Narrative Theory Series
Space Time Causality Medium
The Presentation of Events
Consider the following sequence of sentences (example ‘stolen’ from film scholar David Bordwell):
A man tosses and turns, unable to sleep. A mirror breaks. A telephone rings.
Now consider this sequence:
A man has a fight with his boss; he tosses and turns that night, unable to sleep. In the morning, he is still so angry that he smashes the mirror while shaving. Then the telephone rings; his boss has called to apologize.
There’s lots that can be said about the two different versions of the story above. Such as…
The second version:
- provides more context
- arranges the events into an ordered sequence
- gives reasons for the things happening
- places the events in the same space
- has a beginning and an end
- clearly gives us two different people
- makes more sense of the events
While the first version:
- is a collection of fragments
- lacks connecting tissue that relates the events and objects
- might be an experimental story (of the kind very few people might read or pay for, beyond English or Theatre majors)
Many narrative theorists argue that the most minimal definition of narrative is that it represents events, though many (like Bordwell) argue that those events need to be presented with causal linkages between them. One of the advantages of siding with a film theorist like Bordwell is that cinema can do reality testing on theories due to its unique media ontology of having a physical relationship to reality, which words on a page do not.
A great ‘test’ of narrative theory is to compare montage to continuity editing. Montage can also convey a series of events, but very often with montage sequences, the events do not have narrative coherence. Below are some well-known montage sequences from the history of cinema (warning, the first one is kind of violent, skip that if you don’t like violent images). I think it’s pretty clear from these examples that simply representing events doesn’t produce a strong narrative effect.
Bordwell’s conceptual experiment above at the start of this article is useful but somewhat artificial. Here are some haikus culled from the poetry archive.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Or how about:
Birds singing
in the dark
— Rainy dawn.
What a brief poetic form such as haiku can convey rather concretely is that narrative effects can arise rather spontaneously or ‘naturally’ through juxtaposition alone. Text is a linear medium, and so something that comes second in a linear sequence feels as though it comes later though that doesn’t have to really be the case.
Another tension that haiku clearly highlights (again, because of its extreme minimalism as an artform) is that sometimes relatively static things or ‘entities’ (images of something) are presented where there is no clear action (e.g. faces, petals, dawn). Thus, many narrative theorists argue that narrative requires more than the representation of events, but also requires entities (the things undergoing those events). Usually those entities we call characters, but in poetry they can be any kind of object.
Narrative Perception
In some respects, the difference between entities and events is a function of time. Imagine that you could live for tens of thousands of years and all that time you were staring at a boulder in a river. Over the years you could watch that boulder get eroded into a small pebble by the water’s flow. The entity of ‘the rock’ might actually seem more like an event, or the passage from boulder to pebble. You might say that entities are slow moving events, or that events are very fast moving entities!
Just as we can imagine this reversibility between events and entities, we can also imagine a reversibility between entities and characters. Our cognition of narrative (all the mental processes involved when we understand experiences as narratives) has often been studied using very simple geometric shapes. Psychologists have interesting debates as to whether narrative mental processing occurs at very ‘high’ (i.e. in consciousness) or very ‘low’ (i.e. at the level of the senses) neural processing.
Have a look at the two videos below, one connected to the Heider-Simmel Illusion, and the other from Albert Michotte’s study on the perception of causality.
There are basically three broad levels on which people approach attribution of causality in Heider-Simmel animations:
Literal interpretation. The geometric figures are described only as such and no motivation or anthropomorphic qualities are attributed to them. Example: the small triangle moved parallel to the circle, the large triangle moved out of the rectangle, the small and large triangles came into contact three times in a row.
Goal-direct interpretation. The figures are described as having anthropomorphic actions like running, hiding, fighting, dancing or fleeing. In other words, they are trying to achieve certain physical goals but there is little to no description of motivations or desires. The description is written mostly from the perspective of an impartial observer who is recording the actions of an event. Example: the small triangle ran around the house twice, the large triangle chased the small triangle around the corner, the circle moved into the corner as the large triangle approached it.
