A Storyteller's Toolkit: Structure, Narration, Time, Space

Henry Jenkins III

Introduction
There are two main poles around which the study of games has developed – ludology (the study of gameplay) and narratology (the study of narratives) and there are tensions between game fans, game scholars and game critics about these two poles. Americans have been painted as narratologists and the Europeans, particularly the Scandinavians, have been painted as ludologists. While it may seem limiting to paint people into corners because of the positions they adopt, the debate is helping to map some of the key principles defining a new area of study. The American tradition representing the crossing over of scholars associated with literary and media studies to examine what is similar or different about the new medium of expression; the Scandinavians draw more heavily on a body of work in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy which have sought to understand games and play. Game designers increasingly think of themselves as storytellers and the role of narrative in games has grown over the past decade, yet they still remain deeply committed to designing rule sets, which result in a compelling play experience. The third element that often gets left out of the debate is the concept of space – a crucial term for understanding the structure of the game.

This talk will lay out the basic elements of narratology in order to provide the readers a vocabulary of terms to think with. The main elements of narratology are structure, narration, time and space. Let us examine these terms individually.

Structure
1. NARRATIVE
The classic definition of narrative is that it is a "chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space." (David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film art: an introduction, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2001, p. 60.) Note that there is nothing intrinsic within the above definition that says that these events have to occur in a linear fashion. There are a variety of relationships between time and space that are possible within the scope of the above definition.

2. WHAT SPECTATORS DO
Consuming any narrative is a problem solving activity. Early elements in the film cue a series of expectations based on prior experience which enables us to begin to form a hypothesis about what will occur next and what consequences it will have for the characters; each subsequent scene either reaffirms or requires us to rethink those assumptions. The Usual Suspects was one such film that people came out of saying, "Man, that kept me guessing the whole time!" They kept on making assumptions about what would happen, and those were constantly being changed as the film progressed. Games may make this process more visible, since they require players to actively test those assumptions through their interactions with the program.

3. EXPOSITION
This is the initial information given about a story/world, which sets the preconditions for the hypothesis forming and testing activity. Exposition may play a more important role in a game than in a traditional story because players need to act directly on that information. The result is often a sparser, more streamlined story. Most games start with a cut scene (pre-recorded, pre-rendered material that plays out regardless of what the player does) instead of a play scene (action fully controllable by the player) because of this reason. Exposition is different from genre. Game genres are another way of looking at the issue of exposition – the genre gives you a roadmap of the game mechanics, controls, rules of fairness and unfairness. If the game relies heavily on genre codes, then one needn't even read the instruction book before playing it, if one has played similar games previously.

4. GOALS
Most stories are structured around the goals of a core protagonist or protagonists. Their goals and desires are established early in the story and serve to motivate subsequent actions. The resolution of the story comes when the protagonist has met their goals, where-as many elements in the story can be understood as either advancing or retarding the movement of the protagonist towards the fulfillment of their goals. In Hollywood films for instance, there are two sets of goals the character faces: professional and romantic and the proportionate relationship between these two is what makes the film interesting. Because games depend on the player assuming direct control over the protagonist's movements, many aspects of good game design emphasize the shaping and communication of these goals and the development of obstacles that block the achievement of those goals. Goals in games may be narrower than those in other media, but are much more important as they motivate the player's activity to a large extent. This again, makes games like Grand Theft Auto and The Sims interesting because the games don't have pre-determined goals. It is left to the player to set personal goals and personal missions and how the story plays itself out depends entirely on what the player is trying to do. Thus, these newer games begin to create a playground space where players have what they feel are narrative experiences.

4. CAUSALITY
Most stories are organized around actions and their consequences. Games transform this process into a series of choice points. What is the causal relationship between two actions, i.e. if a certain action occurs, will another particular action occur as a result of the previous action. Causality is the essence of plot and understanding the causal relationships built into games is one of the essential building blocks by which one can create a narrative with compelling experiences that is not pre-programmed.

