Wey-Han Tan (April 2008)

StorySpaces

Stories give in-game experiences context and contingency. There are abstract games like „Tetris“ or „Add’em up„, which rely exclusively on game mechanism and aesthetics to hold the player’s attention. But in the end, a player of an abstract game can retell it to interested listeners just in terms of general adjectives, and not about the none the less exciting events and situations in it.

Connected to Situated Cognition, Anchored Instruction and Cognitive Apprenticeship, one can say that a gripping story that’s deemed worth to be retold by the player/learner, is also one most likely to be remembered – including the facts and skills contextualised with and situated in it.

Narratives can be seen as a way of acquiring, structuring and contextualising knowledge.
This is a universal cultural phenomenon of intersubjective fiction: directed or spontaneous, intended or purpose-free, consolidating or subverting a specific cultural aspect. Narratives share many structural and functional traits with games when listened to (see e.g. Bruno Bettelheim, „The Use of Enchantment“), and in their creation, (re)telling and willful changing some of the traits of shared communicative toys.
Thus they can provide the player with both orientation in and appropriation of the game, whilst the difference between embedded stories by gamedesign and emergent stories created by players (Salen & Zimmerman „Rules of Play“, p. 383) may blur in the more complex communicative games.

„Within a culture, ideas are exchanged and modified and belief systems developed and appropriated through conversation and narratives, so these must be promoted, not inhibited. Though they are often anathema to traditional schooling, they are an essential component of social interaction and, thus, of learning. They provide access to much of the distributed knowledge and elaborate support of the social matrix (Orr, 1987). So learning environments must allow narratives to circulate and ‚war stories‘ to be added to the collective wisdom of the community.“
Brown et al. (1989), „Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning“

A narrative aspect may elevate a dry topic into something exciting and relatable.
Though this GBL-design-standard often gets overused or misused as cheap ‚extra‘, it is a powerful tool to shape, guide and flavour the player’s experiences. Due to the human nature of analog communication and interpretation, storyspaces as design elements can be easier to access, understand and modify than tuned rule systems and/or the program(ming) of a game, thus providing a form of semantic skinning. This accessability is a valuable asset for educators or budget-bound GBL-designers.

There are several forms of narrative framing, structuring or spacing adaptable to different playing/learning/teaching styles.
They requiring from nearly none to a quite sophisticated technical and creative effort to integrate in a GBL-application; from providing a solidly structured guidance to aporic open possibility spaces (e.g. Will Wright, „Gaming is a form of time travel“, Video). In most games, especially in more complex ones, there’s often more than one of these approaches in use, either in sequence or parallel.

I’ve chosen some topological space-movement-metaphors to illustrate the more ’story-esque‘ forms of contextualisation.

1. Visual and behaviour association
2. Micronarrative
3. The Vantage Point
4. The Path
5. The Tree
6. The Garden
7. The Field
8. The Market
9. The World

1. Visual and behaviour association

Probably the simplest form of creating a story inside the head of the player/learner is to shape the objects according to a contingent background, like spaceships, planets and astronauts, drawing from the assumed experience of the player with sf- and space-opera-stories; or to let the behaviour of the objects, independent from their form, lead to associations of their purpose respective intentions, like hunter, prey, lover, fighter, etc. (e.g. Bruner, „Actual Minds, Possible Worlds“, p.16)
This level of storyspace is non-verbal but retellable none the less.

Example: Most small Online Flash Games rely on visual or behavior association to either motivate playing or implicitely explain the action recquired by the player/learner.

2. Micronarrative

Closely related to visual and behaviour association, this aims for a short ‚anchor‘ to attach an idea, association, concept in the mind of the player/learner. This can be a single sentence, a paradox or mysterious statement („There are only 10 kinds of people in the world.“), a joke, an implicit or explicit question. Micronarratives try to catch the player/learner’s attention and, like a minimised version of the Vantage Point, to linger on in the background of her mind to be recalled for contextualisation when an appropriate situation calls for it.

Example: Rene Magritte’s „Ceci c’est nest pas une pipe“ can be seen as a Micronarrative.

3. The Vantage Point

One of the most popular, best known and cost-effective of storyspaces, the Vantage Point is told beforehand in its entirety, to give the player/learner an overview on the starting situation as well as the background and motivating context of the actions he’s supposed to follow.

Example: Most learning Adventures from Heureka Klett rely on The Vantage Point as motivation and explanation, to the point that there’s nearly no story development in the adventure itself like in „Physikus„.