Social attribution interpretation. The figures are described as having anthropomorphic actions as well as feelings and motivation (affective and cognitive mental states). There is an emphasis on why the figures act or react the way they do, with detailed attribution of intent. Example: the circle is trying to persuade the large triangle, the large triangle is jealous, the small triangle is trying to coax the circle, the large triangle is manipulating the circle’s feelings, the two small shapes are celebrating their deception of the large triangle. Additionally, there is often a highly detailed narrative used to explain what has happened (a gestalt explanation). Example: the small shapes are friends and the big triangle is a bully, the circle was supposed to go on a date with the big triangle but he got angry when he saw her with the small triangle. (source)
Beginning with the research of Albert Michotte, investigators have identified simple perceptual events that observers report as causal. For example, suppose a square moves across a screen and comes to a halt when it makes contact with a second square. If the second square then begins moving in the same direction, observers sometimes report that the first square “pushed” the second or “caused it to move.” Based on such reports, Michotte claimed that people perceive causality, and a number of psychologists and philosophers have followed his lead. This article examines Michotte’s hypothesis by comparing it with its chief rival: Observers possess representations of pushings, pullings, and other events in long-term memory. A Michottean display triggers one of these representations, and the representation classifies the display as an instance of pushing (or pulling, etc.). According to this second explanation, recognizing an event as a pushing is similar to classifying an object as a cup or a dog. Data relevant to this debate come from infant and animal studies, cognitive and neuropsychological dissociation experiments, and studies of context effects and individual differences. However, a review of research in these paradigms finds no reason to prefer Michotte’s theory over its competitor. (source)
While these two examples above might seem rather clinical or far removed from narrative creativity, creators of narrative experiences, particularly in the audiovisual realm, frequently employ abstract motion design elements that have a strong narrative thrust to them. For example:
Narrative Logic
Another place to explore the minimal conditions of narrative would be the literary genre called variously flash fiction, nano fiction or micro fiction. Here’s an example of that genre, which certainly feels more like a narrative and less like a juxtaposition of entities and events, with clear characters and a unified context:
I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.” (source)
This micro/nano/flash story was also made into a very short film, which is interesting as something to compare it to, though I think the text version is more creepy in its overall effect:
This contrast that’s been made above, between narrative and poetry, and between causality and juxtaposition (sometimes also referred to as ‘association’) is common in media arts, and we can model the possibilities of entities and events unfolding in time as a spectrum like so:
Film is an ideal place to explore this continuum between a logic of causation versus a logic of juxtaposition, since the same narrative film may employ both logics as part of its development. Juxtaposition logic, i.e. montage, is often found in certain specialized story moments, such as flashback sequences, compressing time, drug-induced hallucinations, dreams and nightmares, memories, title sequences, demon possession or alien abduction and so on.
Below, check out the opening title sequences to the first two seasons of True Detective, followed by a scene from Season 1. The first two clips are clearly montages that are not in themselves narratives, while the third clip satisfies the condition of ‘narrativity’ or the quality of feeling like a narrative. Narrative can in a sense incorporate its ‘opposite’ or what we might call anti-narrative forms and tendencies, by allocating certain kinds of moments to these montage-juxtaposition sequences.
A good montage opening title sequence, for example, prepares us for the ensuing narrative, by introducing characters, locales, moods, themes and serving as a kind of transitional space and time between everyday reality and the narrative universe. Title sequences in a sense let us ‘pre-dream’ the narrative world before it starts.
The Logic of Juxtaposition was famously explored by the early Soviet montage theorists through experiments like the Kuleshov Effect film, which involved studying the audience’s changes in interpretation that came about via juxtaposing an expressionless face in a sequence with images of food, a dead girl or woman lying on a couch, which produced emotions of hunger, sadness or lust, respectively.
Here’s a more recent take on the Kuleshov Effect you may find interesting:
Working Definition
Based on the above, we can say that narrative conveys the causal relationships in time & space of events involving characters and entities:
Narrative is a basic unit of our understanding of experience is the sense that there are causal relationships between events as we normally experience them. We make sense of the world in terms of narrative. One thing causes another, within a sequence of one after another, and occurring in some place.
