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Below is the written
component of the paper I presented in the Geographies of Interactive Digital Narratives session –
which I also co-convened – at the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of
British Geographers) Annual International Conference on 29th August
2019. The superscript numbers in the text indicate the number of the
corresponding slide you should view in the embedded Powerpoint above (you can access
the slides separately as a PDF here).
I’d like to thank Scott Palmer for his efforts in convening this session with me, particularly when deciding how to frame the session, what papers to include, and what kind of format the session would take.
I’m also grateful to the Digital Geographies Research Group for sponsoring Geographies of Interactive Digital Narratives, alongside an impressive number of other sessions on digital
themes throughout the conference. Lastly, I want to thank my fellow presenters in
this session, Duncan Speakman, Jonathan Barbara and Lissa Holloway-Attaway. As the session chair, I was delighted with the quality of the papers and how well they spoke
to each other throughout the session, despite covering diverse digital narrative forms. A post giving an account of the overall session will be posted on this blog soon.
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Today1 I’m going to talk about the ways that stories can be
told using a person’s environment with interactive digital media. I’ll be drawing
on the example2 of exploration-based video games, explaining how a set of design
techniques known as ‘environmental storytelling’ works to produce narrative experiences
for players in their fictional worlds. This is based on autoethnographic
research on 12 ‘walking simulator’ games and interviews with their designers.
In particular, I want to outline why I think environmental
storytelling can provide a useful concept beyond just video games3, for thinking
about the ways that navigational practices are meaningfully evoked in a
range of digital narrative forms. I’ll ultimately be suggesting that this concept
could be a starting point for new and fruitful directions of research at the
intersection of geography, narrative studies and the digital humanities, especially
given the heightened importance attributed to the ‘immersive’ sector of the
creative industries today.
But first, why the focus on digital ‘environments’? It’s
evident4 that the ways in which we interact with digital technology are characteristically
navigational; whether it’s in our use of links to move between sites on the
internet, the ways mobile and locative tech guides our movements in physical
space, or the rendering of 2D and 3D worlds that we traverse in video games. Consequently,
one5 of the qualities that makes digital storytelling unique is how these
kinds of navigational interaction with virtual space are shaped into the
dramatic enactment of plots.
This process is perhaps demonstrated most clearly by the
game design practices known as ‘environmental storytelling’6. In game
development, this term typically refers to methods developers use to embed narrative
information in the worlds they design. As this information is discovered
by players7 when they move through the spaces represented onscreen, they’ll come
to perceive a sequence of events that has taken place in the world – a narrative.
To quote Henry Jenkins8, who first popularised the ‘environmental storytelling’
term, video games displaying these techniques are not designed as pre-authored
narratives, but “spaces ripe with narrative possibility”.
Accordingly, what I’m going to focus on in this presentation9
is, firstly, how narrative information is embedded or ‘emplaced’ in video game
environments; and then how players navigate these storyworlds through the
information they encounter. I’ll then use these observations to discuss why I
think this concept of environmental storytelling is helpful for interactive
media scholarship beyond video games.
So10, as a method of narrative communication that requires
navigation, we can say that environmental storytelling entails the distribution
of narrative information across the realm of play. Michael Nitsche calls these
pieces of information ‘evocative narrative elements’ – details11 that don’t
necessarily represent recognisable narratives in themselves, but require movement
and interpretive work from the player to be understood as part of a wider story.
These evocative elements can take a variety of forms, from detailed written
artefacts like letters, diaries or newspaper clippings to objects, signs, and music.
But what qualities do these evocative narrative elements
possess that enable players to construct meaningful stories from them?
Firstly12, the diversity and distribution of these elements enables
a multi-vocality of information transmission, whereby each object can
have its own voice and perspective, rather than being filtered by a narrator. This
means that the narratives emerging from discovered artefacts always reflect the
value judgements of those doing the interpreting – in this case, the player.
In the game Gone Home13, the player-character returns from
holiday to an apparently empty house, and can explore the rooms and belongings
of her family members to make sense of events that unfolded since she has been
away. By giving players deep access to the thoughts, motivations and
personalities of a range of story characters, players can engage with an
intricate exploration of family dynamics and belonging in a middle-class
American household, but in a way that allows them to interpret the events for
themselves.
