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I saw your comment at Kotaku and posted a reply; unfortunately, Kotaku’s comment moderating system doesn’t know me from a pack of biscuits, so it hasn’t come through!

A few important points to note:

There’s no judgement implied with this theory. It’s only a descriptive frame: an aid to a clearer understanding of how specific narrative elements are created. (One commenter at Kotaku assumed I was judging the death of Aeris as the greatest moment of game narrative, because I put it at the top of the triangle!)

Pure procedural narrative is probably impossible. As I mentioned in another comment above, it’s significant that there is no example on the bottom-right corner of that first triangle graphic. The nature of computer code is that it is always created by a human, even if indirectly. However, the further away an outcome of a game simulation is from what the designer intended and predicted, the closer it is to an abstract theoretical point where it was created without human input at all. That’s why I use a glitch as an example, as it’s an unintended outcome of the code, and therefore further away from the programmer’s intentions than ‘working’ code.

Not all my examples are bugs, though. In fact only the first graphic mentions a bug. The examples from GTAIV are all correctly functioning processes within the game. Again, these are only partial examples of procedural narrative, due to the initial input of the game designer, but their computed rather than pre-stored nature makes them more a creation of the computer than, say, a cut scene.

I also want to emphasise that the purpose of the triangle is to define an area rather than three discrete points. To my mind, narrative elements don’t usually belong in one category or another, but rather exist as the fluid result of multiple interacting factors. Pure procedural narrative is the most abstract and probably impossible concept, but I’d argue that pure player narrative and pure created narrative are also impossible, as any game situation only exists as an interaction between a computer, a player and a game designer, even if one of the three is relatively passive.

I’m also resistant to characterising this substantially new form of media in terms of what has come before. Obviously there is continuity with the media, games and real experiences that existed before videogames, but they are their own thing. Talking about them with words designed for fundamentally dissimilar concepts tends to cause confusion, as well as lend certain assumptions about what is desirable in a game (see Heavy Rain as an example of a mediocre game that was designed to be a great movie), which we may not have desired if it weren’t for our preconceptions.

At RKD, we’ve made a conscious choice to use the term ‘videogame’ instead of ‘video game’, as the latter suggests a medium defined by pre-existing concepts that may not always be relevant: ‘video’ and ‘game’. Few videogames are played on video screens any more, and many videogames are not games in the traditional sense: most of Will Wright’s work, for example, are not games in the traditional sense because they lack a win or lose condition, i.e. an end. (Wright himself describes them as ‘software toys’.) We think the compound word, ‘videogames’, is somewhat more suggestive of a distinct entity in its own right.

‘Narrative’ is still a problematic word, though. Through past use, it’s assumed to mean a static progression; however, it’s more flexible than ‘story’, which is why I avoid ‘story’ a lot of the time. (I prefer simpler words where possible!) ‘Expression’, ‘experience’ and ‘meaning’ all capture aspects of gameplay more accurately, but lack in other areas.

As you say, it’s an ongoing journey of exploration. We can only plough ahead with the best tools we’re able to fashion and wait to see how it all shakes out in the end.

I think video games are attempting to blend these two into some new form of human expression, experience. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet. Maybe at times it comes close. However this is a deep cave system, and we’re only at the entrance.

Overall I really liked your article. I feel your theory is very good, but not quite 100% there. I have shared my thoughts on Kotaku, which I am sure I will get flamed for very harshly, and thought I would venture over here and share as well.

“I like this but think the “computer” aspect is really up for debate and further discussion. The examples called by Mr. Allison are all bugs within the games, but his description on “procedural” leaves a more open ended ideal of AI within the game. It is also a little insulting (just a little, and unintentionally) to designers and programmers because it presupposes that these little narratives are not the intention of the creator, and it is an attack on the creativity and intelligence on the creative team.

I wonder if the “procedural/computer” part of the triangle shouldn’t be there because they are still experiences outside of the embedded path. The player encounters these events and gathers their own interpretation from them, but in Mr. Allison’s own descrption the emergent experience still falls within a set of rules and many of these rules are dictated by and create these “computer” experiences as well.

Or if it should just not be considered “emergent” and instead should fall under a new type of category of bugs which were not intended by the creators and not initiated by the player.”

