In his article “Game Design as Narrative Architecture, Henry Jenkins describes a number of ways in which narrative can be inserted into the gaming experience, arguing that games use game space as the primary method for narrative integration. What stuck out to me about this article was it’s age. Published in 2005, this article uses as evidence games such as Half-Life, Quake, and The Sims, which are powerful examples, but which are no longer representative of the gaming landscape. In an effort to evaluate the lasting value of Jenkins’ argument, particularly the model of embedded narrative, I will attempt to map his argument onto a few newer game objects.
First, let’s examine Gone Home. Gone Home is, I think, a near-perfect example of the type of narrative embedding Jenkins describes. Gone Home’s narrative is broken up and scattered throughout the house, the game’s space. The story is attached to artifacts the player must locate, which is a method of narrative embedding that Jenkins explicitly describes. Players take on the role of investigators, “assembling and making hypothesis about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues.” Gone Home isn’t a perfect example, as Jenkins’ model describes two narratives, the structured ‘past’ that inhabits the game space and the open ended ‘present’ in which the player discovers the events of the past. Gone Home relies heavily on the ‘past’ narrative, with very little in the way of a ‘present’ story. In a way, the game’s ‘present’ story is more similar to what Jenkins calls an “emergent narrative,” where the narrative work relies on the player’s interpretation of game events. But Gone Home is still a good fit.
However, Gone Home is hardly exemplary of the video game world. Most AAA games operate using very different rules. There are still elements that would be familiar to Jenkins’ models, of course. Games like Skyrim contain a number of spaces which offer clues about previous occurrences. For example, very early in Skyrim, there is a cave section which contains a skeleton buried under a collapse. Near the skeleton, there is a diary in which the writer complains about the instability of the cave supports, which creates a small, self-contained scene of irony.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is another game that employs Jenkins’ model of embedded narrative. Jenkins compares the ‘past’ and ‘present’ narrative structure to a detective story, which is, in essence, what The Witcher 3 is. The entire first act of the game is the player character chasing clues in an effort to find his adopted daughter. Markers, waypoints, and quest objectives serve as what Jenkins calls “kludges,” tools that steer characters toward “narratively salient spaces.” The game also places even more emphasis on the ‘past’ side of the narrative than Jenkins’ model might allow for, as players are given the opportunity to take control of the adopted daughter and play through the events of the past. In these ways, The Witcher 3 clearly fits within Jenkins’ ideas of narrative embedding.
However, there is an aspect of The Witcher 3’s narrative which I believe renders Jenkins’ model obsolete, or, at best, incomplete. That aspect is character. Unlike Gone Home or Half Life, where the player character is practically meaningless to the narrative, and interaction with other characters is either impossible or extremely limited, The Witcher 3’s narrative is fundamentally driven by its characters. This element of storytelling is entirely neglected in Jenkins’ article, but it has become an extremely important aspect of contemporary gaming culture. Quests are given by characters, motivations are provided by character motivations, and player choices affect the development and fate of important characters. Dialogue is an incredibly important aspect of the game, and in more than just a ‘cutscene for exposition’ sense, because the player can make dialogue choices. Other important AAA titles function in this way. Games like Skyrim and Fallout, while somewhat less character driven, still find complex political ideas woven into the environment through character interaction, and Rockstar games such as Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption mark missions on the map with character initials, showing that the characters involved are fundamentally important to the story, potentially more important than the game space. (Side note, don’t talk to me about RDR2, I game on PC and don’t own a gen 4 console, so I’m basically crying.)
What does this mean for theories of game narrative? I don’t know, and I’ve rambled long enough. But I think it is clear that the gaming world has changed a lot since 2005, and Jenkins’ models of narrative architecture, while still useful, certainly don’t tell the full story.