5. STORY and PLOT
Narrative theory makes an important distinction between story (the set of all the events in the narrative, whether they are explicitly presented or simply implied) and plot (the ways those story elements are ordered within a particular work.) Very few works spell out every element of the story or present them in sequence. Many stories achieve artistic effects by reordering the story events or withholding key information about events until much later in the plot. In other words, one doesn't need to start every story at its beginning – one can start with a peak moment of dramatic action and fill in the back story later on. In a game like Myst, the player starts at the end of the action. The characters have long since vacated the space – you move into their world, their physical environment to try to find out information about them from their diaries, books, examining the places they lived in, etc. So the past is being constructed almost like a detective story, while the actual experience with the gameplay is that of moving forward in time,

6. THE ACCORDIAN STRUCTURE
Some story traditions depend on a tight narrative economy, where nothing is introduced which is not essential to the overall trajectory of the narrative. Other traditions, however, leave greater space for improvisation with some elements considered essential while others can be added, subtracted, or altered without dramatically altering the overall plot. The term, accordion-like structure, describes such narratives, where the opening, closing, and certain key transition points are fixed but many aspects of the middle can be expanded or contradicted depend on local improvisations. This accordion structure links games with earlier improvisational forms, such as Commedia Dell'arte, silent slapstick comedy, or professional wrestling.

Narration
1. NARRATION
This is the process by which information about story events is transmitted to the consumer. It may well involve some degree of detection on the part of consumers to ferret out information that has been withheld or masked by the storyteller. Narration helps to shape our identification with the story protagonists. For instance, in the film Blade Runner, there are two editions – one with and one without voiceover narration. The absence of the narration makes the film a lot more ambiguous. Relatively few games have voice-overs, but a lot of games have some kind of guiding mechanism – either a sidekick or a comic character, some sort of instructional mode, that provides you some information. This may be pre-recorded in a cut scene or may pop up in an action in response to something that you do.

2. IDENTIFICATION
Tied to narration is identification. How we get information is directly related to how we feel about the information we receive – and this is what is known as identification. When you say that you identify with a character, what exactly do you mean by that? Narratologist Murray Smith identifies several different kinds of identification: Recognition, which refers to the character's ability to form a coherent picture of the character on the basis of the various information the text provides; Alignment, which refers to the access spectators are given to characters, their actions, and their psychological states; and Allegiance, which refers to our moral evaluation of the characters. Games can create a very powerful sense of allegiance with the protagonists because we are not only aligned with them but we also control their actions. This is true even when we have a third person view of the action rather than adopting a first person camera. What games have a harder time achieving is separating out alignment and allegiance so that we make negative moral judgments about the choices the characters make.

3. HIERARCHY OF KNOWLEDGE
Part of what makes stories compelling is an imbalance in the kinds of information available to the various characters, the author, and the reader. In some cases, interacting characters have unequal access to information, giving rise to conflict or misunderstandings. In some cases, the viewer may have greater knowledge than the characters. In some cases, the characters know things we do not and thus we spend time trying to infer what they know from their actions. In some cases, the author purposefully withholds information from us, often with the goal of motivating us to continue to read/view/play the story. In film, Hitchcock described this as the difference between shock and suspense. He said that if he showed a room, a person coming into the room and then a bomb blowing up the room, the audience would be shocked, as they wouldn't expect this. So this could create a minute or so of intense shock. On the other hand, if he showed the bomb under the table to the audience at the beginning, but neither of the characters in the film knew it, and were instead sitting in the room and having a conversation about cricket, then that would be suspense. The intense emotion could be stretched out for five minutes or so in this case, and Hitchcock used suspense effectively in several of his films to create intense experiences for his audiences. In the game space, the more you restrict your point of view to a single character, the harder it is to create the hierarchy of knowledge. Once you are in the character's world and controlling the character fully, creating an effective hierarchy of knowledge is difficult to achieve. As a game designer, this something that has to be thought through – in a game space, how do you create a hierarchy of knowledge that allows suspense, for example, instead of shock, which allow the complexity of emotional relationships that are created by having unequal flows of information between characters.

TIME
1. THE AESTHETICS OF TIME
Storytellers have enormous power to shape our experience of time. For example, they may alter the ordering of events; they can draw out or compress the duration of events; they can repeat actions or bring us back to the same point multiple times in the process of experiencing a particular plot; they may simultaneously confront us with multiple time-spans. Game designers give up control over some aspects of temporality to players, yet there may be a broader potential vocabulary for exploring time than is represented by the current range of games on the market.