Of course I wrote all this before reading about Craigs experience in your comments. Hooray for me and jumping the gun. I guess for me I had always felt that anything outside of the story was the single emergent experience regardless of what initiated it, whether it be computer or player. Or maybe I just don’t like having two categories (emergent, embedded) breaking up a triangle; feels a bit unbalanced. In any case, I think it is a good analysis and I look forward to seeing where you take it from here.

“Other players” as a source of narrative is an interesting suggestion. It shows that you’ve approached the issue with a different assumption about how the game is being viewed than mine. In game terms, yours is a first-person model and mine is an overhead view; you’re thinking about how the game looks from within as a player, whereas I’m thinking about how the game looks from the outside. I wasn’t conscious of my own perspective, but I think both are valid.

Computer-generated narrative is an entirely distinct form of narrative in the abstract. However, it’s telling that there is no example of pure computer narrative mentioned in the article. The only examples that we can point to in existing games are partial cases, including the examples I give. It’s difficult to imagine how a pure computer narrative could come about without input from a human designer (that’s why glitches are useful examples, as they are at least unintended by the designer). However, as an element of game narrative becomes more complex and less predictable, more dependent on the interaction of computer processes and less on direct human input, it moves further and further away from the creator’s design; the logical, if impossible, endpoint of that is the pure computer narrative.

While this might seem like a technical disqualification, it’s important to remember that the other two points of the triangle are equally impossible to find in a pure form. Even in a purely pre-rendered cut scene, the computer is at least running the video file; the player is at least interpreting what they see and hear.

Dan Stubbs:

It’s great to hear from someone working to crack the actual problem of dynamic narrative; all this theorising won’t change any games by itself!

I’m interested to know why you say there’s an unbreakable wall between emergent and scripted narrative. If I read you correctly, you don’t mean that there can be no true hybrid of emergent and scripted narrative, but rather that they refer to different planes of the mental experience: scripted narrative is the stimulus players respond to, and emergence is the possibility space they play within. Is that about right?

I’m at odds with your description of the gap between types of narrative as a wall or divide, which seems to be due to a difference in the fundamental way we’re thinking about the concepts. Let me back up a bit to explain this.

I have a particular bias against the idea that things exist in a pure form (Plato is my least favourite philosopher); the common tendency to divide and categorise strikes me as a result of the way the human brain is wired to label ideas neatly in order to process them more easily. (This model of processing, by the way, is explored exhaustively in Ian Bogost’s rather good book Unit Operations.)

This resistance to discrete ideas is an overlooked factor in the triangle article. A few people have mentioned that this article takes one step away from the traditional model of emergent/embedded stories, but it actually take two steps. The first step, which is often overlooked, is that I’ve represented embedded and emergent narrative on a scale, rather than as two separate points or as a Venn diagram. In other words, I don’t think of it as a dualism, the way you’ve described. By the same token, to the extent that the triangle should be taken seriously at all, it’s intended to be read as an area in which game narrative elements can be roughly located, rather than three isolated points. As I mentioned above, I don’t think any of three narrative types exists in a pure form.

Bringing it back to your point: I see the player’s participation within a game as a fluid conflux of observation, interpretation and action – not as multiple distinct processes but as aspects of an integrated behavioural process.

(I’m trying to use plain English here, but I’m not smart enough to make this idea sound as simple as it really is!)

I admit this mashing together of apparently discrete concepts may be an unhelpful approach to solving the practical problems of dynamic narrative. On the other hand, the subconscious tendency to compartmentalise aesthetics, gameplay, narrative and so on is part of the reason game stories are so frequently disjointed and unfocused, so perhaps it’s worthwhile.

My model of choice is the dualism of simulation & narration, understood in terms of player agency. The player ACTS in the simulated world, and OBSERVES the narrated world.

While your model has some value, it divides the player’s participation into acting (in the simulation), observing (the narration), and witnessing(?) the emergent behaviour from the simulation, so it would seem to me not to be a triangle, so much as a deepening of one side of the simulation/narration dualism.

There are (to date, at least) very few games which break down this wall. In Animal Crossing, there are narrative elements embedded in the simulation, which are allowed to emerge through player agency. Left 4 Dead’s Director AI shows promise as an embrionic form of dynamic Narrator. If there are others, I cannot think what they are (neither Facade, nor Storytron are not really suitable for embedding into game systems).

For the record, I’m working on my own dynamic narrative system, which hopefully I will be able to demo next year.