Importantly, though, environmental storytelling relies on
players to find these narrative elements in the game world by exploring
their surroundings. In narratology14, the relationship between the unfolding
action of a story and what’s actually observed by the recipient is known as a
story’s focalization. But what Michael Nitsche argues is that video games enable
‘dynamic focalization’, through which players can choose where to
point the camera, which directions to move in, and what to focus on in their
surroundings.
This has some important consequences for narrative
communication. The possibility15 of ignoring information means that players can
choose how they want to invest in the world, but also rely on their own
observational skills to discover information rather than being ‘told’ or
deliberately exposed to it. The player experience deriving from the emplaced
narrative elements is tailored to the player’s own affective and emotional sensibilities.
Indeed16, many developers choose to actively hide impactful pieces of narrative
detail in the world, knowing they’ll provide a significant emotional payoff
when found by those looking for secrets.
Dynamic focalization demonstrates how the communication of
visible and audible narrative information is closely entwined with the player’s
haptic control of an avatar as they explore game environments. And indeed17, the
emplacement of narrative elements is as multisensory as the practice of
game playing itself. Shibolet’s paper on the avatar’s movement in Journey
describes how the ‘story’ of the experience comes into being almost solely
through the shifts in movement dynamics you embody as you move across the world,
each ingrained with a kinaesthetic significance that echoes the game’s wider
metaphor of the path of life.
It’s an example that reminds us that game worlds are not
just a mise-en-scene, but what Andy Lavender calls a mise-en-sensibilité.
The interplay between diverse player sensibilities, material hardware and
aesthetic representations assembles to generate events of narrative
meaning-making.
What’s notable18, then, about environmental storytelling is
how the stories that derive from the evocative narrative elements emplaced in
the world become personalised to the player. The affects and perceptions
that players chart become closely mapped onto internal topographies of the self,
providing opportunities for players to engage on their own terms with aesthetic
and kinaesthetic possibilities in the world. It’s this highly personal quality
of player interaction that can make game environments “a place for dwelling
rather than merely a territory”.
All this said19, the evocative narrative elements in
themselves aren’t narratives. It’s the player’s navigation across environments populated
by these pieces of information that leads to the development of stories. But
how does this navigational process work?
When speaking to developers of the games I played, it became
apparent that, even in worlds that seem to let you explore more or less
‘freely’, behind the scenes there are devices encoded into the world to subtly
guide the player’s navigation. In the games I played, there were three main
techniques developers used. The first20 is gating, in which entry and exit points
in the world are carefully coordinated to structure the flow of information the
player is exposed to. The most common method is to require that the player has
found a particular object or piece of information in order to advance to the
next area, such as locked doors that require keys or passcodes to open. The
second is signposting21, in which light and sound directs the player’s attention
towards certain significant elements in their surroundings. And the final
method is pacing22, in which the spacing between narrative information is
carefully managed to elicit dramatic tension and mood.
Together, these three techniques help to negotiate one of
the key ‘perils’ of interactive storytelling – retaining drama when the
interactor can determine which information they encounter and the context in
which they encounter it. These techniques23 provide a basic framework that subtly
shapes how players ‘join the dots’ between the world’s dispersed narrative
information, preserving the intended affective qualities of the story, while
still enabling the sense of thrill and intimacy that comes with encountering
and interpreting this information for yourself.
Nonetheless, this balance between dramatic emplotment and player
agency emerged from my interviews with developers most often in the notion of ‘believability’24.
The developers wanted to spin worlds that players could ‘imagine themselves
into’, but recognised that achieving this aim meant purposely ‘leaving room’
for the player’s imagination. That’s why many exploration-based game design
teams actively imbue depth and ambiguity into their worlds25, using
juxtaposition, symbolism or even contradiction to invite players to formulate
their own beliefs about what any arrangement of narrative elements ‘means’.
At the same time, designers need to reinforce the idea that
each individual narrative element logically belongs to the wider fictional
universe. For game environments based on real-world sites, this might entail
quite extensive research – such as this26 example, where the developers used
academic articles about farming practices to learn whether hay bales were
wrapped in 1980s rural Shropshire. More generally, games testing27 is crucial, as
developers of these games use player feedback to carefully manoeuvre the spatiotemporal
attributes players interact with to achieve “positively affective” outcomes,
with believability being one of these key objectives.
