Module 4 - WORKING WITH NARRATIVE + STORY

INTRODUCTION

The lecture content for this module will focus on working with a predefined story or narrative that influences the overall art direction of a game. This lecture module is going to be a little bit different from the past few modules, as it will be more closely related to the work you are completing in this course for the final project. The final project requires you to create assets and artwork for an imagined game based on an event, narrative or story that is connected to your own lived experience. The examples and discussion below expand on different ways to work with personal experience to craft this defining story. I also hope to demonstrate that this requirement is not meant to be limiting in terms of what you can create for this final project - instead it is intended to help focus your designs and provide a more connected method for conceptualizing a style and visual theme for your game.

As we will see in the case studies presented in this module, stories can be hugely important to a game’s art direction, especially when the game-play and mechanics are built around a detailed narrative OR when a narrative is expressed or communicated through game-play. Sure, there are many games that do not start with a detailed narrative in mind, and instead craft a visual design and style informed by aesthetic choices alone. This type of art direction, however, does not suit the ideal output for your final projects, simply because we are not producing complete games. It is, therefore, important to tether these visual designs to some kind of personal narrative element, to connect you to the artwork you are producing. And, while you will absolutely be making purely aesthetic choices that inform your final project’s artwork and assets, it is also important to look at how game artists incorporate story elements into games to direct visual meaning.

The images below are different ways to represent and think about stories and narrative structure beyond written narratives that relate to the dynamic nature and player interaction of games. Some of these might be more familiar game narratives, and others are just stories about eating bacon.

Crafting a Story - Final Project Specifics

Since you are not completing full games for this course, the narrative elements driving the final project are especially important in terms of focus and overall visual direction. Your “game narrative” will partially shape the assets and other artwork you develop for these projects. We require these narratives to be based on some part of your lived experience in order to create a more personal connection with the game’s style and visuals, and to avoid some of the more generic visual forms that accompany existing narratives and common video game tropes. The idea with this requirement is that you are developing the style and mood of the game world, along with specifics of characters, environments and other in-game assets, based on unique aspects from your game’s narrative versus drawing only from pre-existing assets and visuals from similarly themed games.

This requirement is not meant to limit your creativity or to keep things grounded in reality. You can also absolutely use events, experiences or stories from your life, family and/or community to inform or inspire fantastic, completely fictional narratives, or as the basis of symbolism or metaphor within your game. You are also welcome to develop game artwork that is rooted to every-day experiences and realistic subject matter or content.

These stories do not need to have numerous details or contain conventional pacing or plot points, nor do they need to have any kind of resolution. The idea is to create more of a conceptual or stylistic framework that you can populate with corresponding characters and environments, that are specific to your game’s over-arching story. The sections below describe a few different methods and options for incorporating lived experience into game-narratives, explore multiple case-studies, and also introduce some issues that can arise when developing narratives that are based on cultural, social and/or political experiences.

1. Direct Reference

This is probably the most straightforward approach to developing a narrative for the final project. You can work with the details / visuals related to a specific experience, activity, sport, action or event from your day to day life, past, present or even future, and then “fit” those details into a 2D game format, such as a runner, a platformer, an RPG, a resource clicker / simulator, a point and click adventure, a puzzle-game, a rhythm game etc. You will pull visual details unique to your personal experiences, and apply them to the characters, environments or other in-game assets. Some elements could be highly fictionalized or fantasy based, as long as they connect back visually to something rooted from your actual experience.

There are many different types of games and game-narratives that pull directly from these types of every-day references and inspirations, as well as more personal experiences. These games can be humorous, exploratory, satirical and/or serious. The game-play can be action-packed or more slow-paced. Some game authors use these types of narratives to express a political or ideological viewpoint, or share personal experiences shaped by their social, cultural and/or racial identity, while others focus more on the mechanics / details of a specific action or procedure. If this were your focus for the final project, you would include visuals or an aesthetic that were specific to the experience you are describing.

Games by Jenny Jiao Hsia

Jenny Jiao Hsia is a game designer with a library of games based on her personal experiences. Many of these games describe these experiences through direct reference to "everyday" actions and events that communicate more personal information and relationships via the game visuals combined with the rules and progression of each of the games.

Link to Hsia's portfolio below, and play-through the short games Wobble Yoga and Morning Makeup Madness. Then review / play one additional game in her porfolio of your choosing. CW: some of these games contain cartoon depictions and discussions of dieting and disordered eating - most of these are noted by the designer's own content warnings.

https://q_dork.itch.io/

Playing through Wobble Yoga and Morning Makeup Madness is required lecture content. At least one lecture quiz question will relate to these games.

