Summary

We have taken a peek at how narratives are designed for video games and how stories suit the video game medium very well. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Interactive storytelling is a huge discipline, one that a game designer should know but doesn’t necessarily need to master unless they want to specialize in writing or narrative design. For readers who want to delve deeper into it, we have established a few starting points.

We looked at two common types of narrative: the three-act story, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, through which the tension constantly builds up and reaches a final climax, and the monomyth, which is used to represent the archetypal hero’s journey through an adventure that takes them out of their comfort zone into a new world of discovery and experiences, and back again.

We went through the structure of different narratives in games, both linear and modular, and we closed the chapter by looking at environmental...