Narrative Theory Series
Narrative in Analog & Digital Media
Designing Games & Interactive Stories
A digital medium stores content in the form of a code — at a machine processing level, this is represented as 0s and 1s which stand for open or close the logic gates that either pass or do not pass electrons flowing through circuits. Analog media is not encoded but is embodied in a physical medium that is an alternative physical representation of the original physical events.
A digital photograph is a data file of 0s and 1s, but an analog photograph is embodied in a negative which you can squint at and still get a sense of the original image. Encoding media as data allows for easy storage, fast access, device transfer and infinite reassembly possibilities — which is ultimately the basis for computational interactivity.
Many pre-digital narrative forms that were just as interactive and nonlinear as today’s digital narratives. Interactivity is simply an affordance to make a decision that does something, and is not inherently either analog or digital. Audience participation, breaking the fourth wall, utilizing multiple characters’ perspectives, having many overlapping and interconnecting storylines, allowing events to unfold in a different order, giving each audience member different configurations of narrative information, providing a very rich multisensory experience — all of these interaction and experiential techniques can work in either analog or digital media. An affordance is a perceived action possibility. For example, a fork can be a good back scratcher because it has physical properties which support that kind of action.
Today, we tend to associate ‘old media’ (which are still very pervasive!) with linear narratives, e.g. films, comics, music and books. The ease with which we can build interactivity into digital narratives (it was far more cumbersome generally with analog media) means that we tend to associate digital narratives with nonlinear media.
However, the films you stream on Netflix, the comics you read online, the books you read in your e-reader, or the music you listen to via your Spotify account — these are certainly very linear digital media. It is more the platform for the content that we would generally say is more interactive compared to the platforms of old media, such as broadcasting, theatrical presentation and print publishing.
The skills for developing linear and interactive narrative are largely similar, though challenges can emerge around how to handle and write a script for an interactive story. Interactive narratives usually require tables which are very different from linear scripts or pages. You can also use a spreadsheet or make clever use of a mind mapping online tool and find other ways to develop interactive stories from a production workflow angle.
Narrative can often incorporate its opposite: anti-narrative tendencies — such as finding a productive role for montage sequences in opening title sequences, dream sequences, drug hallucinations, alien abductions, demonic possession and memory flashbacks. Interactive narrative can also productively incorporate its media-opposite — linear media — in the form of cutscenes. These are moments of linear narrative that often happen at transition points (after some main task is achieved), or to provide some backstory, or give users ideas as to items they may need to acquire on the adventure, etc.
Presence effects are generally psychological — i.e. the feeling of ‘being there’ — whereas immersion is usually more about the specific system features that block out the real world in order to bombard the senses with an alternate reality through rich multisensory system features. The ‘paradigm’ or ‘Holy Grail’ immersion technology is the Holodeck of Star Trek and Janet Murray fame.
There’s a kind of irony or Catch-22 to VR projects, because they aim to immerse you in a totally alternate reality, but you have to don so many technological encumbrances — i.e. lots of gear on your body — that you are always on the verge of being yanked out of the immersion because you may trip over a cable, or a head mounted display and headphones may make your head sweat too much.
VR experienced a wave of typical Silicon Valley hype for many years, which eventually petered out because people came to realize how difficult it is to integrate this form factor into everyday life. Most homes don’t have a spare empty free roam room, for instance. VR gear is expensive, and content for VR is often device-specific.
You might want to think about key interaction metaphors that may drive a VR and AR experience. For VR, the narrative unfolds to a great extent through navigation, because you are given a virtual space to roam, and then within that space you do the usual game things, like click on or shoot at things. But the 360-degree spatial/spherical envelope of VR invites a more involved form of navigational experience perhaps compared to screen-based games.
AR seems to work to a great extent by constantly scanning the environment, using a mobile device as a kind of ‘pointer’ to find virtual things in real environments. Scanning and pointing in AR is clearly a very different kind of interaction experience compared to deeply enveloped navigation. In a nutshell, if you ever find yourself designing experiences for these media, think about the root experience metaphors employed — such as scanning or navigating — to develop your narrative premises.
In Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman argue that it is less interesting to argue about whether something is interactive or not, and instead focus on the ways in which something can be said to be interactive. They define four general modalities of interactivity:
Cognitive/Interpretive Interaction: there is a baseline form of interactivity involving our internal mental states. Reading a book or watching a movie or even walking the dog usually involves mental interactions that are not exactly ‘passive’ and in fact can be considered a form of interaction.
Functional: most media involves some kind of physical affordance or alternately virtual representations of physical affordances. To play a movie or video game, there are controllers to grab and buttons to press, menus to cycle through, pages to flip etc, in order to activate the sequences of events.
Explicit Choice: this is what we usually think of when we use the term ‘interactive.’ What we usually refer to are explicit choices that a user can make in order to trigger computational events based on their actions with the provided affordances.
Cultural: we can also interact socially and culturally, through fan activities, cosplay, user generated content, and participating in various online social worlds that are organized around our favorite narrative.