Pre-Shave by Saam Pahlavan

Pre-Shave is a short game that directly references a personal experience. As described by the author on the 2020 Independent Games Festival site:

"Pre-shave is a game about a brown man in a hairy situation.

In Pre-shave you play as me (Saam Pahlavan) dealing with racial anxieties. In the game you're presented with a way to groom facial and body hair by shaving and later find out that this in preparation for going on a trip. It's a game that touches a bit on male physical anxieties and the issues that come with being a brown man attempting to travel."

Watch through the trailer below, and consider how the designer uses a combination of gameplay, visuals and the game progression to communicate a personal experience. Imagine how a player's experience might shift as the game progresses.

This content is required for lecture.

Studio Zevere’s She Dreams Elsewhere

The game in the trailer below is described by the designer as a “deeply personal narrative with a thematic focus on emotions, mental illness, and self-identity”. The visuals and game-play pull from a combination of real-world experiences, inner thought processes, and the creator’s own dreams + nightmares.

Watch the trailer below, and then the interview with the creator Davionne Gooden. This is required for lecture, and there will be at least one quiz question based on the interview.

Emma Kidwell’s Half

Emma Kidwell describes Half as “a series of vignettes detailing the experience of being on the fringe of two identities and the invisible toll it takes. Pulled from memories both good and bad.” The resulting narrative is highly personal.

Using the link below, play through Half at least once. Note: this game was having an issue with Firefox on a Mac, but seems fine with other browsers. Opera is my go-to browser for in-browser games. Note how the artwork of the game relates directly to Kidwell's narrative in terms of color, style and overall subject matter.

https://emmkid.itch.io/half

Since Half's completion several years ago, Kidwell has continued to design and produce larger scale projects and games. She worked as the narrative designer for 2022's indie game Hindsight, a game centering around memory, time and grief, and she has noted in several interviews that many of the explorations in Half continue to influence later projects such as these.

Playing through Half and reviewing this content is required for lecture. At least one quiz question will cover playing Half.

2. Cultural Narratives

Many games work with already existing narratives such as folklore, mythology or other cultural stories and legends. Working with specific cultural narratives to inspire game-play, game mechanics, and visuals can be an amazing way to share these stories, however, these narratives are often mined and exploited for their unique content, which is applied superficially to visuals or other mechanics in a way that obscures their original authors, does not honor their cultural significance, and fails to express their intended cultural meaning.

If you are considering working with a specific cultural story for your final project, it must be from a culture / community that you are directly connected to or a part of. Your project must also exhibit visuals that connect you to these stories, or show how they have inspired or impacted you. These requirements are primarily to avoid issues of appropriation that I will discuss a bit more in the section below.

Cultural REference + Inspiration V.S. appropriation

Below are a few editorial articles examining the use of different cultural artifacts, folklore and narratives in games. In these first articles, the authors and artists of the games are working from outside of the visual culture they are borrowing from for narrative design, character design, and other larger visual themes and aesthetics in their games. When reading through these articles, note how different people in different roles - player, reviewer, cultural member / observer and in one case, game author - respond to and talk about the use of this type of visual culture in video games. The two articles below are required for lecture, but are not covered by the Lecture Review Quiz.

The Cultural Storytelling + Development Process of Never Alone

In contrast, these videos below all address multiple perspectives of the development process for the game Never Alone. This game is a product of a collaboration between Alaskan Native Iñipuat community members and game developers to craft and communicate cultural narratives and stories via a game. The project was envisioned and driven by members within the culture that originally authored these narratives. In reviewing the videos below, note the overall development process, specifically how the narratives are gathered and used to inform the visuals, characters, and environments within the game. How does this compare to the use of cultural symbols and narratives in the games in the section above?

The videos below for Never Alone are required, and are covered by the Lecture Review Quiz.

3. Social/Political/Historical Reference

This is another option for crafting short narratives for your final projects. Many games work with historical or current events and social topics that are not based on first-hand experience, but on accounts from other direct sources. I believe the best uses of these types of narratives are ones that work with a specific point of view and explore a lesser known perspective of a well-known topic. If you are interested in working with a historical or current event for your narratives, you will need to somehow locate yourself within this narrative and within the game visuals as well.

Shawn Alexander Allen’s Treachery in Beatdown City

Designer Shawn Alexander Allen based a turn-based brawler on a loosely fictional narrative that was heavily informed and inspired by not only current social and political events, but his own experience of those events. In locating himself within this work and the narrative, the game commnicates a story that is both "historical" and "political", but also personally expressive without needing to be super specific.

Read the two interviews with Shawn Alexander Allen below. They each focus on slightly different aspects of the game's design and development process, but both are very interesting explorations of one designer's specific creative practice, and approach to making games that communicate social and political themes through the narrative and gameplay.