So by manipulating how narrative information is exposed to
players as they traverse game worlds, developers create the conditions for
players to draw meaningful associations between the evocative narrative
elements. They calibrate player perception to ensure that dramatic agency is
retained and believability is maximised, while also inviting personal
interpretation to enable intimate narrative world construction by the player. The
navigational process of enacting environmental storytelling isn’t a process of
narrating events in sequence, but enabling dwelling in a storyworld that spills
out of the screen, whose narratives are intimately tied to player dispositions,
sensibilities and real-world contexts.
Everything28 I’ve said so far about environmental storytelling
is based upon the findings of my research into video games. But today,
particularly with the increasingly hyped ‘immersive media’ paradigm that’s
shaping the future of work in the creative industries, we’re seeing an ever
greater number of narrative works being produced that use locative media, 360°
video, sound, AR, VR and MR technologies. Like video games, these are
interactive and often involve some form of spatial navigation by the user. But
to what extent can the game design techniques falling under the banner of
‘environmental storytelling’ be of relevance to these emerging media forms?
Well, the informational environments29 that users engage with in
these immersive media arts often differ quite considerably from video games. Johann
Huizinga famously described playful activity as something that takes place in a
‘magic circle’ – a sphere of activity separate from the spaces and times of
everyday life that participants enter voluntarily. Yet for many of these
emerging storytelling media, this magic circle is forced to expand in
some way, whether spatially, temporally, or socially. The affordances of immersive
technologies increasingly enable the blurring of fictional environments with
the environments30 of everyday life.
This presents some important questions. How would a
storyteller go about embedding narrative elements in changing, off-screen
environments? In turn31, how would the gameplay interact with existing material
processes, histories and social norms? And lastly, when the boundaries of the
storyworld are less clearly defined, how can narrative designers ensure that
participants continue engaging meaningfully with the narrative architecture
they’ve designed?
It's evident that, if the ideas and practices associated
with environmental storytelling are to be useful in these contexts, the
informational ‘environment’ we engage with needs to be expanded too. In video
game development32, environmental design currently refers to a very specific set
of practices – such as modelling and texturing, lighting scenes, and creating
concept art. Yet narrative world-building in hybrid ‘immersive’ storytelling
forms often relies on a much broader ecology of human and non-human agents –
intersecting with processes and phenomena we study across geography as a
holistic discipline.
By adapting the environmental storytelling concept to
encompass the array of materials, bodies, social norms and physical processes through
which digital narratives of all types are produced, we can work towards understanding
the significance of space and place in communicating stories across a range of
digital media and contexts.
I also33 want to emphasise the importance of practice-based methodologies
for answering these questions. From my own experiences so far in my
practice-based PhD, being involved in the iterative process of game development
reveals the myriad challenges and affordances that designers inevitably negotiate
when working with environmental storytelling techniques, which can easily be
missed after the creative process has taken place. Yet it’s often ‘interesting
failures’ that offer the best opportunities for learning, and could address
important questions here, such as: what kinds of story are most appropriate
to tell using environmental storytelling techniques? What are the possibilities
and limitations of this storytelling method in different contexts? And what
implications are there for the experiences of creative practitioners
involved?
All these questions would appear to suggest that there’s not
only mileage in environmental storytelling as a conceptual framework through
which research can be conducted, but more broadly that there are ample avenues
for potential future study by those working across disciplines, and between
theory and practice.
To finish34, I would argue that it’s no coincidence that
scholars have observed a ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences
at the same time as a ‘digital turn’. Digital media have not only impacted the
geographies of how societies operate and organise themselves, but the
distinctly navigational qualities of how we interact with media generally. Both
in how spaces are represented and negotiated, and how information itself is spatialized,
digital media have influenced our understandings of dwelling in the world as
humans.
Digital35 narrative forms such as video games are at the
forefront of research into the relationship between ‘place’ and the digital
because these media actively seek to create believable worlds that we can dwell
in. Their storyworlds hinge on the sense of place curated by players as they
encounter, associate and interpret information through navigation.
I’m contending36, therefore, that environmental storytelling
can be an important frontier for future research at the intersection between
digital geographies and narratology. Understanding how these storyworlds are
crafted and inhabited can help to reveal and dissect the meaningful interrelationships
of technologies, bodies and social norms that unfold when we engage with interactive
media forms.
In particular37, I’m proposing that the environmental
storytelling toolkit has mileage beyond its current limited use in games
studies and game design circles. By expanding our conception of the
informational ‘environment’ that participants in interactive digital narratives
engage with, it can help us think about how the interaction between navigation
and narrative plays out across a range of ‘immersive’ media, and not only in
playful contexts38.
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