Stories, worlds & the player's hand
Crafting compelling player experiences: story structure (acts, arcs and beats, scripted and emergent), linear, branching, branch-and-bottleneck and open-world narratives, characters, world-building and environmental storytelling, thematic coherence, level pacing and layout, Norman's interaction principles, affordances, and balancing agency with guidance. In the practical your group designs one of five game concepts and pitches it.
Slides: use the arrow keys or swipe; press F for full screen and Esc for an overview.
- Structure a game story with acts, an arc and beats, both scripted and emergent.
- Choose a narrative structure (linear, branching, branch-and-bottleneck or open world) and say what it costs to build.
- Build a coherent world where characters, lore, places and levels all express one theme.
- Design the interaction using Norman's principles and affordances, balancing agency with guidance.
Finish your group's pitch deck. Optional: sketch your story's choices in Twine to test the structure, and play Portal (2007) if you haven't.
Activity files
Key reading
Jenkins, H. (2004) 'Game design as narrative architecture', in Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Harrigan, P. (eds) First Person. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 118–130.
Norman, D. A. (2013) The Design of Everyday Things. Revised and expanded edn. New York: Basic Books.
Sylvester, T. (2013) Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.
Ashwell, S. K. (2015) 'Standard patterns in choice-based games', These Heterogenous Tasks [blog].