The Enlightenment philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, whom many today consider to be an important historical founder in the history of ideas for concepts that cognitive psychology still relies upon today, argued that we cannot really understand anything at all unless we situate it within space, time and causality. Kant expressed his ideas in a German dialect called Kantese which sounds like this:
One can and must concede that space and time are mere thought entities and creatures of the imagination. But because they are the essential form of our sensibility and the receptivity of its intuitions whereby in general objects are given to us, and because the universal conditions of sensibility must at the same time necessarily be a priori conditions of the possibility of all objects of the senses as appearances and so agree with these, they are not fictitiously invented by the imagination but underlie all its compositions and creations. (On A Discovery, AA 8, 203)
Don’t worry about your understanding of Kantese, just understand that understanding itself is nigh darn impossible without some cognitive coherence between space, time and causation! On this sound cognitive and Kantian footing, we will find that narrative helps with many important things such as memory recall, personal and social identity formation, social cohesion, and is the basis of widely held beliefs in any culture such as myth and religion (myth for example is etymologically related to the Greek word for story or mythos).
A popular contemporary scholar, historian Yuval Noah Harari, has argued that all societies depend on stories in order to flexibly coordinate the activity of lots of strangers who do not know each other. In his argument, only humans have created forms of social organization that are both large scale and highly flexible and adaptive. For example, ants and bees have very large social organizations (e.g. bee hive and ant hill), but the social roles of each bee or ant are highly rigid in terms of genetic encoding. The society is massive but inflexible and non-adaptive. On the other hand, primates and ocean mammals such as dolphins have very flexible social organization, but their group sizes are very small, compared to ants or bees. Humans are the only species that exhibit large scale social organization AND has shown considerable flexibility and adaptability in their forms of organization.
How do we do it? What’s the ‘special sauce’ that allows humans to do what bees, ants, dolphins and chimpanzees can’t do? His theory: stories. Or “myths.” It’s because humans create these stories about the world — general myths about reality that many can agree on — that we are able to coordinate action with millions of strangers at large scale. To get a sense of his argument, jump into around 13 minutes here (watch for maybe 5 minutes or so to get an idea of his argument).
If you are a very attentive reader, you may have noticed that I have introduced another term, “Story” instead of using “Narrative.” Is there a difference? Well, of course, because narrative theory needs lots of terms! People do often use story and narrative interchangeably, and there is nothing wrong with that per se. However, in this context, Narrative means the following: a sequence of causal events (involving entities or characters) in time and space.
Plot and Story
In this article/lecture series, Story will not be just another word for Narrative but rather will be distinguished from another word, Plot. Narratives have two aspects to them, Story and Plot. Plot will refer to what is directly shown and given in a narrative, and Story will refer to the contribution of the reader/viewer/listener to the rest of the meaning of a narrative. A narrative, in other words, presents some information directly, but other information has to come from inference and imagination. Narrative has Plot and Story dimensions, so to speak. So these will actually be three different terms used in this course: narrative, plot and story.
We can illustrate these differences with a one panel comic, “The Cows’ Revenge.”
Narrative Definitions
Now let’s quickly review these working definitions:
Narrative
a sequence of events in space & time connected by cause-and-effect relationships, involving entities or characters
Plot
the narrative events presented directly to the audience of interpreters (whether reader/listener/viewer/interactor)
Story
the narrative events that are reconstructed by the audience of interpreters, typically via memory, inference, shared sociocultural associations and imagination
In the Cow’s Revenge, we can ask such questions as:
- What is the plot?
- What is the story?
- What is the timeline?
- What happened in the past?
- What is going to happen?
- Why?
- What are the narrative elements of each?
We also have a Multimedia event here: text AND image! What we see in the Plot are:
- cows
- farm, fence, barn
- night, moon, stars
- house
- farmer couple
- an auto milker conveniently labelled “Auto Milker” so that we know what it is
- cows gritting & baring their teeth, because that is the convention for showing angry cows.
