Experimental Narrative Structure in Games

Literary concepts and dynamic perspectives can make games better: This grandiloquent titled article of Games Radar takes a look at narrative structures in games or – actually – just perspectives of narration. It’s not very insightful but ends with a funny thought-experiment.

A slightly more interesting (if only in theory) concept for an abstract perspective involves the reversal of time. When the player pushes forward on the analog stick, his game character walks backward. When the player presses a button to interact with an in-game object, the character (un-does) whatever was done to the object. When the character (fires) a gun, bullets are sucked back into it, and downed enemies stand up and run away from him.

The player must determine the means by which the character reached the end in order to determine how to undo all of his actions and find the beginning, and there is the added challenge of decoding the reversed story, as in the film Memento.

The reversal of time, while theoretically amusing, may translate into terrible gameplay – perfect balance between narrative structure and solid gameplay is difficult to achieve. Perhaps all of our hypothetical games would be awful, but they were meant as extreme examples to illustrate points. The hypothetical quality of our hypothetical games isn’t as important as the general idea we want to communicate, which is that perspective can be adjusted and shaped in a myriad of ways, and is far more complex than just the location of a virtual camera.