Introduction: A Discipline, if We Can Define It
What in the world is narrative design?
The term has no Wikipedia page. There is one for "narrative designer"—the job title—but not one for the discipline itself. Which is funny; from where I sit, the discipline is a solid thing that I can define—while the job title is much more liquid.
In the video games industry, the "narrative designer" title is applied very broadly to narrative workers who have a range of responsibilities. I've known narrative designers to write dialog, edit dialog, design narrative systems, implement narrative systems, design quests, place narrative entities in levels, oversee localization pipelines, direct VO and mocap, supervise writers, report to writers, be forbidden from talking too much to writers, design progression systems, write specs for engineers, act as a technical interface of writers, make broad story decisions, write internal narrative documentation, review story material for setting consistency, enforce brand guidelines, and more.
Not all—not even most—of these tasks are "narrative design". Not even the whole of the Game Narrative Reader is about narrative design; I've opted to incorporate writing about game writing and narrative production, too. So I can also blame myself for the apparent confusion.
But still, again: the discipline of narrative design, the underlying craft and theory, is to me a solid thing; a definable thing. I shall then endeavor to prove it by defining it.
Narrative design is the discipline that concerns itself with how stories are structured, how they become known to the player, and how they respond to the player's actions.
How stories are structured: Sometimes a game story can be written down as a linear outline; sometimes it's a branching tree structure; sometimes chunks of narrative are free-floating, and can be encountered in different orders. Narrative design encompasses the work of defining these structures, both at the micro level (individual conversations, scenes, or quests) and at the macro level (the entire game).
How they become known to the player: Which storytelling tools do we deploy, and how do we deploy them? Video games are a composite art, made up of images, writing, and sound all put together. Different games use these channels of communication differently, and arrange them into different legible units. Some games use voice over in the form of linear narration; some in the form of systemically-available snippets of sound, or "barks". Some games use text extensively to tell their stories; some have no text at all; some are made up entirely of text.
How they respond to the player's actions: Sometimes they don't; sometimes stories vary wildly based on player input, and two players will have entirely unlike experiences. Often, we're somewhere between those two extremes, trying to balance questions of player agency against the needs of experiential focus and game scope.
The Discipline is as old as video games, although the term "narrative design" only became standard in the last twenty years or so. And as long as there is a story, the Discipline is always present—whether or not there is a person doing it exclusively.
Infocom famously titled its writer-designers "Implementors"; they worked in a holistic way, not really observing a barrier between writing and programming and the (initially invisible, but increasingly self-aware) intermediate craft of design. This tradition bled into hobbyist interactive fiction, and lives on in other places too—I've described my original job at Failbetter as being essentially an implementor, someone who would build an interactive story end-to-end as an individual creation.
On the other end of the spectrum, big studios have sought to not only separate out narrative design into a distinct project role from writing, but to define individual responsibilities within that sphere: quest designers, scenario designers, world designers, content designers, technical narrative designers. Not everything that all of those titles encompasses is the Discipline, but they all at least touch it—as do game designers, UI/UX designers, writers, localizers, editors, producers, artists, and QA. The very best game stories are a whole-team effort, and the Discipline spreads out of the boxes we try to shove it into.
It seeps; it leaks; it gets on everything. It is, honestly, rather a huge inconvenience—the people who make abstract, storyless arcade puzzlers might have the right idea. Its fuzzy and frustrating boundary is a major reason why this is the Game Narrative Reader, not the Narrative Design Reader. You need to understand writing, and narrative production, to do narrative design; either because those are also parts of your job, or because they are key pieces in making your job a thing that can even exist.
But the promiscuous nature of the Discipline doesn't make it vague or undefinable; it only makes it everyone's parcel. It is, therefore, the necessity and hope of this collection that it be of use outside the boundaries of titled "narrative designers," too. Show the Bestiary of Functions to a programmer. Talk to your voice actors about the Triangle of Identities. Tell your producer that you're done with sprints. Tell your editor… well, if you have the luxury of one, just tell them you appreciate them. For me.