Slides on Spatial 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)

8. EVOKED 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

12. EMERGENT NARRATIVES

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.”