Recently in the Forum Ludorum seminar, we have discussed the topic of interactive storytelling in games. Based on that discussion, I was able to summarize my own current understanding of the topic below.

Basic Definitions

For the purpose of this essay, the terms "story" and "narrative" are synonymous with each other (but not with "plot" – see below) and defined as a retrospective account of a sequence of causally and chronologically linked events (based on Simons 2007). Narrative is how we humans "make sense" of the world or, more formally, how we process, store, and share our in-the-moment experiences by reducing them to sequential reports. Because video games are a participatory, interactive medium, they generate in-the-moment experiences for players, but as authored media, developers also commonly insert curated narratives into them. This gives rise to two distinct kinds of narratives in games (first identifed and named by Marc LeBlanc at GDC 2000):

Procedural narratives are not to be confused with "computational narratives" (Yannakakis and Togelius 2014), which are authored at run time by the game's artificial intelligence, rather than (exclusively) by the player or by the developer. Computation narratives are a largely theoretical (at the moment) attempt to teach machines to recognize narrative threads in unstructured clusters of gameplay events and, in the long term, to allow machines to develop these narratives into dramatic conflicts, similar to how a hands-off game master would run a tabletop RPG campaign.

Finally, we define a dramatic narrative as one that is driven by a conflict between an individual character and an opposing force (often another character), which the audience (the player) is expected to emotionally invest themselves in.

Aspects of a Narrative

In this section, we present a framework for analyzing and improving video game narratives. Because of the fundamental differences of how embedded and emergent narratives are authored, however, two related but distinct toolsets are needed to model them. Our embedded narrative model is adapted from The Lorerunner's Six Points of Story and is rooted in the aforementioned claim that the primary purpose of embedded narrative is to establish context for gameplay interactions. Together, following aspects comprise the narrative design of a video game:

For emergent narratives, we can instead turn to a theory developed by the indie pen-and-paper community The Forge (Edwards 2001) to model fantasy role-playing as exploration of shared imaginary worlds. Borrowing from fantasy role-playing is appropriate because emergent narratives are arguably the main strength and purpose of this medium. Edwards' model states that dramatic narratives emerge from the Premise of a role-playing game, which consists of Character (who the story is about) and Setting (where and when it takes place), which together produce Situation (what kicks off the story); as well as System (how the shared fiction is negotiated by players) and Color (evocative details of the fantasy). A more technical look at emergent storytelling specifically in video games is given by Chauvin et al. and Ryan et al., among others.

Semiotic Building Blocks

An embedded narrative of a video game is created by the developer and mediated by the game to the player using a variety of signs in the semiotic sense (for a more in-depth introduction to Peircean semiotics and their relation to video games, see Aristov 2017). These can be subdivided into two broad categories: content and rules, or, in cybertextual terms, "textons" and "transition functions".

The content of a video game comprises its textual (where "text" is defined by Aarseth 1997 as "any object with the primary function to relay verbal information"), audio (sound), and visual components. A case can be made for including haptic (touch-based) and spatial content (such as 3D architecture) as separate sub-categories, but there are too few examples of haptic storytelling in commercial games to theoretically model them, while spatial signs are almost always mediated through visual display due to limitations of gaming hardware and are therefore rolled into that category.

The rules of a video game can also be subdivided into player controls (how the player interacts with the game state) and behaviors (how the game state evolves without player interaction). As tools for constructing embedded stories, they are unique to interactive media, but have been historically neglected by developers in favor of appropriating content-based storytelling techniques adopted first from literature and later from film. The term commonly used in game studies to describe narratively meaningful rules is "mechanics-as-metaphor" (cf. Portnow and Floyd 2012).

Textual Content

Even though following content is referred here as "textual", it includes both the visual representations of text (letters and words displayed on the screen) and audio representations (sound files played back on the speakers) und is subdivided into dialogue and flavor text. In terms of antecedent media, the former is rooted in theater, while the latter is typically literary in nature.

Audio Content

Audio content are any sound files that contain information beyond verbal.

Visual/Spatial Content

Player Controls

"Controls" here are a subset of game rules that allow players to interact with the game's internal state. Note that the term "game mechanics" is ambiguous: Hunicke et al. use it to refer to all rules governing game behaviors, while Järvinen 2008 and Sicart 2008 specifically define it as player controls. In this section, we will use "mechanics" and "player controls" interchangeably.

ADDENDUM 2021-03-24: Regarding exceptional mechanics, Hoge 2018 explains how Monolith's famed Nemesis System assembles procedural character arcs out of tightly-controlled exceptions to the consistent rules (which the game previously taught to the player). His argument that players mostly remember the rare exceptions to the normal gameplay goes a long way to answer the question posed in Portnow and Floyd 2014 of why moment-to-moment experience of interactive media appears to be much more forgettable than that of non-interactive fiction. The latter may be able to focus on exceptional events to tell a gripping story by piggybacking on the audience's preexisting notions of normality, while games must spend most of their playtime establishing said normality so that the players appreciate the rare unexpected events and remember them as a causally-linked story arc.

Procedural Behaviors

The final category encompasses rules, run-time behaviors that emerge from them, and all other systemic interactions that are used for narrative purposes. They are similar to repeatable interactions above, in that they establish a narrative of what is normal and what never happens, except that the player does not have to engage with them in any way other than observation and interpretation. Bogost 2007 has coined the term "procedural rhetoric" to describe how games-as-simulations make claims about the real world with their systemic interactions alone, but the same deliberation applies to "narrating" the realities of their own fictional worlds. Because these behaviors emerge from underlying rules and simulations, they blur the line between embedded and emergent storytelling.

Plot Progression in Video Games

Progression in video games refers to the player gaining incremental access to a game's content and mechanics, meaning that the player cannot experience certain parts of it until certain actions are performed, and is therefore synonymous with the term "exposition" as used by Kasavin 2010. Plot progression is thus a measure of how many of the embedded (authored) story building blocks the player has already accessed or can currently access. The appeal of progression systems lies in the delayed gratification and lusory attitude (Salen and Zimmermann), while for plot progression specifically, Aarseth's concept of intrigue ("a secret plot in which the [player] is an innocent, but voluntary, target... with several possible outcomes that depend on various factors", p.112) is also highly relevant.

There are two popular and one rare approaches to tracking plot progression (or, equivalently, referencing a particular plot moment) in video games:

The two main progression types (spatial and causal) are rarely used in isolation, e.g. many role-playing games tie plot events to the completion of dungeon levels (spatial progression), but grant access to said dungeon levels based on which plot event flags have been raised (causal progression).