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Games as Narrative Systems
The creation of a game narrative is really the creation of a narrative system. This notion unifies all of the concepts presented so far in this chapter. As a design problem, creating the narrative elements of a game is very much like creating other aspects of your game. You are crafting a system of parts, simple elements that interrelate to form a complex whole. The meanings that emerge from a system arise out of the individual relationships between elements, as well as the more global patterns that emerge across many sets of smaller relationships.
Even games that are not explicitly oriented toward story creation can be framed as a narrative system. The LEGO Drome Racing Challenge is a massively multiplayer game in which players create a game persona, collect and customize LEGO race cars, and then race them against each other on a variety of tracks. During a race, players do not directly control their cars but instead see how their racing strategies and car customization plays out on the constantly changing tracks. As a large-scale community game, the Drome Racing Challenge offers many modes of interaction, manifesting narrative play though a variety of means. As a game system, the narrative of the Drome Racing Challenge emerges from the interaction of the many parts of the game. The total narrative experience of the Drome Racing Challenge does not lie in any one of these individual elements, but instead, their overall effect arises out of the system as a whole, which includes: Pre-existing backstory. The game exists within a larger narrative world that includes comic books and the LEGO Racers toy products. This sci-fi racing fictive world, where speed-hungry drivers compete against each other in the many dangerous tracks of the Drome, provides the setting for the game, as well as the primary frame for the narrative play. Player as protagonist. Each player constructs a driver character that represents him or her in the world of the Drome Racing Challenge. This driver is defined through a cluster of narrative descriptors: team name and colors, helmet icon, racing motto, and text phrases that the driver utters when making or accepting a racing challenge and winning or losing a race. All of these characteristics are embedded narrative content, selected by the player from pregenerated lists. Other player characteristics, such as a player's racing record, status on the leader boards, progress toward the next license rank, and particular cars and parts collected and assembled, are more modular and emergent ways of personifying the player. Multiple goals. The Drome Racing Challenge embeds long- and short-term goals throughout the game experience and ties them directly into the narrative. Players build a collection of cars and parts, upgrade and evolve cars that they own, improve their license class, compete on the rankings boards, and interact in limited social ways with other players through the narrative world of the game.
The total narrative experience of Ms. Pac-Man arises from a myriad of components: the title of the game and its reference to the existing narrative of Pac-Man, the arcade cabinet graphics and text, the looping animated title screens, the in-game cartoons between levels, and all of the visual and audio elements of the game itself. These elements do not exist in isolation, but combine to form a narrative whole that is more than the sum of the parts. The narrative is multi-faceted, and not only establishes a cartoony fictive world and a romantic backstory for the protagonist, but also provides a narrative framework for the game play itself.The play produces intense emergent narratives of insatiably hungry consumption, strategic avoidance and survival, and dramatic turnabout where the hunted temporarily becomes the hunter.These emergent experiences exist in counterpoint to the light and colorful fictive world of the game, resulting in a richly textured narrative experience in which every element plays a part. A game oriented more explicitly toward narrative play is Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D and other tabletop role-playing games, the game is a system for generating narrative play, a system that can help define the characters, settings, conflicts, plots, and goals of the game narrative. These designed game materials usually include a formal system that details the rules of the game, as well as a narrative world that provides the overall settings and backstory. These two components are intertwined into the larger narrative system of the game. For example, in the fantasy medieval world of D&D, rules for armored swordplay, fantastical creatures, and magical spells are included, whereas rules for computer technology are not. Although players can purchase pre-generated D&D adventures, it is more common for a game's Dungeon Master (the player that leads each role-playing session) to create original adventures. The Dungeon Master leads the rest of the players through these homebrewed stories, each participant role-play-ing a single player-character. The Dungeon Master provides the rest of the narrative elements, describing each setting the players enter, role-playing allies and enemies the players encounter, and slowly revealing the dark mysteries and unexpected plot twists of the ongoing story. Dungeons & Dragons and other similar games are quite explicit story-creation systems, designed to facilitate the structured, collaborative authorship of narrative play. Each player is a part of that system, as are the player-characters, the Dungeon Master, and the many elements of the game world. These game world components might be formally defined (a long sword does 1–12 points of damage), narratively defined (the wizard hermit doesn't seem to like us), or both (if we can convince the wizard to enchant my long sword, it will do +2 damage). As the players converse, roll dice, and consult the game rules, they enact pitched battles and dramatic dialogues, brokering power, knowledge, and personality as they together create meaningful narrative play. Every action taken, whether a difficult feat that requires a die roll or a clever conversational stratagem, has its place in the overall narrative system, buoyed up by the formal rules that make such actions possible. Actions simultaneously expand the ongoing story as new narrative elements are added to the series of events.