How do we know the cows are angry? Because even without the bared gritting teeth (think about it– when you get mad, do you grit and bare your teeth?? Why do people draw anger this way….) the text says “REVENGE” so we know they are mad.
Why DO YOU think they are mad?? If you think it’s because they don’t like being auto-milked, you are probably correct, though that’s your own invention and contribution to the Story, because it’s not shown directly in the visualized Plot.
Note that good stories leave much to the imagination. If stories showed everything, what role could our minds contribute? In the difference between Story and Plot, there is already implied a notion of Interactivity. Our minds have to manipulate the Plot to generate Story. Plot is almost like a kind of game controller, a narrative interface, for cognitive interaction.
There’s another argument to make here: all narratives are by default incomplete, and require active ‘gap filling activity’ on the part of an audience to complete its meaning. There is no narrative without gaps, and filling in the gaps is essentially to telling any narrative.
These gaps have a different effect on the process of anticipation and retrospection, and thus on the ‘gestalt’ of the virtual dimension, for they may be filled in different ways. For this reason, one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled. In this very act the dynamics of reading are revealed. By making his decision he implicitly acknowledges the inexhaustibility of the text; at the same time it is this very inexhaustibility that forces him to make his decision. — (Iser, The Reading Process, 216) (source)
Above we have shown how theory can be used to interpret narrative. Now, let’s show theory being used to create narrative. This ad below is actually based on the notion of cognitive interaction, and the gap filling activity of story production. It is explicitly based on a big gap right in the middle of it.
Watch this short ad:
What is the Plot? A retiring coach holds a press conference. What is the Story? That’s probably X-rated and requires a trigger warning or something.
This ad is explicitly based on leaving the Story to your gap-filling imagination (no pun intended : ) and provides an example of how one can use narrative theories not just toward understanding media, but to create them as well. In other words, while usually you are used to writing papers based on theories (that’s what universities usually ask you to do with them), in this course you can also use them as Design Principles.
The Structure of Narrative Time
Time as we usually think of it is linear. In other words, there is a direction to time, sometimes called time’s arrow, which is the name of a Star Trek episode, a story collection, and a general concept of physics. We can draw it like this:
Another term to use here is linearity. That is, an effect follows a cause, and itself becomes another cause for the next effect, because they happen in a fixed unalterable sequence (unless time travelling interventions are employed). Also, many media are linear, such as books, music and films, because they fix the order of events.
- Books are linear media because one reads them one page after another.
- Films are linear media because they progress one frame count at a time.
- Music is linear because you hit Play and it runs in a timeline to the End.
- Comics are linear because like books they have pages, but also Nonlinear because often one can look through the image panels in different order without altering the story.
Most of what we would call ‘traditional media’ are linear media. However, one can also find examples of linear narrative in other environments that one wouldn’t normally think of as narrative. For example, in churches one will find The Stations of the Cross images which tell a biblical story through visual panels arranged linearly along the wall.
Another example of linear narrative in this same context is the Rosary Prayer, where one counts along the beads of the rosary and says a specific prayer at a certain bead in the sequence. However, note that these forms are highly narrative in character compared to, for instance, Tibetan prayer wheels, which are based on repeating and focusing on mantras and various concepts which are more abstract.
By contrast, interactive interfaces allows us to reconfigure spaces so that we can experience them based on our choices and the affordances of the medium, constructing the narrative events via our navigation of the presented content.
Sectioning Time
Linear narratives are often understood to have three recognizable sections to them, which can be understood in the following ways:
- Beginning — Middle — End (Aristotle)
- Past — Present — Future (Everyday sense of time)
- Equilibrium — Disruption — New Equilibrium (Todorov)
- Memory — Experience — Anticipation (Everyday sense of consciousness)
- Retention — Attention — Protention (Phenomenology)
Aristotle’s Poetics is the first work of literary theory in the Western world, in which he set out a model on how narratives are constructed. He famously noted that all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. However, not all stories need to progress in this order. Many Greek plays often start toward the end, at a moment of crisis, then the beginning is told later through flashbacks (how we got to this crisis moment…). Starting at the crisis can be a very dramatic way to begin a narrative, but usually you have to go back and recount at some point how you got there.