In Remediation, media scholars Bolter and Grusin introduced the concepts of “immediacy” and “hypermediacy” as two primary ways that media can be analyzed. Remediation refers to the way in which new media technologies often draw upon and refashion preexisting media forms, rather than replacing them entirely. In other words, remediation is the process by which new media incorporate elements of older media into their own forms and practices. For example:
The way in which digital media has remediated print media, such as books and newspapers. Digital versions of these media forms often incorporate elements of the original print versions, such as page layout and typography, while also adding new interactive and multimedia features.
The way in which social media has remediated traditional forms of communication, such as letters and phone calls. Social media platforms allow users to communicate with one another through a variety of media, including text, images, and video, and also provide tools for organizing and archiving these communications.
The way in which video games have remediated other media forms, such as movies and television. Many video games include elements of storytelling and character development that are similar to those found in films and TV shows, and may also incorporate elements of other media forms such as music and literature.
The way in which virtual reality has remediated real-world experiences, such as travel and education. Virtual reality technologies allow users to experience immersive, interactive simulations of real or imagined environments and activities.
Remediation suggests that as new media technologies are developed, they often borrow and adapt elements from older media forms, creating a hybrid of the old and the new. At the same time, older media forms are transformed and reshaped by the emergence of new technologies, as they adapt and incorporate elements of the new into their own practices. Remediation highlights the interconnected and dynamic nature of media forms and technologies, and suggests that the development and evolution of media is shaped by the ongoing process of media always borrowing features from other media.
Remediation can be applied to any media, for example the design of user interfaces:
Web browsers: Early web browsers were designed to mimic the layout and functionality of traditional desktop applications, with features such as menus, toolbars, and windows. However, as the web has evolved, web browsers have incorporated more and more features from other media forms, such as video and audio playback, social media integration, and interactive content. Even the idea of a ‘web page’ is a remediation of the medium of books.
Mobile apps: As with web browsers, many mobile apps are designed to replicate the functionality of traditional desktop applications. At the same time, mobile apps have also incorporated features from other media forms, such as touch-based input, gesture recognition, and location-based services, adapting and incorporating these elements into their own user interfaces.
Virtual reality: VR user interfaces often incorporate similar elements from traditional computer interfaces while also adapting and incorporating elements from other media forms, such as motion tracking and haptic feedback. The visual rendering of teleporting in VR often borrows conventions that seem to have originated in children’s jumping games.
Game UIs: User interfaces in games can remediate from many different forms such as school yearbooks, in which avatars are presented as faces in little windows, or data visualization methods that stem (no pun intended!) from the empirical sciences but are instead used to represent rather non-empirical data such as health points, experience levels and the number of non-existent rounds of ammo remaining.
Immediacy refers to the idea that certain technologies create the illusion of a direct, unmediated connection between the user and the information or experience being presented. This can create the feeling that the user is present in the same physical space as the information or experience, or that they are directly interacting with it in real time. Examples of technologies that create immediacy include virtual reality, videoconferencing, and live streaming.
Hypermediacy, on the other hand, refers to the idea that media technologies can create the illusion of a mediated connection, or one that is filtered through multiple layers of interpretation and representation. In this way, hypermediacy highlights the role of media technologies in shaping our understanding and interpretation of the world around us. Hypermediacy can be seen in the way that social media platforms present information to users, or in the way that news is reported and disseminated through various channels.
These two concepts, hypermediation and immediacy, follow from Bolter and Grusin’s conception of transparency and opacity in media forms. The concept of transparency in media refers to the idea that the medium itself should be invisible or transparent, allowing the user to focus on the content being presented rather than the medium itself. In other words, transparent media allows the user to “forget’’ that they are using a medium and become fully immersed in the content.
On the other hand, the concept of opacity in media refers to the idea that the medium itself is noticeable and draws attention to itself, rather than being transparent. Opaque media might do this through the use of expressive or stylistic elements, or by drawing attention to the medium’s technical characteristics or limitations.
Bolter and Grusin argue that different media technologies tend to be either transparent or opaque to varying degrees, and that these characteristics can have significant effects on the way users experience and engage with media content.
The effects of immediacy are also ubiquitous in media. Immediacy is also technological, and involves technique, and is not necessarily ‘natural’ to media. Even with the example of looking through a window, that window is still a technology (glass). One of the most familiar technologies of immediacy is perspective, the geometric rules for creating the illusion of depth. The power of perspective is that it produces an effect of depth immediately. That is, we don’t have to think about the fact that the surface of the image is just two dimensional and that the depth we perceive is produced artificially by drawing or painting tricks.
This all-at-once effect of perceiving depth is why it is called immediate. It just happens instantaneously, allowing for the effect of transparency to occur in representation.
Bolter and Grusin also argue that these effects of immediacy and hypermediation are not specific to new media but, since they are features of media in general, can be used to understand media from any era. A classic thinker and poet often associated with similar ideas is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. You may not know him very well, but his famous poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner was remediated by the heavy metal band Iron Maiden in their song of the same name.
Coleridge’s concept of ‘the suspension of disbelief’ is often associated with immediacy, since this relates to our capacity to grant representational status to elements of stories that are obviously fictitious and have no basis in reality. Hypermediated forms of narrative often ask us to become aware of the artificiality of the narrative construct, especially in its more critical forms such as Epic Theater.
