Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 162

challenges. The section “Mechanisms for Advancing the Plot” addresses this issue
in detail later.
Narrative
The definition of narrative is open to debate, but this topic uses a definition that
conforms pretty closely to that used by theorists of storytelling. Narrative consists
of the text or the discourse produced by the act of narration. In an interactive story,
narrative is the part of the story that you, the designer, narrate to your player—as
opposed to those actions that the player performs, or those events that the core
mechanics create.
NARRATIVE The term narrative refers to story events that are narrated—that is, told or
shown—by the game to the player. Narrative consists of the noninteractive,
presentational part of the story.
THE ROLE OF NARRATIVE
The primary function of narrative in a video game is to present events over which
the player has no control. Typically these events consist of things that happen to
the avatar that the player cannot prevent and events that happen when the avatar
is not present, but we still want the player to see or to know about them. Scenes
depicting success or failure are usually narrative events.
Narrative also lets you show the player a prolog to the game or the current level if
you want to. It not only introduces the player to the situation in the game—the
game's main challenge—but also to the game world itself. When a football game
shows the athletes running onto the field at the beginning of the game, that's a
narrative event that the player can't change. It simply creates context. Although the
sights and sounds of your game—the graphics and audio—create the immediate
physical embodiment of your game's world ( how the world looks), they can't
explain its history and culture ( why it looks that way). If you don't design that
culture and history, the game world will feel like a theme park: all false fronts and
a thin veneer over the game's mechanics. To establish a feeling of richness and
depth, you must create a background, and you can reveal some of that through
narration. Narrative very often serves as a reward when the player achieves a major
goal of the game—he gets to see a movie or read more of the story he's playing
through. Players who don't like stories in games usually ignore these narrative
moments, but many players enjoy them a great deal.
COMMONLY USED NARRATIVE BLOCKS
Many video games use blocks of narrative material—brief episodes of noninterac-
tive content—to tell parts of the story. Designers commonly use a narrative block as
an opening sequence, to introduce the story at the beginning of the game; as an
ending sequence, to wrap up the story when the player completes the game; as an