This basic form of narrative of course accords with our usual categories of Past, Present and Future, which are cognitively mapped into our subjective states as Memory (of the past), Experience (of the present), and Anticipation (of the future). The philosophical discipline of phenomenology has fancier terms for this subjective aspect of consciousness: Retention, Attention and Protention.
Finally, the Russian formalist literary theorist Todorov used a systems theory model of narrative, claiming that narratives tend to begin with Equilibrium (everything is calm, normal, in balance), then something comes along to Disrupt the Equilibrium (e.g. Trump gets elected), then Equilibrium is restored by the end of the narrative (e.g the Trump coup fails!).
Time, Media & Choice
Linear narratives are told in linear media, because the medium itself constrains the flow of narrative information. A book doesn’t force you to read from page 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 — you could start on p. 321, then go to p. 11, then jump to p. 299 — but probably you wouldn’t. When you go to see a film, you sit back and relax while in the projecting booth, someone presses Start and the film runs out along its timeline.
Linear Media are media that control the unfolding of events in a strict sequence of time. Flashbacks, time travel or dreams of the future do not violate this principle, since those moments still are determined by the fixed linear sequence imposed by the medium.
Just as we saw above in the example of the short ad based on the gap filling activity of mental and interpretive Story construction, we often find narrative theories built into mediated narratives. Here is a clever reference to linear narrative construction from the film, No Country for Old Men, emphasizing the role that cause and effect play in constructing linear narrative time.
BELL You wouldn’t think a car would burn like that.
WENDELL Yessir. We should a brought wienies. Sheriff Bell takes his hat off and mops his brow.
BELL Does that look to you like about a ’77 Ford, Wendell?
WENDELL It could be.
BELL I’d say it is. Not a doubt in my mind.
WENDELL The old boy shot by the highway?
BELL Yessir, his vehicle. Man killed Lamar’s deputy, took his car, killed someone on the highway, swapped for his car, and now here it is and he’s swapped again for god knows what.
WENDELL That’s very linear Sheriff. (source)
Multilinear (or alternately, Nonlinear) media allow for different configurations of event sequences, typically through either interactivity, generativity or some combination of both. Interactive multilinear media provides users with an interface through which they can make choices to produce new sequences of events with each choice. Generative multilinear media uses a database to automate the events in new sequences.
The term ‘nonlinear’ simply means ‘not linear’ and to define something simply by what it is not is often not very useful. The term multi-linearity captures more of the positive side of interactive narrative. Multi-linearity emerges because a) the physics of time is a constant and we cannot escape its linear physical flow, and b) each time we engage an interactive narrative, the sequence of events will be different.
Thus, ‘multi-linearity’ respects the linear flow of time, and also highlights that event sequences will change in every instance of engaging an interactive narrative. It also highlights that designers of interactive narrative need to imagine the main multiple-linear possibilities of their interactive narrative and plan for all the multiple storylines that can emerge.
Generative Multilinear Narrative
Interactive Multilinear Narrative
Linear Narrative: the medium itself restricts the sequence of events, so that one event preceeds or follows another in a defined order (page after page, frame after frame)
Multi-linear Narrative: the medium allows for a different sequencing of events each time the narrative is engaged.
However, you may notice that a linear sequence of events presents a somewhat simplified picture of the world: one thing follows one thing which produces another thing etc. Reality is much more complex, however. For example, here is one archeologist’s take on a potential scenario for a nuclear war, based on observing historical patterns going back thousands of years (apologies if this depresses you):
Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honour NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.
With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends “peace keeping forces” and “aid lorries” into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He cedes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).
A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?
This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.
