Games and Narrative

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Games and Narrative

• Jessica Hammer

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A Historical Note

• Ludology
• Narratology

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Epic Battles?
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The Current Landscape

• What questions are we asking?
• Where are we looking?

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What This Talk Is Not About
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What This Talk Is About

• (the nature of)
• story
• games
• (the nature of)

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Terminology

• Mimesis
• Diegesis

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Mimesis and Diegesis
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Terminology

• Story (Fabula)
• Plot (Syzhet)
• Text (Style)

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Little Red Riding Hood

• What is the story?
• What is the plot?
• What is the text?

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Little Red Riding Hood, II

• Which element is different
• from the prior version?

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Little Red Riding Hood, III

• Which elements are different
• from the prior version?

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Little Red Riding Hood, IV
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Yeah,so what?
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Where Is The Narrative?
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Game-Authored Narrative
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Emergent Narrative
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Player-Authored Narrative
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Meta-Play Narratives
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Discussion

• Narrative moments
• in your gameplay experiences

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Game-Authored Narrative

• Navigable stories
• Navigation in time
• Navigation in space
• Branching stories
• Rejoining
• Rhizomic
• Multiple endings

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GAN Examples

• Zork
• Final Fantasy
• ICO

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Benefits of GAN

• Professional production team
• Authorial control
• Psychological depth
• Sophisticated narrative production
• In theory, anyhow .
• Bringing other experience to bear
• Novelistic
• Filmic

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Problems with GAN

• Production
• Production
• Production
• Nature of the medium
• Linearity
• Player attention

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Emergent Narrative

• Interaction between player and game
• Narrative objects in the game
• Rules that allow player interaction
• The story of the gameplay
• Space Invaders
• Micronarratives
• Players recounting in-game events
• Does this count?

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EN Examples

• The Sims
• Façade
• Angband (?)

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Benefits of EN

• Production-efficient
• More story goes out than went in
• Different every time
• Player ownership of narrative
• Story changes, not just plot
• Well, in theory .

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Challenges of EN

• Rules are hard!
• Gustav Freytag
• Walter Ong
• Can only express what rules allow
• Engagement issues
• Investment
• Vignettes vs. epics
• Often doesnt feel like story

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Player-Authored Narrative

• Players making stories
• Designing for narrative production
• Player competence to produce in medium
• Game mechanics about stories
• Representation in rules
• Balance what devolves to humans

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PAN Examples

• Once Upon A Time
• Dungeons and Dragons
• Lexicon

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Case Study

• Dungeons and Dragons
• vs.
• Dogs in the Vineyard

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Benefits of PAN

• People are good at stories
• Vast possibility for novel stories
• Rules and genre can structure results
• Emotional engagement
• Creative process
• Creative product
• Relatively small production costs

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Challenges of PAN

• Consistent diegetic reality
• Group participation required
• Because ?
• Social coordination
• Narrative coordination
• Player-created content is hard
• Dependent on player skill
• Difficult to scale

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Meta-Play Narrative

• Narrative worlds
• Star Wars canon, Lord of the Rings canon
• Fan-fiction
• Community boards
• Free-form role-playing

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Benefits of MPN

• Highly engaging
• Turns consumers into producers
• And recruiters!
• Extreme narrative freedom
• Choice of medium
• Offload production costs onto consumers
• Extends narrative universe of your game

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Challenges of MPN

• All the challenges of PAN, plus
• Communities defining their own rules
• Continuity/consistency
• Infinite Crises on Infinite Earths!
• Searchability and accessibility
• Where is the game?
• Solitary production vs. group participation
• Closer to other forms of media?

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The Key Question

• What is the role of narrative
• in your game?

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And You Might Answer

• My game is about making stories.
• I want players to have context for understanding
  my rules.
• I want to foster engagement.
• I want to set up a universe in which I can create
  cross-media properties.
• Or ?