The Function of Narrative in Games: A Theory

Looking at the balance of narrative vs ludology in game design, I keep thinking about what it is that narrative does. I’m not especially interested in the ‘effects’ of narrative on the player so much as the ‘function’ of narrative. That is, what role does narrative have in the process of playing of a game?

The simplest and most compelling theory is narrative exists to help the player continue playing the game. Narrative does this by encouraging the player to have an emotional investment in the story, by tying together a series of potentially unconnected events and places (the ice level, the fire level), and giving perceived value to repetitive actions. This overarching function of narrative at any point in the game has two immediate goals: telling the player what actions they need to do next, and reminding the player what they have already done.

Telling the player what they need to do next can take the form of a quest diary or journal that a player can refer to at any point. It becomes increasingly important as the complexity of games has increased. Introducing the 3rd dimension immeasurably increases the difficulty of navigating the playing space, as does other ‘realistic’ effects: dust, clouds, smoke, and moving the colour space towards brown, wet and reflective increase the requirements of filling your levels with shouty men standing where you need to be, pointing at things you need to shoot (This is epitomised in the single player campaigns in the Call of Duty series of games). In this sense, to rephrase Clint Hocking, if the best we can achieve with narrative in games is to prevent the screen scrolling to the left, then we have failed to use it to its full capability.

Reminding the player what they have already done is in some sense less critical: it helps with the elimination process for figuring out where to go and what to do – but the necessity of repetition in games may confuse even this issue. But it ensures the player knows what they can do – what capabilities they have at any point in time. More importantly, this aspect of narrative is what carries the emotional investment of the game – because it reminds the player if nothing else of the time they have already spent playing.

But what the narrativist debate in games is actually about is less the function of narrative, and more that this narrative experience requires an externally agency for it to be effective - an author, who provides the narrative to the player through cut scenes, traditional story telling mechanics like dialog and literally dropping story text, in the form of diaries and recorded messages throughout the game space.

My experience with roguelikes suggests external agency is not a requirement. Narrative exists in roguelikes in two forms, in a similar ‘what I’ve already done’ and ‘what I have to do’ form (it would be disingenuous of me to omit the fact I’ve chosen a narrative theory that provides this correspondence). The ‘what I’ve already done’ consists of after adventure reports (AARs) and day in the lifes (DiTL) written by players of roguelikes and posted to the forums and shared with other players. The ‘what I have to do’ form consists of a check list of items that have been learned by repeated play as necessities for successful progression in the game.

Narrative in this sense is a user generated experience – but other narrative forms are equally user centric. Literature provides this by mimicking the internal voice through the process of reading; film, television and first person shooters by superpositioning the viewer over the camera location. Games do this by creating a space where a set of psychological needs can be replicated and fulfilled. The difference between traditional narrative and games is that with games the player is not only required to read the narrative, but must make decisions to propel it forward.

The simplest narrative is takes the ‘and then’ form – perhaps told by a child. ‘And then we went to the park. And then it was raining. And then there was a red ball. And then I fell down.’ We are remarkably adept at constructing a compelling internally consistent story from this sequence of statements. But if I was to ask you come up with the next statement in the sequence of events, you’d immediately pause. You’d need to consider the likely sequence of events (was this child’s care giver there, were they seriously injured, is there a hospital near by, does someone have a phone) and provide a statement that follows consistently. That in itself is not difficult. But where the current gap with games occurs, is that you must not only consider a whole set of information, the game designer must have anticipated all of this criteria as well, and provided for the set of decisions you are likely to make. The correct answer, of course, is ‘And then Zoe helped me up.’ – it’s a retelling of a game of Left4Dead.

It is the gap between the decision making capabilities of the player, and the game rules built by the game designer that makes narrative problematic. We overcome this game through repeated play, as I suggested, through learning the rules of the game and improving our skill in navigating the game space. But linear narrative fails to provide a supporting framework for repeated play: ‘And then we went to the park. And then we went to the park. And then we went to the park. And then we went to the park.’ is a far less interesting a story. We focus a lot more on the exceptional events than the everyday. But we need that everyday framework to ground this in – reread the first example with the insertion of ‘And then zombies attacked.’ as every second sentence to understand how this framing helps understand context.