The suspension of disbelief refers to the idea that, when engaging with a work of fiction, the reader or viewer is willing to set aside their disbelief in the reality of the story, and accept the events and characters presented as if they were real. This allows the reader or viewer to become immersed in the story, and to experience a sense of emotional involvement and engagement with the events and characters.
The idea was presented in Coleridge 1817 work Biographia Literaria. In it, he argued that the suspension of disbelief is an essential aspect of the reading experience, and that it is up to the writer to create a sense of “probability” or “verisimilitude” in the story, in order to convince the reader to suspend their disbelief. Coleridge argued that this involves creating a consistent and believable set of characters, plot, and setting, and using language and imagery in a way that evokes strong emotional responses in the reader.
The suspension of disbelief helps to explain why we can become so emotionally invested in stories that we know are not real.
Immediacy is a common experiential facet of 3D virtual environments, where the technologies and mathematics of the 3-axis Cartesian grid produce immediate effects of depth and volume without calling explicit attention to its technical production. The 3D effect just happens instantaneously, and normally we don’t think about it too much as members of a playing audience.
For creators of 3D media, however, there will be many moments of hypermediated frustration when using or learning the software, because computer graphics applications are usually rather feature-dense and complicated to master.
In interactive narratives, we often have to perform both of these forms of mediation at the same time. For instance, a game controller is a form of hypermediation because it does not reproduce naturalistic reality. Rather, is a manual technical affordance full of buttons and controls that have to be manipulated in order to produce effects on the screen, whereas the world depicted may actually be mostly associated with some form of representational realism.
Lev Manovich is a scholar associated with the concept of ‘oscillating’ back and forth between these two states, so that we can say that with an interactive narrative, we experience both effects by cycling between them:
Immediacy (Bolter and Grusin): immersion, suspension of disbelief.
Hypermediation (Bolter and Grusin): being aware that one is undergoing a mediated experience.
Oscillation (Lev Manovich): rapidly cycling back and forth between these two states, characteristic of interactive works.
Interactive narratives that use mobile devices, for example, have many built-in affordances to draw upon, any of which could produce oscillatory effects in a user’s attention while engaging the narrative. Mobile devices have many affordances, such as:
touchscreen
QR code reader
accelerometer
gyroscope
compass
facetime
camera
From a narrative design perspective, a designer’s role is to decide how each of these affordances connects to the logic of storytelling and/or gameplay. In other words,a designer chooses intentionally whether an accelerometer or a camera or a gyroscope can be used to make a story rich and meaningful, rather than just being features of a mobile device, for some particular character action or spatial navigation.
And then in addition to this, a decision has to be made as to how immediate or hypermediated the use of these affordances will be — will they work seamlessly in the background, lending more towards immediacy effects, or will there use require explicit gestural inputs from the user, so that they have to take some time out from the narrative immersion in order to activate these features and then proceed with the narrative, which would be a form of hypermediation.
These effects of immediacy, hypermediation, oscillation and the suspension of disbelief are shaped by creators and experienced by audiences in different ways across analog, digital, linear and interactive narrative media.
Linear narrative refers to a form of storytelling in which the events of the story are presented in a chronological, cause-and-effect sequence, and the audience experiences them in a predetermined order. Interactive narrative, on the other hand, refers to a form of storytelling in which the audience has some degree of control over the order in which events are experienced, and may be able to make choices that affect the direction and outcome of the story.
Traditional media are usually considered to be linear but very old forms of media in analog forms did have interactivity in the form of audience participation, so interaction is not a unique characteristic of digital media, and in face the history of technology in the arts provides many examples of interactive analog technologies, such as works that cut up analog audio and video tape and made their playback subject to how a user manipulates the playhead.
There are several key differences between linear and interactive narrative in terms of their design by creators and their experience for an audience.
One key difference is the level of control that the creator has over the storytelling experience. In a linear narrative, the creator has complete control over the order in which events are presented and the ways in which they are experienced, as the audience is simply a passive spectator. In an interactive narrative, on the other hand, the creator must take into account the potential choices and actions of the audience, who become co-authors or co-creators of the narrative, and design the story in such a way that it can accommodate a range of different experiences. This can be a more complex and time-consuming process, as the creator must consider multiple branching paths and potential outcomes.
Another key difference is the level of immersion and agency that the audience experiences. In a linear narrative, the audience is typically more passive, as they are simply observing the events of the story unfold. In an interactive narrative, on the other hand, the audience has the ability to make choices and take actions that shape the direction and outcome of the story, which can lead to a more immersive and engaging experience.
So, linear narrative may be more straightforward and predictable — this is certainly the case when watching a movie or novel one has already experienced before — while interactive narrative can be more complex and open-ended, by allowing the audience to take an active role in shaping the story.
A defining characteristic of interactive narrative is that users become co-authors. With linear media, the creative contribution to narrative experience performed by the audience is typically limited to the level of interpretation. When users act in a narrative, they become authorial agents and take away some of the responsibilities usually allocated to writer, director, producer etc.
Related Articles
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
