Hannah Nicklin

Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Familial relationships do often adhere to a stereotype or format, but to turn from stereotype to character, consider how you will complicate your characters, and demonstrate that through dialogue-driven exposition.

Choice and agency are part of the material of storytelling in games – and you can make decisions against the grain of players’ expectations for better storytelling.

Characterisation can be derived from disagreement, silence, and lack of effect.

What’s important is that the player is acting, leaning in, and playing ‘as’ the character very often.

David Edgar, How Plays Work

Narrative is ‘the representation of a story’; story is the sum of all the technical aspects and practices of storytelling including narrative (Abbott, 2008, p. 237). Narrative is the choices we make in representing the story (this is explored in more detail a few definitions on from here).

I think that the word ‘narrative’ is often used inaccurately in game circles solely because it sounds more technical. Beware: sounding technical and actually doing a good job of having a technical understanding of your practice which you communicate well to others are often in opposition to one another.

While this book is focused on writing (for which worldbuilding is a process it’s good not to lose yourself in), if you’d like to delve more into the practice of worldbuilding in games, I recommend Emily Short’s excellent blog post ‘Worldbuilding from a Mechanic’ (Short, 2018; Short and Adams, 2019), which includes a link to her literature review on the subject.

plot is what happens in the story – select events in a select order.

Elements of form in games are ways the storytelling is shaped by the writer, the design, the gameplay, and by the player. These elements include:

Register (poetic, prose-like, script-like, sitcom-like)
Length (vignette, 3–5 acts, epic)
Parcelling of story (episodic, sequel based, mission based, through environment, through encounters)
Agency (play between cutscenes, open world, multiple middles, multiple endings)
Platform and proximity (mobile, console, PC, local multiplayer, online multiplayer, non-screen focused)
Unit of attention (how long a play session is meant to be – a commute, a bathroom break, an evening, a weekend day)