Summary
Narrative architecture is Henry Jenkins’ description of how games tell stories: not mainly by narrating events, but by designing spaces in which stories are evoked, performed, discovered or generated. In his 2004 essay “Game design as narrative architecture”, Jenkins argues that game designers are “narrative architects” more than storytellers, and that spatial design, not plot, is where games do their most distinctive storytelling.
Key ideas
Jenkins describes four ways a game space can carry narrative:
| Type | What it means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Evoked | The space calls up a story the player already knows from other media; the game adds to or reworks it | Star Wars games; American McGee’s Alice re-imagining Wonderland |
| Enacted | The story is organised around the player’s movement and goals through space: a journey, a quest, small story beats triggered as you go | Adventure and quest structures; the hero’s journey through a sequence of locations |
| Embedded | Story information is placed in the world in advance for the player to find and piece together: objects, layouts, documents, ruins | Myst; BioShock’s Rapture; What Remains of Edith Finch; Hollow Knight’s ruins |
| Emergent | The game provides spaces and systems rich enough that stories arise from play itself, unplanned by the designer | The Sims; Minecraft; Dwarf Fortress; a near miss in XCOM |
- Stories told vs stories played. Embedded narrative is closest to traditional authorship; emergent narrative is closest to pure play. Most games mix all four.
- Space as storyteller. The environment does work a narrator would do in a novel: it sets mood, implies history and signals conflict.
- A middle position. Jenkins wrote partly in response to the “ludology vs narratology” debate, arguing that games are not simply stories, but not story-free either; they tell stories in their own, spatial way.
In practice
- Embedded: treat every room as evidence of what happened there. Plan the backstory first, then place the props, damage and documents that imply it (see environmental-storytelling).
- Enacted: map story beats onto locations, so that reaching a place is progress in the story; tie triggers (Unity: trigger colliders, Timeline sequences) to arrival rather than to elapsed time.
- Emergent: give systems states that players can tell stories about: named characters, persistent consequences, readable cause and effect. Emergent stories need legible systems; if players can’t see why something happened, they can’t retell it.
- Evoked: if you use a known setting or genre, decide what the player is expected to know already, and spend your effort on what’s new.
Evidence
- Jenkins, “Game design as narrative architecture”, in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (MIT Press, 2004), pp. 118–130. The essay names evoked, enacted, embedded and emergent narrative and frames designers as narrative architects.
- The course lecture series pairs Jenkins’ embedded/emergent distinction with a “stories told, stories played” comparison: traditional storytelling has a fixed structure, an audience who is told the story and author-set pacing; game narrative is dynamic or branching, experienced and performed by the player, and draws emotion from agency and consequence as well as empathy (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).
Implications
- Narrative design and level design are the same job more often than team structures suggest. A level designer placing props is writing.
- Emergent narrative is cheap in content but expensive in systems design and testing: the stories are only as good as the systems’ legibility and variety.
- Arguably the four types also describe four kinds of player effort: recognising (evoked), travelling (enacted), investigating (embedded) and causing (emergent).
Open questions
- How do you evaluate an emergent narrative in a playtest, when every player’s story is different?
- Where does branching dialogue fit? It is authored like embedded narrative but chosen like enacted narrative.
Related
environmental-storytelling · games-as-systems-vs-games-as-stories · narrative-design · ludonarrative-dissonance · emergent-design · emergence · level-design · open-world · exploration · thematic-coherence