Game Design, Narrative Design and Game Writing

So I was (am?) having a quick twitter discussion about game design, narrative design and game writing with Steve Ince, Stephen E. Dinehart, Altugi Isigan and Armando Troisi.

It's a bit tricky to cover nuance in 255 characters, especially when the @-list grows, so here's a blog post instead, with my working definitions and how they interact:

The overall vision of what the game is, how it works and what the user experience is - that's Game Design. It often seems to focus on game mechanics and user input, two very important areas, but ultimately that is in pursuit of the end goal: to shape the experience of interfacing with game.

Narrative Design is a subset of Game Design focusing on story and story like elements as tools to achieve the Game Design goals. The better the Narrative Design, the more it meshes with other parts of the game, be it the mechanics, the art direction or something else.

The most obvious example of Narrative Design, and what I expect most people think of when they think about it at all, are seen in the cutscenes that are typically found in games. A one minute animation makes it clear that the hero's best friend is really a traitor, and that he has the macguffin; thus the player understands why he has to kill the 200 zombies in the level and ultimitaly defeat his erstwhile ally.

But Narrative Design is also used in more subtle ways and, I would argue, that's where the real substance of the discipline resides.

When, after having slain the nasty dragon, you overhear a random villager comment about how life has changed now that the dragon is gone, that's due to good narrative design. If there are physical changes in the village (i.e. the narrative design and art implementation are aligned) that's even better.

If the fact that the Chemical-Substance-With-A-Cool-Name is incredibly flammable has been mentioned several times throughout the game before the players are faced with an action-puzzle based on setting fire to it, that's good Narrative Design. If the flammability of the substance has somehow been a core part of the plot, that is (again) even better.

Then, of course, there's the whole subset of Narrative Design that deals with allowing the players to substantially change the plot. If the players can either slay the mercenaries and return the cargo to the corporation or join the mercenaries and sell the cargo, then both of those options need to be communicated (so they're aware there's a choice to begin with), both options need to make sense within the context of the game-world and there should be noticable in-game consequences of that choice. And to do that, you go need good Narrative Design as I outlined above.

Good Game Design is making sure that whatever the players do in the game is fun; good Narrative design is making sure not only that it's clear why they're doing it, but that it's interesting and compelling.

If it's fun flying the space ship around to defeat the massive alien invasion, then that's good Game Design; if the alien invasion makes sense to the players and they're invested in defeating it, that's good Narrative Design.

All that said, then, Game Writing is writing the words that are used in games. Whether it's the amazingly pithy one-liner the hero speaks as he kills the end boss, the heart-wrenching exposition that explains why you want to kill the end boss in the first place or simply the copy on the bullet-ridden billboard in the middle of level 7, it's all game writing.

The thousands of lines of ambient dialogue that help make the open world seem alive? That's game writing. So are the instructions in the front end, or the little blurbs that go with each of the upgrades you can buy at the in-game vendor.

The Game Writer obviously needs to be aware of what the goals of the Narrative Design is; it's no good writing in California vernacular if the game is trying to evoke the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Often that's not a big problem, as the Game Writer and Narrative Designer is the same person.

Narrative Design and Game Writing are relatively new terms so I'm sure there are different definitions out there; but those are mine.