Spatial Stories and Environmental Storytelling
“Game designers don’t simply tell stories, they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” These two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
“Monopoly, for example, may tell a story about how fortunes are won and lost… but ultimately, what we remember is the experience of moving around the board and landing on someone’s real estate”
Monopoly has an equivalent in the real world, with its basis on London. Not only do we have an understanding of what the Mayfair square means in Monopoly, but we also have an understanding on the location in the real world.
There’s an interesting difference between design space and real spaces. In video games, areas may seem very large but have to be squeezed in, for example the length of time how long it would take to drive from one end of a map on GTA to another compared to how you would do so in real life.
Collaborative Storytelling
D&D: “The Dungeon Master’s activities start with designing the space… where the players’ quest will take place”
Without the space the game becomes abstract for the players. The story becomes more real when it takes place on a map so players can imagine it takes place in a world.
Gaming more than literature or film need these spaces to create a story. The story becomes more grounded once you get a space, or a map. Before designing a map you must know the story so that you know how to create the space, if the space isn’t created with narrative in mind it will break down.
Zork: “Centred on enabling players to move through narratively compelling spaces”
Zork plays completely through text, giving no map to speak of, so the space must be created through text and description. As such, the player controls the narrative by choosing to go in certain areas and investigate certain things. The sense of moving through the space in text adventures is illustrated by navigational directions (north, south etc), as such creating a map in your mind.
Disney Theme Park Rides
“The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell… armed only with their own knowledge of the world, and those visions collected from movies and books, the audience is ripe to be dropped into the adventure”
There’s nothing but the space, and the design of the space, that tells the story.
Before the Pirates of the Caribbean films came out, Disney relied on the audiences understanding of pirates in general and what people have learnt about it to understand the meaning of the ride. If the pirates in the ride did something unbelievable of uncharacteristic it would break the audiences suspension of disbelief.
4 Types of Environmental Storytelling
- Evocative Spaces: Evoke pre-existing narrative association
“The most compelling amusement park attractions are based on stories or genre traditions already known to the visitors, allowing them to enter physically into spaces they may have visited many times before in their fantasies.”
“McGee’s Wonderland is not a whimsical dreamscape, but a dark nightmare real. McGee can safely assume that players start the game with a pretty well-developed mental map of the spaces, characters and situations associated with Carroll’s fictional universe, and they will read his distorted and often monstrous images against the background of mental images formed from previous encounters with storybook illustrations and Disney movies. McGee rewrites Alice’s story in large part by redesigning Alice’s spaces”
“The role and importance of gamers [in the telling of the story] will almost certainly centre on [gamers’] ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the story world, creating an immersive environment through which we can wander and with which we can interact”
They evoke an understanding of popular culture, literature, films and television as well as our own understanding of other games and the spaces within them, as well as how they relate to the player and their journeys. - Enacting Stories: Spaces provide a staging ground on which narrative events are enacted
“Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories that respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and driven by a character’s movements across a map. The resolution often hinges on the players reaching their final destination”
Prime examples of this are games such as R-Type or Contra games, simple side-scrolling titles and platformers in general fall in to this category. Also in some respect Lord of The Rings and the Hobbit fall into this category, their story is dictated by the way characters move through the map and progress.
“Organising the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist’s forward movement towards resolution” - Embedded Narrative: Narrative information embedded within Mise-en-Scène
“The detective story is the classic example of the principle of embedded narratives. It tells two stories, one more or less chronologically (the story of the investigation itself) and the other radically out of sequence (the events motivating and leading up to the murder”
These narratives are embedded not only in the story, but also in the spaces, for example the detectives find clues in the landscape, including people.
See also: Memento (2000) - Christopher Nolan.
See also: Starship Titanic - Douglas Adams - Emergent Narratives: Player is more involved in narrative decision-making
“Emergent narratives are not merely prestructured or preprogrammed stories that take shape through the gameplay, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic and frustrating as life itself”
Mods can be seen as a type of emergent narrative, by giving players the opportunity to play games in new ways.
“[The Sims] should be understood as the kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories. The ability to design their ‘skins’ encourage players to create characters who are emotionally significant to them, to rehearse their own relationships with friends, family and coworkers or to map characters from other fictional universes onto The Sims. ”
Narrative Architecture in the Real World
“Kevin Lynch made the case that urban designers need to be more sensitive to the narrative potential of city spaces”
“Some kinds of spaces lend themselves more readily than others to narratively memorable or emotionally meaningful experiences… a landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories”
“Game designers would do well to study Lynch’s book, especially as they move into the production of game platforms that support player-generated narrative”
A Threat to Interactive Narrative?
“The player’s participation poses a potential threat to narrative construction, while the “hard rails” of plotting can overly constrain the “freedom, power, self-expression” associated with interactivity”
On-rails is “necessary to make the game work really well. We are building a story-based game, a well-crafted world, a powerful narrative, a beautiful looking game” (Gary Carr, Lionhead)
The Dilemma
“[Designers] must try to determine how much plot will create a compelling framework and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally derailing the larger narrative trajectory”
“As inexperienced storytellers, they often fall back on rather mechanical exposition through cut scenes, much as early film makers were sometimes overly reliant on intertitles”
Two Kinds of In-Game Narrative:
- “Relatively unstructured, controlled by the player as he explores the gamespace and unlocks its secrets” [Story of the players exploration, Red Dead, GTA]
- “Prestructured, but embedded within the mise-en-scène awaiting discovery” [The unfolding written plot]
Give an example of where you see the space and narrative being linked.
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