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The Narrative Quality of Game Mechanics

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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10045))

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Abstract

This paper will introduce and discuss a new model for understanding the relation between narrative and games, by looking at the narrative quality of game mechanics. First, a review of the terms “Narrative” and “Game Mechanics” is made, and defined in this context, before a literature review, based on both narratological and ludological sources. From this, a model is presented and described, which encompasses the previous research as well as defining a clear relation between mechanics, context, story, and narratives of games. This model is intended for both design and analysis of games, and has been developed to cover a lack of definition of how game mechanics create narrative through their own definitions and their relation to the context and storytelling of the game. This model, still in an infant stage, shows potential, but still requires rigorous testing in several areas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As one of the parts of aesthetics is “Narrative” in the MDA framework, that obviously clashes with the idea that aesthetics are ludic narratives, and thus our understanding of aesthetics is slightly adjusted from MDA. This will be explained in Sect. 5.

  2. 2.

    All narratives can have a thousand interpretations. This is just one of them.

  3. 3.

    It is important to note that in many cases the major difference is the definition of narrative, which is often the root cause of most of the ludonarrative debate.

  4. 4.

    Interactive Digital Narratives. These are not quite games, necessarily, but there are many overlaps.

  5. 5.

    The experienced narrative is closely related to the “postclassical” sense of narrative as a mental construct as defined by Herman [19], and while that cannot be disregarded here, we will focus more on the mechanical, discoursal parts of games.

  6. 6.

    Context can also be understood as the outside context, e.g. the players previous experiences, location, etc. but here we focus purely on the context within the game. Not to say that the outside context is not important but it is outside the control of the author and thus not part of the game specifically.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Section of Medialogy, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, A.C. Meyers Vænge 15, 2450, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Bjarke Alexander Larsen & Henrik Schoenau-Fog

Authors
  1. Bjarke Alexander Larsen
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  2. Henrik Schoenau-Fog
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Correspondence to Bjarke Alexander Larsen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank Nack

  2. The Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Andrew S. Gordon

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Larsen, B.A., Schoenau-Fog, H. (2016). The Narrative Quality of Game Mechanics. In: Nack, F., Gordon, A. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10045. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_6

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