game design as narrative architecture henry jenkins

Emerging from the narratology vs. ludology discourses which were prominent during the early 2000s in game studies, this article from Henry Jenkins attempts to blend the merits of both views to form an understanding of spatial storytelling within video games. It's funny, one of my supervisors actually recommended that I read this article a while ago and I completely forgot about it; it wasn't until I read it of my own volition yesterday and searched up some citation information that I realised they were one and the same.

Jenkins begins by weighing a few of the diverging views on narrative in games present at the time of his writing, which tended to place interactivity and narrative at opposite ends of a spectrum.

"Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power."

Jenkins argued that these sort of views may be a result of the application of film theory to games, which "can seem heavy-handed and literal minded, often failing to recognize the profound differences between the two media." To me,this is a distinct habit of academia; a reliance on spotting similarities rather than differences between mediums. This could be an anxiousness on the part of academics, who are faced with an entirely new medium and aren't quite sure how to deal with it, and so fall back on established ideas and terms to talk about them. However Jenkins, and I, would agree with this, stating:

"The last thing we want to do is to reign in the creative experimentation that needs to occur in the earlier years of a medium's development."

While there is certainly plenty to gain from exploring film, theatre, and narrative studies in relation to games, we must be careful in not leaning too heavily on these ideas which might restrict how we talk about and make these works. This was something I discovered in Honours, and it seems like scholars were just coming around to the same idea during the period this article was written. Since then, games studies has incorporated aesthetics into their discussions just as much as narrative, and opened itself up to more forms of narrative theory beyond what may have been looked at before.

"First, the discussion operates with too narrow a model of narrative, one preoccupied with the rules and conventions of classical linear storytelling at the expense of consideration of other kinds of narratives, not only the modernist and postmodernist experimentation that inspired the hypertext theorists, but also popular traditions which emphasize spatial exploration over causal event chains or which seek to balance between the competing demands of narrative and spectacle."

Jenkins advocates here for a turn towards the spatiality of games, rather than focusing on narrative or ludology. Even with early games, which one might not typically associate with a traditional conception of virtual environments, as relying on their spatiality:

"Even many of the early text-based games, such as Zork, which could have told a wide array of different kinds of stories, centered around enabling players to move through narratively-compelling spaces: "You are facing the north side of a white house.There is no door here, and all of the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees.""

This is quite an important point, I think, and could even be used to justify my focus on virtual environments in this research. You can have a virtual space without a game, but you can't have a game without a virtual space. You can't have anything without a space. This positions virtual environments, and the qualities of their spatiality, as quite a fundamental concept in game studies; you could even argue that in order to understand video games you would first have to understand virtual environments. Jenkins agrees, stating that "before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about game spaces."

Jenkins spends the rest of the article laying out four main "narrative options" for game designers to utilise in their game worlds:

Evoked Narratives

This is where environmental details evoke well-established narratives from our collective memory, and goes some way to explaining why science-fiction and fantasy are so popular as game genres. Dressing Link up as Peter Pan is going to remind players of adventure and wonder, feelings the The Legend of Zelda games tend to deal with, for example.

Enacted Narratives

Enacted narratives could be said to be the most dominant form of story telling in digital games at this moment. Story "moments" are peppered throughout the games world, and to advance the plot the player moves between them. The environments are structured around these moments, funnelling players towards specific cutscenes or in-game conversations or events through linear level designs. Uncharted, Half-Life, and Call of Duty would be good examples of this kind of narrative presentation.

Embedded Narratives

These story cues are a little more subtle than the first two, and generally involved hinting at a narrative which has occurred before the player had reached the space. Most games use this at a very fundamental level, by including environments which have some sort of history, like ancient ruins or a developed city. Games also use this as a signposting technique (the hallway full of corpses in Metal Gear Solid is a good indication of the challenging boss fight in the next room), and as a way to add texture to their worlds without bogging the player down in cutscenes or audio logs. Increasingly, the narrative burden is being placed entirely on the composition of a virtual environment and objects within it, as inGone Home.