2. DEADLINES AND APPOINTMENTS
A common strategy for creating a compelling narrative experience is to motivate the unfolding of story time by linking it to the protagonist's goals and desires. The most typical devices for doing this is to establish a deadline (by which a certain action must be completed) or an appointment (a future assignation between the protagonist and another character.)

SPACE
(Derived from: Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller, "Nintendo and New World Travel Writing," http://www.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/FullerNintendo.html)

1. SPATIAL STORIES
"De Certeau (1984b) lays out a grand claim for spatial relations as the central organizing principle of all narratives: "Every story is a travel story--a spatial practice" (p. 115). Our cultural need for narrative can be linked to our search for believable, memorable, and primitive spaces, and stories are told to account for our current possession or desire for territory. Consider, for example, the emergence of science fiction in the late l9th and early 20th century as a means of creating imaginary spaces for our intellectual exploration. The adventure stories of Jules Verne drew upon centuries of travel writing as they recounted a variety of trips to the moon, under the sea, into the center of the earth, or around the globe. The technological utopian writers often created static plots (a man from our present goes to the future) that allowed them simply to describe the landscape of tomorrow; one can draw a direct line from the moment in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, where the book's protagonist stands on his balcony and surveys Boston's future, to the train cars that allowed visitors to the 1939 New York World's Fair to ride above and look down upon Futurama. Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories magazine was full of chronicles of "odysseys" across the uncharted wilderness of Mars or Venus and encounters along the way with strange flora and fauna. Writers often modeled these aliens' worlds after the American West so that they could cross-market their stories to both western and science fiction pulps. A focus on plot and characterization was slow to develop in this genre that seemed so obsessed with going "where no one has gone before." A similar claim could be made for various forms of fantasy writing. Trips to Oz or Narnia or through the looking glass, adventures in Middle Earth, or quests for the Grail all seem to center as much on the movement of characters through space as on the larger plot goals that motivate and give shape to those movements. Nintendo® may also be linked to another class of spatial stories, the amusement park rides that as early as turn-of-the-century Coney Island adopted popular fictions into spaces we can visit and explore. Walt Disney's Peter Pan becomes a ride by flying ship across the landscape of London and Never-Never-Land, Snow White turns into a runaway mine car tour, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is remade into a submarine ride. The introduction of virtual reality technology to the Orlando, Florida amusement parks results in a succession of ever more intense "tours" of the stars, the oceans, the human body, the World of Hanna-Barbara, and the dawn of time. Nintendo®'s constant adaptation of plot-centered contemporary films into spatial narratives represents a miniaturization of this same process. The tamed frontier of the virtual new world has, from the first, been sold to us as a playground for our world-weary imagination, as a site of tourism and recreation rather than labor and production. Public interest in virtual reality is directly linked to the amusement park's long history of satisfying popular demand for spatial difference, spectacular attractions, affective stimulation, and sensual simulation. De Certeau's description of Jules Verne's stories as focused around the related images of the Nautilus's porthole (a windowpane that "allows us to see") and the iron rail (that allows us to "move through" fantastic realms) has its obvious parallels in these amusement park attractions that invite us to look upon and travel through but not to touch these spectacular spaces (De Certeau, 1984b, p. 112). What is a spectacle at the amusement park ("Keep your hands in the car at all times") becomes a site of more immediate interaction in the Nintendo® game that asks us to act upon and transform the places it opens to our vision."

2. GAMES AS SPATIAL STORIES
"Nintendo®'s central feature is its constant presentation of spectacular spaces (or "worlds," to use the game parlance). Its landscapes dwarf characters that serve, in turn, primarily as vehicles for players to move through these remarkable places. Once immersed in playing, we don't really care whether we rescue Princess Toadstool or not; all that matters is staying alive long enough to move between levels, to see what spectacle awaits us on the next screen. Mario's journey may take him by raft across a river of red hot molten lava, may require him to jump from platform to platform across a suspended city, or may ask him to make his way through a subterranean cavern as its ceiling collapses around him. The protagonist of a sword and sorcery game may struggle against a stormy sea, battle a massive serpent, confront a pack of wolves who rule a frozen wasteland, or combat an army of the dead that erupt from the trembling earth, all in search of lost fortunes and buried gold. ...The art of game design comes in constructing a multitude of different ways we can interact with these visually remarkable spaces."