4. The Path

The Path guides the player through a series of plot developments, for example as inserted cut-scenes after the mastering of an in-game obstacle, or as result from talks with in-game characters and finding clues giving information on events. This very structured approach avoids desorientation of the player/learner and lets the designer carefully built up daramtic tension. When well written and using the player/learner’s ability to cognitively and emotionally fill in gaps created for dramatic or aesthetic effect, or to associate unspoken events and motives, this can be a sound tool for designing an immersive game.

Example: Many linear detective / conspiracy stories are structured this way, where any sucessfully tackled obstacle leads to another, bigger one, revealing step by step what has happened – or will happen. „Caroline Online“ e.g. is an example for a complex use of The Path

5. The Tree

The Tree branches into different storylines according to decisions of the player/learner. The storylines may flow together later on or lead to early ends of the game. This is based on a classic instructional design approach („programmed instruction“), where any false answers of the learner branches off into a small loop of repetition before he’s directed again to the question he failed to answer. Later on this approach saw some popularity in interactive books („Gamebooks„). With the Path, the designer has absolute control of what actions and reactions are required from the player/learner to develop the storyline(s).

Example: Interactive books like „Choose your own Adventure“, but also many multiple-choice-assessment ‚games‘, who confront the player/learner with a problematic situation, let him choose between several pre-formulated answers and confronts him with the results of his decision.

6. The Garden

The Garden is essentially a hypertext or hypermedium, allowing the player to freely move along arranged paths (links) to examine different points of the story (nodes). The sequence of visits is loosely pre-structured by the network arranged by the designer, but ‚movement‘ isn’t bound to the linear flow of a story. The player/learner explores and (re)constructs the pieces of a story, sequentially, semantically, topologically etc. while commuting the network as both a topological and dramatic labyrinth. Desorientation and demotivation may result if the task is too difficult or to unclar in it’s aimed for results.

Examples: Most adventure games rely (at least partially) on The Garden, starting with the classic „ADVENT„, with many interconnetced nodes influencing each other without having to be explicitely visited in a given sequence.

7. The Field

The Field allows the player/learner to commute freely among hints, objects and characters, though the game area may be subject to temporal progress in its entirety, thus setting a frame for sequential development of a story. The Field itself resembles more a toy or a free configurable simulation than a rule-based and goal oriented game, though its elements are, of course directed in their interactions by hidden algorithmic – or dramatic – rules. For example can the use of violence somewhere in the game have repercussions on the behaviour of other characters met later on.

Example: Many of the more complex simulation games without a given goal, e.g. „The Sims„, can be seen as Fields, allowing the player/learner to invent or associate a story with the events unfolding by his direct or indirect actions.

8. The Market

The Market shares similar traits with the Field, but doesn’t rely entirely on algorithmic regulated interactions of objects and player/learner, but integrates other player/learners up to massive scale into the field, to take the role of characters in the story or to control narrative objects. Roletaking and rolemaking, the creation and handling of complex motives is an important part of shaping and directing this kind of storyspace. By using human cognition, imagination and improvisation a much higher level of unforeseeable (emergent) dramatic development of the storylines can be achieved.

Example: Many MMORPGs rely on the interaction of their players within a given narrative frame, delivered via some of the other forms of storyspacing. Alternative Reality Games like „World without Oil“ for example are based on the creativity, collaboration and communication of their participants inventing and exchanging stories, while the gamemaster arranges, plants and sends dramatic turns and events to keep the overall initiating background story going.

9. The World

This is actually no story internal to the game, but the external story the game is socially and individually embedded in by (non)players/learners. Knowledge can be situated in a game by a developing or given story, but the game itself is already situated in a continuum of other games, of media, social discourses and research of these. To modify two sayings: No game is an island, and you can’t play the same game twice. Personal experiences with other media, games or game sessions lead to narratable individual framing (Minsky) („I hate these adventures, I’m running around and nothing ever happens.“) respectively a narratable social framing („Killergames held accountable for another school massacre – 17 dead!“)
Games may refer to these metastories by subverting common tropes or by putting them up for the player/learner for reconfiguration. At this point, intertextuality and transmediality enters the storyspace – or vice versa.

Example: Possibly as a reaction to political criticism on wargames and first-person-shooters, the trailers of „Command & Conquer: Generals“ (Overview,USA,GLA) mock the interchangeability of political reasoning and use of violence across the ideological borders; you may find this kind of political comment also in Crawfords „Balance of Power„. On the other hand, tropes especially related to games in general and related media can be found in the highly entertaining „TV Tropes“ Wiki.