KOTCL Dev Diaries: Diving deeper into narrative design.

Knock, knock, travellers!

As I promised, today we’ll be venturing into the tangled jungle of game development.

Last time, I talked about the exotic and rarely understood profession of the narrative game designer—myself being a scriptwriter, ha-ha!

Yes, I’m not a narrative designer but a humble scriptwriter, although after spending half my life in the game industry, I’ve learned so much about the ways of the wise that I could just as easily work as a narrative designer. Still, my biggest priority is texts, and I don’t always have time for narrative design duties (and there’s plenty of work there).

If you want to understand the difference between a scriptwriter and a narrative designer, just read the previous diary entry. In this one, we’ll figure out what exactly narrative game designers do and what kinds of problems they run into.

By the way! There are narrative designers among our readers. I personally know two —but there well may be more. I hope they’ll chime in in the comments and tell me whether I have a good grasp of what they do. And maybe they’ll even share a couple of tips for the future, hmm?

Let’s Go

Do you respect professionalism? I do. Professionals know best how to do their job. I’d never tell an artist that they’re drawing the wrong way, and I’d never tell a sound designer that they’re doing the sound wrong. And if I told a game designer that their mechanic needs to be reworked, they’d tell me to stick my criticism where the sun doesn't shine. And just try telling a scriptwriter (I.e. me) that my script is bad—I’ll launch into a lecture in response, and it might even be interesting.

Everyone in game design wants to do their job well and knows how to do it. Everyone is a professional in their field, and the narrative designer is sometimes perceived as an obstacle: listen, buddy, you don’t understand anything about this, and I know exactly how it should be done. It sounds fair in theory, but if narrative designers didn’t interfere in other people’s work, they wouldn’t be able to do their own.

Their job boils down to making sure that every element of the game is narrative. They take care of the presentation so that everything tells the same story in sync. And for that purpose, they bother absolutely everyone in the process. How do you avoid conflicts in that situation?

References

Here’s a great idea: provide more references, explain what you want in as much detail as possible. For many experienced people, that actually makes things easier—just tell me what you need, and I’ll make it perfect.

But sometimes that’s not enough.

Sometimes a narrative designer has to partner up with other team members, guiding them almost manually. That won’t work with artists—they can’t bear it when someone is standing behind their shoulder. (Hey, artists, I’m right, aren’t I?). But with others it works fine, even helps them. It definitely helps the scriptwriter! When a narrative designer works in tandem with me, the result is simply—chef’s kiss. But it doesn’t always work out and you can’t avoid conflicts. Especially when it comes to game design.

Conflicts with Game Design

If game designers have come up with a really cool gameplay mechanic, maybe the narrative designer shouldn’t interfere. Or should they? We all came here to play great games, not to listen to great stories. We play because we want to play. If you tell us an awesome story while we’re at it, that’s fantastic! But gameplay comes first.

The problem (for the narrative designer) is that game mechanics can sometimes be counter-narrative. They interfere with storytelling. What do you do about that?

You don’t have to look far for an example: a card-based combat system is counter-narrative. How do you explain to a player immersed in a believable game world that all the battles in it are actually a card game? You don’t. If you try, you might only make it worse. Or maybe not?

Game Conventions

If a game mechanic can’t really be explained, it can easily be turned into a convention. Fortunately, game conventions were invented long before video games. We all understand and accept them.

Chess is one big game convention, a pure abstraction of warfare. Card games are the same. Although wait… There’s Magic: The Gathering, a card game—but that one does have a narrative. When I play Magic, I step into a crafted universe with different worlds and the inhabitants of those worlds. A small illustration, a bit of text—presto! A road to adventure is stretched out before you. That’s narrative game design, babe.