Emergent Narratives

Arguably the most exciting form of narrative delivery for academics is where tools are provided by the designer for a story to emerge naturally from the intersection of elements which make up a games world. The Sims allows players to create their own stories by putting them in control of the virtual lives of their avatars, just as running around one of Grand Theft Auto's cities is likely to result in some kind of emergent interaction between the player and the game's A.I. Multi-user games such as World of Warcraft could also be said to breed emergent narratives as players interact with the world, and each other.

So overall a useful article, if only as a foundation for further investigations into narrative in short-form virtual environments, if I choose to take that path. However, what can I draw from this piece if I'm dealing with virtual environments without a specific, pre-described narrative? There are a couple of points in Jenkins' article which I believe are worth extrapolating in this regard.

"Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word, attractions, broadly to describe any element within a work which produces a profound emotional impact and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicated across and through these discrete elements."

To me, this quote is emblematic of the idea that, even if narrative theory may not be directly applicable in all cases, we can still use elements of it to design virtual spaces. For example, if we consider what Eisenstein calls "attractions", such as unique structures, vistas, or visually complex landscapes, as plot beats, we can begin to see how designer could lay out these spatial moments throughout a player's path through a virtual environment, to provide affective moments of awe, concern, and so forth. Dear Esther plays with this idea beautifully, carefully revealing certain views and compositions of its space at certain times to tell a spatial story of rebirth and redemption.

Of course, Dear Esther is a very strictly linear game. The player's path, and therefore the way they enter certain environments and view them, has been rigorously designed to achieve those certain affects, even if they aren't contained within a cutscene. This ties in with readings I've been doing surrounding performativity, and is referenced by this quote from Jenkins:

"The actors have mastered the possible moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain character actions. No author prescribes what the actors do once they get on the stage, but the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary of possible actions and from the broad parameters set by this theatrical tradition."

The key difference here is that a designer, unlike a theatre director, has prescribed (as much as one can, indeteminancy of computer hardware and input notwithstanding) the actions avaliable to the player in the game world. There's nothing physically stopping an actor in a play from breaking character, walking off the stage into the audience and going to grab a burger. There are things in place to prevent such action in a virtual environment though; in Dear Esther there are colliders preventing you from walking away from the path the designers want you to follow, and if you walk into the ocean you drown and will be placed back on the path. There's no jump button, or fly button, and no way to teleport. In fact, the only way to not follow the pre-described path is to either quit playing the game completely, or to walk back toward the start of the level. Even then there are quirks built into the environment, such as steep cliffs, which prevent you from going back after a certain point. The designer of virtual environments, as I discovered in my interaction experiment, is designing every little detail, including which actions are afforded and which are not.

So to close, how might we design a virtual environment to contain some sort of plot, without harshly limiting the player's control through cutscenes or strictly linear level design? The answer, for Jenkins, lies in the urban design philosophy of Kevin Lynch.

"He proposes an aesthetic of urban design which endows each space with "poetic and symbolic" potential: "Such a sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages the deposit of a memory trace."

I think that idea of potential is an important one. Triple AAA game development is very concerned with efficiency, and with such high budgets and therefore high risks, it's hard to blame them. Assets such as models, textures, and animations mean work, which means paying people to do that work, which means taking money from the budget. To fill a virtual space with "poetic and symbolic potential" would be a risky idea; to spend money on something that the player might not ever see or experience. But with short-form virtual environments, a key feature of which is their status as non-commercial works, this ceases to be as much of a problem. Designers still may have a budget in terms of time and effort, but they won't have to justify each creative decision in terms of money spent or wasted. They can totally afford to put in a model or sound effect the player might not ever experience.

A good example to finish up is last year's Her Story. While it's hard to call this a virtual environment (at least in the sense I mean in this research), the game consists of a collection of video interviews of a single woman in relation to the death of her husband. By viewing these tapes, the player is able to piece together the plot of the game, and how the woman is involved. While there are some restrictions and prompts to guide the player's investigation, for the most part they are in control of what they watch, and when. They can totally miss not only entire videos, but entire plot points if they don't pay attention. Her Story is brave enough to build itself on potential rather than restriction, and allows each player to form their own narrative architecture.

Jenkins, Henry. "Game Design as Narrative Architecture." First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 118-30.