So here we go, banging out a few points of perspective on narrative from various game scholars. Now, I’ll start with Jenkins, for the sake that I too have been accused of being a “narratologist” for using Jenkins as a reference in papers. Accused, I say, because that’s how it feels—you dirty, dirty narrative person who doesn’t understand what games are about at all. Well, hey, I’m a game writer, gotta give some credit to the fact that I see narrative elements in various forms. Pardon me! That doesn’t mean I’m not capable of understanding game mechanics, and that doesn’t mean narrative doesn’t influence mechanics.
Henry Jenkins does a great job of bringing up factors like “micronarratives” and embedding vs. embodiment vs. emerging vs. enacting forms of play in his “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” article. Interestingly, there has been a recent discussion on the IGDA Game Writing SIG mailing list concerning the job title “Narrative Designer.” Jenkins’ description of a game designer as a narrative architect overlaps quite a bit with this Narrative Designer position. Stephen Dinehart at Relic describes it this way:
“Narrative Designers are storytellers whom live alongside a game as it develops through the production process. As the project grows and alters over the course of production, Narrative Designers make sure the story maintains continuity throughout the experience. They are managers, writers, game designers, artists, and more. The pillar of their primary tenant must be founded on a transparent blend between narratological and ludological tendencies within interactive experience design. Simply put the balance of play and story.
A Narrative Designer should understand the whole product, and that doesn’t mean just talking about the story. Like any good Hollywood Director they need to know the entire game production pipeline so that one may intimately understand the implementation of said narrative elements for which they will be responsible. That said it’s a new field, it’s ripe for exploration and definition.”
On this note of considering the industry job of a game writer, the work of scholars like Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern can be, at times, threatening, since they call for the use of AI in narrative to enhance dramatic arcs and interaction with the narrative of a story. However, I think we’re a very far ways away from any AI being able to self-generate appropriate content. Everything needs to be programmed and accounted for in advance, which means there’s a role for a writer to aid the depth of character in dialogue form. Not that I enjoy writing AI barks in Excel sheets—that’s by far not my favorite part of the job. The direction of these character-oriented games would call for a different structure though, taking into consideration all of the possible conversations, but not making them active based on a simple “yes/no” branch in the plot of the game.
As Mataes points out, “… strongly authored stories whose path and outcome depend on player interaction are not currently on active line of exploration in commercial game design” (644). Sure, we can co-author stories in MMOs and construct stories out of our gameplay experience, but again, interactive drama has not been brought about to its fullest in the way Brenda Laurel might envision. She suggests, instead of looking to literary narrative structures with description, extensification, episodic structure, games benefit more from a dramatic narrative structure of enactment, intensification, and unity of action.
Ultimately, they are looking for games where the player has many opportunities to change many aspects of the story. This is not to say that all games should be this way though. I want to be very clear that I respect all varieties of games and my purpose as a game writer is to see where I best fit in the game development process, whether it be for writing background story, cutscenes, dialogue, plot progression, AI barks, or just instructions in the best possible manner and nothing more. There are many varieties of games, and this dramatic narrative form is just one of many possibilities.
Sure, I want story in games, believable characters, something immersive that keeps me invested not just in the game mechanics but the story-oriented purpose to playing—but that’s my th’ang. There are times I’m in the mood for MMOing it up and being social, times where I just want to do a quick TextTwist or online poker game without real stakes, times I want to oo and ahh over the Next Gen console games, and times I want to bang a fake drum set that matches up with color patterns on a rolling screen. Narrative has a unique role in each of these, but so does the gameplay. Without proper attention to mechanics and the actual play, story depth won’t be able to save the game.
What projects like Façade are trying to show is a new kind of mechanic with interactive narrative and drama in mind, but the game-like qualities have far to go just yet, if they even want to make games. In most cases, it’s about a different form of interaction. It calls for what Chris Crawford pointed out to me during the Northwest Games Festival in Portland, Oregon—that games are one thing underneath a larger umbrella of interactive media.
