as they are told to us by elders as ways of explaining the universe, or they are shared in social media by people who think just like us.
Some argue that narrative is implicit in the basic grammar of language, so that as soon as you have subject/predicate structure in a sentence, you have a story of sorts: X did Y, etc. Narrative is also universal — you won’t find a single human culture anywhere without it.
Narratives are often, in the history of literary studies, contrasted against its ‘opposite,’ poetry — though the ancient heroic poems by Homer, for example, were clearly narratives, too, being narratives that were sung or chanted along with musical accompaniment. Sometimes poems are said to have a central feeling versus a central story, or poems contrast a sequence of images rather than a series of events.
Most scholars think that narratives are about representing events, and some debate whether causality needs to be a kind of glue between those events. In this book, we will keep in mind that there are lots of theories about narratives, but we will generally say that narrative is about events in time and space in a causal relationship to each other.
You will see in this Aristotle passage quite a lot of discussion of the importance of causality in the earliest (~2500 years ago) conceptual formulations as to what narrative is all about:
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.
Narrative is undoubtedly about time. There is the time of physics, e.g. mathematically expressed in experiments as T1, T2, T3, T4 — time at various intervals being measured — also called clock time. Narratives have a timing for sure and exist within clock time, and if you are making a video, you know you rely heavily upon the video timeline which is clock time, but narratives per se are more about human time, or the significance of events for humans experiencing them.
Even a simple picture can be loaded with narrative implications. A photograph is still, but we will naturally imagine what came before and after, and thus construct narrative in our minds. There are also narrative templates, e.g. “good shall conquer evil,” or “the underdog can vanquish the more powerful foe” or “nothing matters because we all die” and so on. People who create narratives often utilize these pre-existing templates to convince us of their story. “Super rich people will form secret cabals that rule the world, and so they put microchips into vaccines” etc.
Much of our knowledge is stored in our minds, or expressed, as narratives. How do you know how to cook something? Tell me how to cook it, and that will be a story of sorts. What caused World War 2? What caused the stock market crash in 2008? Why is Vancouver real estate so expensive? You will find that knowledge in general and narratives are highly intertwined.
At a minimum, narrative needs events. But, what undergoes those events? Some scholars call those entities. Let’s say that something happens, e.g. a bee stings you. That’s an event, Ouch! But there are entities present: the bee, your arm, the table, the glass of wine that attracted the bee to your patio table, etc. It’s hard to imagine events without entities. In an abstract sense, an entity is of space and events are of time.
In J J Gibson’s environmental psychology (he coined the term ‘affordance’ popularized by Don Norman), he said that vision gives us knowledge about Objects in the environment, and sounds gives us information about Events in the environment. That’s a great perceptual-environmental-psychological insight that can easily be applied to many narratives.
Normally, the entities experiencing events in narratives we call Characters. You can have stories without characters, like when we narrate something that happened to an object — why a round thing fell off the table etc. Most stories, though, aren’t about geometric and physical situations, of course, but are about representations about other People whose actions we become interested in.
While there are some scholars who think narrative can be conceived without causality, I think it’s pretty hard to imagine an event without some kind of causality being involved. The philosopher Immanuel Kant — whom many say was the philosophical ‘father’ of cognitive psychology — claimed we can’t say we understand anything at all if we don’t situate it in relation to space, time and causality.
An event is something that happens, which usually means something causes something else to happen (cause and effect). Poems, often being sequences of relatively static images — because they don’t cause each other, but are juxtaposed against each other — are often said to have thematic coherence, but not narrative coherence. I.e. the images are related in theme, tone, emotion, mood, general ideas, but are not placed in cause and effect relations to each other as with stories.
A major distinction is usually made between Story and Narrative Discourse, which is a different contrast than between Story and Plot. Story is what you would tell someone else that narrative is about. If they tell you: “Oh, in the movie Luke Skywalker found out Darth Vader was his father all this time,” that’s story. Narrative discourse is how that information was conveyed: the bad acting, visual effects, the medium of film, the dramatic music, the close-up on Mark Hammil’s face, Darth’s outstretched hand, the dark shadowy space station, etc.