3. GAMES ARE NOT TRADITIONAL STORIES
"Most of the criteria by which we might judge a classically constructed narrative fall by the wayside when we look at these games as storytelling systems. In Nintendo®'s narratives, characters play a minimal role, displaying traits that are largely capacities for action: fighting skills, modes of transportation, pre-established goals. The game's dependence on characters (Ninja Turtles, Bart Simpson, etc.) borrowed from other media allows them to simply evoke those characters rather than to fully develop them. The character is little more than a cursor that mediates the player's relationship to the story world. Activity drains away the characters' strength, as measured by an ever-shifting graph at the top of the screen, but it cannot build character, since these figures lack even the most minimal interiority. Similarly, plot is transformed into a generic atmosphere – a haunted house, a subterranean cavern, a futuristic cityscape, an icy wilderness – that the player can explore. This process becomes most visible when we look at games adapted from existing films or television programs; here, moments in the narrative trajectory become places in the player's itinerary, laid out as a succession of worlds we must travel through in order to reach our goals. Playing time unfolds in a fixed and arbitrary fashion with no responsiveness to the psychological time of the characters, sometimes flowing too slow to facilitate player interest and blocking the advance of the plot action, other times moving so fast that we can't react quickly enough to new situations or the clock runs out before we complete our goals. Exposition occurs primarily at the introduction and closing of games: For instance, the opening of Super Mario World reminds us that the Princess has once again been kidnapped. The game's conclusion displays the reunion of Princess and champion and a kind of victory tour over the lands that Mario has conquered. But these sequences are "canned": Players cannot control or intervene in them. Often, a player simply flashes past this exposition to get into the heart of the action. These framing stories with their often arbitrary narrative goals play little role in the actual experience of the games, as plot gives way quickly to a more flexible period of spatial exploration. Although plot structures (kidnapping and rescue, pursuit and capture, street fighting, invasion and defense) are highly repetitive (repeated from game to game and over and over within the game, with little variety), what never loses its interest is the promise of moving into the next space, of mastering these worlds and making them your own playground."

4. PLACE/SPACE
"For De Certeau (1984b), narrative involves the transformation of place into space (pp. 117-118). Places exist only in the abstract, as potential sites for narrative action, as locations that have not yet been colonized. Place may be understood here in terms of the potential contained as bytes in the Nintendo® game cartridge or the potential resources coveted but not yet possessed in the American New World. Places constitute a "stability" which must be disrupted in order for stories to unfold. Places are there but do not yet matter, much as the New World existed, was geographically present, and culturally functioning well before it became the center of European ambitions or the site of New World narratives. Places become meaningful only as they come into contact with narrative agents.... Spaces, on the other hand, are places that have been acted upon, explored, colonized. Spaces become the location of narrative events. As I play a Nintendo® game and master it level by level, I realize the potentials encoded in the software design and turn it into the landscape of my own saga."