Notice how interconnected and multifactorial actual messy reality is. In fact, this messy interconnected complexity suggests several Design Principles which could be used in an interactive digital narrative:
- Linear narratives might be better at telling simplified stories about the world (e.g. anything a politician says).
- Multilinear narratives might be better at illustrating complicated entanglements of forces (e.g. war games).
For example, imagine that there was a special Trump Edition of the popular game Risk, which one can play in either a board or video game variety:
Games allow complexity to be explored through playing out alternate If/Then constructions of event sequences. The effects of causes are more difficult to predict, since there may be multiple players involved, rather than a single author carefully laying out events in a strict linear sequence.
In this hypothetical example of a Risk: Trump Edition game, I am also doing something designed to potentially make people uncomfortable. While it is common to create war games out of long past historical events (e.g. World War 2 or 1 battles, ancient Rome or Greece, Viking raids, the American Civil War etc.), turning contemporary events into game scenarios is not usually done because it can invoke a lot of emotional unease or social controversy. But there are examples such as Kuma War which translate battles in Iraq into large online multiplayer first person shooter environments (note that the video below has typical first person shooter imagery).
With current events, there isn’t the kind of emotional distance between fictional worlds and actual reality, which is a creative resource that one can tap into, for instance in the design of Serious Games. With new Secessionist movements in the States such as Calexit, one can imagine that a Trump-based series of games, e.g. ‘USA: Civil War 2’ might be quite successful commercially.
Whether or not the digital interactive narrative you create as your project in this course is a game, the use of game mechanics incorporated into your story will help make it compelling, since as we will see, there can be new creative tensions created when one adds the possibility of different and changeable event sequences to our expectations of narrative enjoyment. Game mechanics might include:
winning & losing
levels
challenges
goals
gaining points
random dice throws
challenges
quests
puzzles
territorial control
structure building
capture/eliminate
movement
victory
damage
scores
If your roommate is reading a novel, you wouldn’t ask, “Hey, what’s your score?” You wouldn’t even ask, probably, what page they are on. You probably also wouldn’t wonder if, in reading a story, they are winning or losing. Nor would you introduce randomness by suddenly flipping a bunch of pages on them and say, “Ok, random throw. Start reading here now.”
These game mechanics would produce odd linear narratives indeed! But in a digital narrative, it might be odd not to have some game mechanics because otherwise the narrative might seem too aimless and lacking in structure. Also, it is impossible to program every possibility into a computer and so all choices for interaction have to be constrained by some factor, and game mechanics offer a set of plausible constraints so as not to call too much attention to the fact that the virtual world one is immersed in is highly lacking in possible activities, objects, people, dialogue, spaces and outcomes. Game mechanics limit expectations of interaction so as to enrich the highly limited set of programmable media possibilities.
Sometimes people confuse or use interchangeably these ideas of Multilinearity and Interactivity. These terms do not mean the same thing. Interactivity just means that you allow a user to produce some effects via an interface. Multilinearity means that sequences of events can play out differently in the same medium and same narrative, so for example there can be different endings, beginnings or middles of a narrative each time it is engaged. Moreover, these differences can be produced generatively, e.g. by a computer program, or interactively, e.g. through use of an interface controlled by a user. So to clarify the difference in these terms.
Interactivity: the medium allows for different sequences of events based on choices expressed through manipulating the interface
Multilinearity: each presentation of a storyline can be different and needs to be designed in such a way that this is taken into account
However, these are not always separate kinds of media, but can be combined. A good example of this combination is cut scenes, or short animated films that separated different levels, worlds or challenges in a video game. A cut scene is a bit of linear narrative embedded in an overall interactive form.
There’s a parallel here that you may have noticed with the discussion earlier about narrative incorporating anti-narrative. Just as a continuity-styled film or tv narrative can contain its logical opposite, montage, by identifying appropriate roles for it, similarly interactive narrative can make use of linear narrative — in this case, cut scenes — to propel the game play forward.
