Part
Narrative design
You might say: interactive narrative design, story systems design
Narrative design structures a game's stories, how players learn them, and how they respond to player actions.
- What it does
- Aligns story structure, delivery channels and reactive state with player agency, game scope and the play experience.
- Ask
- What story structure, delivery and response will make player action matter?
- Typical
- Linear, branching, free-floating or systemic; text, dialogue, image, sound, space and rules.
- Trouble
- Story arrives as disconnected exposition, choices promise change without consequences, or mechanics ask players to act against the stated fiction.
What to look for
- Stories learned through dialogue, text or sound
- Player actions changing story response
Parts
- Narrative structure: Narrative structure arranges scenes, conversations, quests or storylets into the order and conditions in which players can encounter them.
- Narrative choice: A narrative choice offers alternatives whose selection changes the story state, what the player learns, or what can happen next.
- Narrative state: A narrative state is the current combination of variables that determines which story content and outcomes are available.
- Worldbuilding: Worldbuilding defines the social, historical, economic and physical context that makes the game's actions make sense.
- Narrative delivery: Narrative delivery chooses how a player learns story through dialogue, text, images, sound, space and systems.
- Agency contract: An agency contract is the set of expectations about which player actions can shape the story and how visibly they matter.
- Ludonarrative dissonance: Ludonarrative dissonance is a conflict between the story a game tells and the actions, incentives or values its mechanics require.
Sources
- Bruno Dias, Introduction: A Discipline, if We Can Define It, Definition of narrative design
Narrative design is the discipline that concerns itself with how stories are structured, how they become known to the player, and how they respond to the player's actions.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Narrative design" (narrative-design) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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