5. MAPS/TOURS
The place-space distinction is closely linked to De Certeau's discussion of the differences between "maps" and "tours" as means of representing real-world geographies. Maps are abstracted accounts of spatial relations ("the girl's room is next to the kitchen"), whereas tours are told from the point of view of the traveler/narrator ("You turn right and come into the living room") (De Certeau, 1984b, pp. 118-122). Maps document places; tours describe movements through spaces. The rhetoric of the tour thus contains within it attention to the effects of the tour, its goals and potentials, its limitations and obligations. A door is a feature of a place, or it may be a potential threshold between two spaces. The maps and charts that Nintendo® Power publishes are curious documents. Strictly speaking, they are not maps at all, not abstract representations of geographic places. The magazine simply unfolds the information contained on many different screens as a continuous image that shows us the narrative space from the player's point of view, more or less as it will be experienced in the game.... Surrounding these successive representations of the screen space is a narration or "tour" that identifies features of the landscape and their potentials for narrative action, as in this text from a discussion of Adventure Island 3: "Lush jungle regions dominate Stage 2. However, a remote island to the southwest appears to be snowed under. How unusual! One of the largest waterfalls known to mankind will be encountered in Stage 2. Its cascading torrents may be too much for the loin-clothed island hero. To the south, Higgins will be lost in the mist". The text may also suggest possible ways of acting upon this space and point toward the forms of resources and knowledge needed to survive there: "The Spiders shouldn't give Higgins too much trouble. Some move up and down and some of them don't. There may be hidden Eggs in places such as this." At times, the text may also focus our attention back onto the larger narrative context, onto character disputes or goals that frame the game action: "The volcanoes are erupting! Higgins had better act fast so he can rescue his girlfriend and get out of there. Because of the tremendous heat, the supply of fruit is shrinking. There won't be much time for decision-making. The aliens, astonished that Higgins made it this far, will be waiting!" ("Adventure Island 3," Nintendo® Power, October 1992, no. 41, pp. 8-13). Nintendo® documentation focuses on the specific narrative actions to be performed upon these spaces, purposes to be pursued and sites to be visited, rather than a universalized account of the possible places that exist independent of the reader's goals and desires. In most cases, however, the game company withholds crucial information, and the final stage of the game remains unmapped and undocumented. Players must still venture into an unfamiliar and uncharted space to confront unknown perils if they wish to master the game."

6. THE FRONTIER
Nintendo® enacts a constant struggle along the lines that separate known and unknown spaces – the line of the frontier – which is where the player encounters dangerous creatures and brutal savages, where we fight for possession and control over the story world. As De Certeau (1984b) notes, the central narrative question posed by a frontier is "to whom does it belong?" (p. 127) ...The frontier line is literalized through the breakdown of story space into a series of screens. The narrative space is not all visible at once. One must push toward the edge of the screen to bring more space into view. The games also often create a series of goalposts that not only marks our progress through the game space but also determines our dominance over it. Once you've mastered a particular space, moved past its goalpost, you can reassume play at that point no matter the outcome of a particular round. These mechanisms help us to map our growing mastery over the game world, our conquest of its virtual real estate. Even in the absence of such a mechanism, increased understanding of the geography, biology, and physics of the different worlds makes it easy to return quickly to the same spot and move further into the frontier. A related feature of the games is warp zones – secret passages that, like De Certeau's bridges, accelerate one's movement through the narrative geography and bring two or more worlds together."

7. STORY SPACES
If we recognize that games tend to privilege space over other aspects of narrative, then we need to examine more closely the kinds of spaces introduced by games. In most cases, the elements in that space are restricted to those that serve a clear function within the game play. Aspects of the design of these spaces, however, may also serve an expressive function, helping to define the atmosphere or tone of a particular game or communicating important information about the characters. One challenge might be to think about how to increase the meaningfulness of the objects found within the story space of a game.

Further Reading

1. Henry Jenkins, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture,"
   in Noah Waldrip-Fruin and Pat Harrington (Eds.) First Person: New Media
   as Story, Performance, and Game (Cambridge: MIT Press 2004).
2. Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller, "Nintendo and New World Travel Narrative," in Steve Jones (ed.) Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995).
3. Espen Aardseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
4. Ernest Adams, "Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers," Gamasutra.com, December 29 1999.
5. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)
6. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992)
7. Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling," Gamasutra.com, March 1 2000.
8. Greg Costikyan, "Where Stories End and Games Begin," Game Developer, September 2000.
9. Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 1984)
10. Markku Eskelinen, "The Gaming Situation," Game Studies 1:1.
11. Jesper Juul, "Clash Between Games and Narrative"
12. Jesper Juul, "Games Telling Stories?" Game Studies 1:1
13. Marie-Laurie Ryan, "Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media," Game Studies, 1:1
14. Greg Smith, "Computer Games Have Words, Too: Dialogue Conventions in Final Fantasy VII," Game Studies, 2:2
15. Noah Waldrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.) First Person: New
    Media as Story, Performance and Game (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). See
    especially Janet Murray, "From Game Story to Cyberdrama", Espen
    Aarseth, "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation," and
    Eric Zimmerman, "Narrative, Interactivity, Play and Games: Four Naughty
    Concepts in Need of Discipline".
16. Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens, Rules of Play: Game Design
    Fundamentals (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). See especially Chapter 26
    "Games as Narrative Play".