Storyworld
Th notion of storyworld in many ways is a term in search of a concept, or a noun in search of a formal definition. Many people use this term but it can be used to mean so many things that it tends to default into being a kind of word that defines itself. Storyworld by itself makes sense– it means the world of the story! But that says both too much and too little at the same time.
Storyworld can also mean the internal logic of space and time in a narrative. Fictional universes after all can have alternative physics, so that what is cause and effect in our world may be different in a fictional one. The short film The Man Without a Head is interesting in this regard, because the world it depicts is in most ways perfectly normal– the only thing ‘off’ is that the protagonist is lacking a head. Other than that little detail, its storyworld is pretty normal and straightforward (old world Europe, Victorian era etc. described online as “a big industrial city by the sea”).
What else can we say about a Storyworld? We can define other components:
• its internal logic of cause and effect (already discussed)
• its mise-en-scène (stage design, props, placement of actors, lighting, etc.)
• an implied historical backstory
• references and interconnections between its elements
• the affordances of a world
• environment surrounding the action
• aesthetics (look and feel)Let’s dig into this list a little bit. Mise-en-scène is a term used in film and theatre, which means “placing on stage.” Here’s an interesting historical anecdote: the Greek word for “scene” means “tent” and some historians think that the original backstage area of ancient Greek theatre was the famous Tent of Xerxes captured during the Persian Wars, which you can also see in the film 300.
Probably many of you in this class have seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But how many of you know that the big snow planet of Starkiller base was the gutted out, rehabbed & repurposed snow planet Illum originally located in the Unknown Regions and home to the Kyber Crystals which are the key ingredient of light sabers?
Well maybe, maybe not, this is just one theory of what planet Starkiller base was made out of. However, we now know that US elections can be won just by spouting unproven conspiracy theories, so why not? I say it is, and that means that now there are no more kyber crystals to make light sabers out of which, due to laws of supply and demand, will make the price for light sabers go up on eBay.
The point of this example of course is that Storyworlds can have very elaborate made up fictional histories, even more convoluted than Middle Earth or the Infinity Stones, and that the elements of Storyworlds can be densely self-referential and intertextual.
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. Storyworlds allow you to perform certain kinds of actions in that world. These can be the actions of your avatar or the actions of NPCs (non-player characters). The online game Machinarium is an excellent example of having your protagonist explore the affordances of the storyworld to get somewhere and solve challenges. Many virtual environments surround you with things that do things in the storyworld, that you have to figure out. The world is everything that surrounds the actions of the character(s), and often offers specific affordances in the objects of that world to support new actions.
Every storyworld has a distinct aesthetic sensibility, which refers to overall qualities of look, feeling and affect (i.e. emotional tonalities). If you think of any vivid narrative experience, it is probably associated with a strong aesthetic sensibility that is unique to that world. The anime film Tekkonkinkreet brings all of these elements together in a virtuosic display of artistry, having a strong sense of internal reference and its own history, aesthetic feel, crazy affordances (e.g. wild leaps by tiny people), and mise en scène.
Mr. Jessop (causality as internal logic)
You are going to watch the short animation film Mr. Jessop. But before you do, you need to get out a sheet of paper and draw some lines on it (shown below the video link). In the left column, list elements of the video that show cause and effect operating similar to the world as you regularly experience it. In the right column, list the elements of the fictional world’s internal logic of cause and effect that are specific only to this fictional universe.
Narrative worlds having their own idiosyncratic causality can be found everywhere, once you start looking for it. In the Star Wars universe, Jedis and Siths can swing at laser beams emanating from blasters, using their light sabers like baseball bats, even though lasers should be travelling at the speed of light, which is far faster than anyone, even Force-empowered people, could ever swing a baseball saber:
Story and Narrative Discourse
A more theoretical concept you will sometimes encounter is the notion of narrative discourse which 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 plot as discussed above) 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.
Bonus Montage!
Montage as narrative time compression:
Bonus Title Sequences!
The Netflix series Dark is especially interesting from a representation-of-events perspective, since the opening titles are different for each season, and show (in an abstracted way) many things happening which come to make sense as you go through the various episodes of each season.
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
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