Narrative Theory Series
Interactivity in Narrative
Designing Games & Interactive Stories
Interactivity poses new challenges and opportunities to narrative, because it allows users to change aspects of the core material of stories, such as making decisions about characters, spaces, objects, events and conflicts. With interactive narrative, the user is also an author or co-author, forcing the content to respond to their actions.
Because interactive narrative is action-based, it tends towards a simplification of narrative ‘verbosity’ in the direction of verb sets, i.e. focusing on key actions that can be performed within it. Instead of lengthy literary depictions of what’s going on, it offers users choices and things to do.
A ‘user’ of an interactive narrative requires agency, which is reinforced through affordances of choice and control. Agency is a unique pleasure to interactive narrative, since with other storytelling media like reading books or viewing movies, it’s hard to see what agency the audience has in determining outcomes of depicted events.
Agency can ‘run amok,’ however, since people may behave badly or at least in ways that don’t support the narrative goals. A lot of design work is dedicated to figuring out how much freedom and choice of action to give users, while constraining what they can do overall and not letting the story get lost in the random or inappropriate actions users might pursue.
One strategy is to develop an A Plot and a B Plot, where the former is strictly controlled by the designers as having the highest degree of importance for maintaining the narrative integrity and coherence of the work, while the latter lets users play around in ways that don’t alter the main story too much.
There are a number of common models for interactivity, which are far more general compared to more specific forms of interaction such as might be based on game mechanics. These are: stimulus and response, navigation, control over objects, communication, exchange of information (which sounds a lot like communication!), and acquisition.
Game mechanics are often imported into interactive narratives as a straightforward way to structure user experiences. Many theorists like Janet Murray have argued that games are essentially highly compressed narratives. Narrative, like games, almost always feature some kind of agon, the Greek word for contest.
The idea of two forces squaring off against each other is a common denominator for games and narratives, and this provides an easy creative route for importing game mechanics into interactive narrative.
Besides the agon, Murray’s concept of ‘the symbolic drama,’ which is also a form of highly compressed narrative, is another way to understand the commonality that can be found across games and narrative, such as:
Being faced with an emergency and surviving it
Taking a risk and being rewarded for one’s courage
Restoring a fallen world
Overcoming a challenge via one’s hard work and skill
etc.
There are different ways to understand how general narrative ‘structures’ can be defined. Let’s start with three main ways to think about structure:
Repetition: anything that repeats will have a structural aspect, because repetition is structure in that it gives form or shape to something, just like a beat in music or columns in architecture. Good examples of narrative repetition are themes and motifs, which are typically identified by their multiple occurrences in a narrative.
Pattern: repetitions are one kind of pattern, but there are more macro level patterns that can be identified across narratives. The 3-Act structure is like this, because it can be found in thousands or perhaps even millions of narratives. The Good Vanquish the Bad and the Story Ends Happily is another kind of pattern
Sections: Dividing a narrative up into clear sections will also impart a sense of structure. Beyond Acts 1 2 and 3, sectioning can be spatial (e.g. under water, on ground, outer space), temporal (a long time ago, now, in the future), or more like chapter divisions. Recently in filmmaking, there has been a resurgence of the idea of using explicit chapter breaks and titles, as with The Power of the Dog and The Last Duel.
Either when analyzing narratives, or creating your own, you can think about Repetition, Patterns and Sections as being viable ways to convey a strong sense of structure to the narrative.
All narratives, and indeed most creative artifacts (such as music and architecture) will involve some forms of repetition, i.e. elements that recur or repeat in a structural manner. In narrative, these repeating elements are generally going to be motifs or themes. Themes are abstractions (e.g. the idea of getting old), while motifs are concrete (e.g. images of clocks). Usually multiple instances of motifs (concrete things repeating) will provide some perceptual grounding for the abstract thematic interpretation.
In interactive narrative, Nodes and Levels are key structural concepts. The idea of ‘nodes’ comes from network theory, and describes a spatial topography of nodes and edges, which makes sense for digital storytelling because you need to describe the logic and paths that connect different events and spaces. The idea of levels comes from game design and relates to the idea of spatial sectioning discussed above.
Structures are developed in the Micro and the Macro. A micro element would be a specific action you allow a user to perform, such as clicking on something or making a decision on which way to go. At a macro level, a structure may be a key goal to achieve (a mission) that allows a transition in the story to some other state.
‘Modules’ are often used in educational and training contexts, such as our very own Canvas module structure, of this this document is a part : )
The ‘episode’ is another common structural device, especially in this video streaming era of ours where the narratives are quite massive in terms of the number of hours (and seasons!) required to tell it.
Aside from these narrative structural considerations, there are also logical considerations. The two most important logical structures for interactive narrative are the If/Then and Boolean constructs. Technically, in programming you have more than just if/then as the author describes, but also If/Then/Else/Else If and so on!
Boolean logic is both the kind of logic that is at the heart of all computer programming — since everything digital is expressible as binary 0s and 1s which represent either open or closed logic gates in circuits which pass, or do not pass, electrons — and is a specific data type that can be used in interactive narratives, particularly in the construction of state engines.
State engines keep track of the current states of variables and allow things to happen when conditional statements are met based on the values stored in those variables’ memory locations. For example, you can have a variable named stanBitten. If stanBitten = 0, then Stan has not been bitten, and thus he is not a zombie (yet!).
But if a zombie bites Stan, then stanbBitten = 1, and based on Boolean logic, now the sounds associated with Stan have to change their audio database from recognizable words to screeches and growls. Also, Stans’s skeletal mesh (his avatar) needs to change, because now he walks funny and his joints can move in the wrong directions. And probably blood is splattered all over his face etc.
That’s the sort of thing you might want to use a state engine for!
The more choices you give users, the more the amount of content you create for them can spiral out of control exponentially, and so you need to devise ways to constrain the infinite explosion of plot lines that can result from various kinds of branching structures, such as using faux choices, cul de sacs, loop backs, and barriers to constrain the narrative possibilities.
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