These articles are both required for lecture, and will be covered by at least one review quiz question.

https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-features/shawn-alexander-allen-nu-challenger-interview-3439988

https://www.thexboxhub.com/exclusive-interview-with-treachery-in-beatdown-citys-kingpin-shawn-alexander-allen/

Final Project Expectations

For this assignment, you will need to reference your personal connection to the narrative via the visuals you create - instead of creating assets based on what you see in similarly themed games, you will create mood boards that relate to your own specific connection to your narrative, and then develop assets from these images. This is a method that will separate these assets from ones you can download as tile sets or character bundles for generic game types or formats, such as “Medieval Knights” or “Ninja Scroller Pixel Art Pack”.

There is absolutely a use and application for these types of prefabricated assets, but for this course, we hope to introduce the tools that will eventually allow you to create fully polished assets that are specific to your ideas as well. This final project is another step in this process - using these unique narrative elements, specific to your experience, to create unique assets. In the game industry, this is one major factor that differentiates successful games from clones and knock-offs.

For these projects, we are not expecting to see a professional level of execution. What we are looking for - and focusing on for grading - is the visual relationship between details from your narrative and the mood boards you develop, and the resulting in-game artwork and designs that you will be producing. This visual connection and cohesion will factor into the overall “visual concept” score outlined in the rubric for the final project.

Working with Multiple Visual Languages

When games are based on specific stories or narratives, game artists often utilize both broader established visual meanings (such as color, tone, symbol or texture) and visual or tonal elements specific to the narrative itself to define a game’s unique overall style and art direction. An example of this combination can be seen in comparing the different visual game worlds of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the upcoming Link’s Awakening and the older, but excellent, Zelda: Wind Waker. Each of these games include visual aspects that are specific to the Zelda mythology and story. These elements can be very general and far-reaching - such as characters + settings - or more detailed and specific - such as clothing color / materials, weapon or item construction and appearance, or specific character features and attributes.

Even though these games are pulling from the same narrative, and incorporate similar visual narrative elements, they also exhibit highly unique styles overall. The darker and more realistic style of Breath of the Wild produces a very different experience for players than the bright, cel-shaded visuals of Wind Waker, or the more retro-inspired, toy-like world of Link’s Awakening. While the 3 games all exist within the same universe, and relate back to a shared story, they also communicate very different meanings through these styles. This contrast demonstrates how both story and style can be used to create visual meaning.

As you craft your own stories to base your games on, this is an important distinction - how much visual meaning do you want to derive directly from your narratives, and how much do you want to construct using other aesthetic choices? Think about these decisions as you are constructing the mood boards for part 1 of your final projects - these two sources of visual meaning are crucial to these projects, as well as any game that works with a predetermined narrative.

Beyond traditional Narratives

To conclude this module, I want to look at a few examples of games that work with narrative and story in ways that are just not very conducive to this specific course or project. Below are links to articles about two games that incorporate, work with, or reveal narratives in different ways.

Dead Cells

As discussed throughout the course, there are many games that start more with a unique mechanic, gameplay device, and/or visual style or format, and adapt a narrative later on. Since we are not creating actual games, and cannot easily exhibit these playable features in combination with visuals, these final projects need a pre-defined narrative to ground them.

This is not the case for a game like Dead Cells, which incorporated a complex story after its demo was released. Read the article below which describes how the Dead Cells designers crafted a narrative after completing most of the game’s mechanics. This article is required for lecture.

https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-03-dead-cells-story-lore-interview-gdc-2019.html

The Missing

There are many games that establish a narrative via its game play - a game might come with pre-defined visual meaning, but as the player progresses, other meanings and stories might be revealed, and in some cases, these narratives might become the primary story the game’s author intended to tell.

The article below describes how the narrative shifts in The Missing. As the game progresses, the mechanics - the rules of the games, the game action, and the game play itself - begin to reveal an expressive story related to the designer’s personal experiences. This emergent narrative begins to metaphorically relate to the more straightforward game content, aesthetics, and visual designs.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18073332/swery-the-missing-jj-island-memories-queer-horror-game

The Missing article TW/CW: Discussions of body-horror-themes in relation to Queer, Gender-Queer and Trans Experiences. This article is recommended, but optional for lecture due to the content.

Also, a few reminders of your options with this video format:

1. Pop out of Canvas and watch in a new tab if any of the features aren't working

2. There are fullscreen and CC (Sub-title) options available in the right hand corner. For being YouTube auto-captions, these are pretty clear. I think they must have improved their algorithm. Please email me with any accessibility needs.

3. If you are feeling pressed for time, but don't want to miss anything, you can watch with audio in 1.5 speed by hitting that little gear icon.