I firmly believe that roguelikes have solved the narrative 'problem' through permadeath: which forces the player to experience this repeated play, while focusing the mind of the designer on how to provide sufficient variety with each play through to make the experience unique. The roguelike narrative of a single play through is united, I’ve argued elsewhere, by the meta-narrative of repeated interesting and hopefully unique failure which guides the player’s learning of the rules of the game. The player overcomes essentially the same challenge over and over, as the player improves in their ability to use the resources they have, over an ever changing, ever escalating topology of surmountable obstacles. It is no coincidence that this also describes Shadow of the Colossus, a game which has been widely lauded for its synergy of game play and narrative.

This meta-narrative theory, replaying the essentially the same game over and over but with harder to solve problems, can help explain the strength of genre in games – when you move from Doom to Half-Life to Far Cry 2 you are not so much playing new games as replaying the same game again with more complex variations. And it can help explain why some narrative devices from other media fail to survive the transition to gaming.

Imagine you are a designer of a first person shooter which has included a successful widely read writer from the beginning, lauded for the previous work he has done in this game genre. Not only has he developed the plot, character designs, history and many script elements to support the kind of exciting, perhaps revolutionary game experience you are looking to produce, but he’s included a plot twist about a third of the way into the game which introduces and provides a coherent explanation for an innovative game mechanic element which features for the remainder of the game. How do you market the game?

In the example I’m thinking of, you go out, and demonstrate at every possible opportunity how the new game mechanic works, giving the media footage and press material showing off the technology, and help them inform and educate the gaming public. Forget the fact that this completely destroys the plot twist for anyone who has the slightest interest in the game: in fact, you’re setting this up so that someone playing the game will spend the first third of it wondering exactly when this mechanic kicks in.

This is comparable to the Wachowski brothers before releasing The Matrix holding press conferences explaining how the machines jack people into their power plants and the BTU output you can expect from an average adult male. Instead, the brothers chose to run one of the most innovative, audio only campaigns creating heightened anticipation of a movie property which had not yet proved itself, to ensure that the first viewing of their film leaves an indelible mark on the audience. The gaming equivalent I’ve referred to: Clive Barker’s Jericho.

From a traditional narrative perspective, the marketing decision made by the makers’ of Clive Barker’s Jericho makes no sense. The twist, a movie staple, works because subverting the expectation of the audience doesn’t suddenly cause the movie projector to fail, or the surround sound system to break down. But subverting the expectation of someone playing a game can result in this complete mechanical failure. If the player doesn't know where to go next, or what they can do, the game can fail.

In this light, it makes perfect sense to spoil the twist in favour of explaining how the mechanic derived from this twist is used in game. While this is a matter of conjecture, I'm am sure early on in user testing, the need to introduce the character switching mechanic to the audience as early as possible was identified and the marketing approach derived rationally from this. Clive Barker is intelligent enough an author to have deliberately designed the narrative twist which introduces this mechanic. He merely made the mistake of breaking the unwritten rule that any narrative twist should never affect the game play (See Metroid, Metal Gear Solid 2, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare etc. for examples upholding this rule).

Similarly, the absence of a falling climax or denouement in most game narratives, much lamented by game critics, is easily explained when viewing the game meta-narrative as an escalating series of repeated actions.

The unreliable narrator is another narrative staple from more traditional media. GLADoS from Portal is the best example of developing an unreliable narrator in a gaming medium: in fact, you are explicitly set up early in the game play to be shown her unreliability by being told by her you cannot complete a puzzle, in direct contrast to the expectation that completing puzzles allow you to progress. But when presented with the twist and after having been trained throughout the game to use the available tools to avoid destruction, it is still incredible to see the number of people who fail to read the situation, and proceed calmly to their death when ordered to do so (I too am guilty of this mistake). Only the game over screen rescues you from this misinterpretation.

So if these traditional narrative techniques fail to translate readily to the gaming medium, what tools can we use successfully to empower game narrative? That's part of what is so exciting about the medium - we are still in the process of building tools and exploring their utility. I'm going to suggest two that are successful: ownership through naming and resonance. Undoubtedly there are many more.