Environmental Storytelling
- 1. SPATIAL STORIES & ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING NARRATIVE AND SPATIALITY IN VIDEO GAMES
- 2. HENRY JENKINS GAME DESIGN AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
- 3. Narrative and Spatiality Games tell stories, but not in same way as other media Games are less stories than “spaces ripe with narrative possibility” Game designers are less storytellers than narrative architects Games are well suited to depict space; they use simulated physical space to structure player and narrative experience
- 5. Spatial Stories and Environmental Storytelling Different ways of structuring game space facilitates different kinds of narrative experience Games don't just tell stories; they project worlds and sculpt spaces ("liquid architecture,” according to Steven Poole) Popularity of genres invested in world-making and spatial storytelling
- 7. 4 Types of Spatial Stories Spatial stories can: 1. Evoke pre-existing narrative or genre associations (Evoked Narratives) 2. Provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted (Enacted Narratives) 3. Embed narrative information within their mise-en- scene (Embedded Narratives) 4. Provide resources for player storytelling (Emergent Narratives)
- 9. Enacted Narratives Games that enable players to either perform or witness narrative events (e.g., cut scenes) In these games, narrative takes place on two levels: broadly defined goals or conflicts and localized incidents (micronarratives) Micronarratives and Accordion-like structure of games (similar to musicals or action films)
- 10. Embedded Narratives when “the game space becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot.” Story is less a temporal structure than a “body of information” Why the popularity of detective and conspiracy stories in video games? two kinds of narrative: one unstructured and controlled by player; the other pre-structured and embedded in the mise-en-scene, awaiting discovery
- 11. EMBEDDED NARRATIVE WORLD BECOMES AN INFORMATION SPACE
- 13. Ian Bogost “Video Games are Better Without Stories” Response to environmental storytelling: Definition: “Environmental stories invite players to discover and reconstruct a fixed story from the environment itself.” Raises a series of provocative, possibly misleading questions: “Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts?” “Are they really stories, when they are really environments?” “And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?”
- 14. Ian Bogost on What Remains of Edith Finch: “These are remarkable accomplishments. But they are not feats of storytelling, at all. Rather, they are novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3- D engine. The ability to render light and shadow, to model structure and turn it into obstacle, to trick the eye into believing a flat surface is a bookshelf or a cavern, and to allow the player to maneuver a camera through that environment, pretending that its a character. Edith Finch is a story about a family, sure, but first it’s a device made of the conventions of 3-D gaming, one as weird and improvised as the Finch house in which the action takes place.”