The Play's the Thing: The Quest for Understanding Narrative Experience in Interactive Digital Games

Christopher Michael Yap (1461022)


Game designers often struggle with balancing an effective narrative experience with engaging gameplay in their games. This difficulty arises because player interactivity with the game creates a potential for the player to directly and freely impede or deviate entirely from any narrative experience intended by the developer. This deviation is referred to as Ludonarrative dissonance(LND), and this problem constitutes an obstacle towards the enjoyment of a game on both the gameplay and narrative levels, respectively.

In this presentation, we seek to elucidate the phenomenon of what constitutes a comprehensive interactive narrative experience in a game in order to better understand ways to maintain a beneficial harmony between interactivity and narrative in games. By attempting to understand both narrative and interactivity in terms of their essential qualities separately, then as a synergistic system which also requires player input and subjective interpretation, we propose a concept of "Player-side Emergence" as a potential solution for instances of LND. Lastly, we propose the idea that an overall narrative experience in a game is not simply the existence of narrative and interactive systems/mechanics of a game, but rather a synergy or phenomenon which forms only when a player actually plays and interprets the game. Based on our findings, we conclude that such a narrative experience exists not simply in one part of a game software, system or player interaction/interpretation, but rather, it exists as a connective phenomenon which pervades all of these components and systems. We propose a new model for conceptualizing this overall narrative experience which is called the Narrative Experience Trinity, and we contend that this narrative experience model can be utilized by game and narrative designers to better conceptualize the narrative in an interactive game as a whole system as opposed to a compartmentalized part of development (that which potentially leads to narrative and interactivity colliding, and thus, the occurrence of LND).