The narrative discourse is the manner in which a story is experienced, via its medium and the aesthetic techniques employed. The story (when contrasted with narrative discourse rather than against the plot) is what you might tell someone a narrative is about (its general gist), whereas the narrative discourse would pertain to all the ways in which the story was told (e.g. camera angles, fast edits, color scheme, framing, etc.).
Narrative happens between creators and audiences in the form of some media. Also, the narrative discourse can be analyzed independently of either the audience or the creator, since there is no formal or required sameness between what is intended in a narrative, and how it is perceived. Both creating narratives, and creating interpretations while undergoing experiences, are equally creative activities and no side — producer, audience, medium– can be said to have priority in meaning making.
The word “discourse” feels like it refers only to words, speech or books, but when you remember that filmic techniques are always described as a language (e.g. close-up, establishing shot, match action, tracking shot, etc.), then the word “discourse” shouldn’t bother you too much. Just think of it as the medium and all the media techniques and properties used to convey the story that you will summarize to someone else afterwards (“You know, Luke’s so cool, he didn’t give into the Dark Side after all.”).
Time is incredibly malleable in narrative. There is a clock time to the narrative (e.g. a 5 minute film), but eons of narrative time can pass within that amount of physical time. A good example would be the Love Death and Robots (Netflix) episode “Ice Age” where a couple discovers a whole civilization rapidly progressing historically in their fridge.
You can do the opposite of course, slow time down so that you can spend five minutes looking at something that took actually 5 seconds to unfold. For example, What If Every Second Lasted an Hour?
In Western civilization, theater (like, live people acting on a stage in front of an audience) was often valorized because of its “unity of time” since the action (and thus, most of the narrative) unfolded on the stage in real time, but even with theater, characters often tell stories about other things that happened to them outside of what’s actually presented on the stage, so even live theater usually contains forms of malleable time.
Aside from events and entities, other terms such as Setting and Storyworld point to the role that Place has in a narrative. Where narratives happen usually matters a lot in a story! There are things you would do on a Death Star or police interrogation room or romantic restaurant or abandoned mansion that really only make sense if you are located in those places to do those things (e.g. have a light sabre duel, torture a suspect, flirt, play Ouji board games, etc.).
In many narratives, there are what you might call the main events (e.g. the major plot points), and more minor events. The former are called Constituent Events and the latter Supplementary Events. A good example of a supplementary event would be the casino scene in The Last Jedi that lots of people hate and want removed from the film. Presumably that means it’s not really necessary to tell the story!
We all know that with any film, many scenes end up “on the cutting room floor.” Usually films eliminate a lot of scenes during editing, which means a lot of scenes are so supplementary they actually just get eliminated entirely. These kinds of events (constituent, supplementary) help us to distinguish those scenes which are really driving the plot, versus those that might be adding a bit of atmosphere or flavor to the main narrative.
Not all narratives have narrativity. “My wall is blue” has a subject/predicate structure, but it doesn’t feel like a story but rather just a report about a factual entity. Even “My wall was painted blue,” which relates an event, doesn’t feel like much of a story. “I shot the alien zombie and its blue blood spurted out, painting my wall alien zombie blue” feels more like a story and thus has narrativity, a mental quality of feeling like a narrative.
Our mental absorption often directs us to times earlier or later than what is being presented to us in the moment of a narrative. Curiosity makes us think backwards in time (e.g. why did Luke’s dad turn to the Dark Side) while Suspense makes us think of future possibilities (e.g. will Darth Dad convince Luke to turn against the Light Side?).
Related Articles
Narrative in Analog & Digital Media
Narrative Continuity vs Poetic Montage
The Structure of Narrative Time
The Fourth Wall & Direct Address
Fact, Fiction & Narrative Contestation
Character Interactions and Narrative Progression
Agency in Interactive Narrative
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
