June 2008 Archives

This is the first part of an ongoing NDE series featuring interviews with Masters of Narrative Design™. While a seemingly new term, the design of story experiences is as old as time itself. Storytellers have been making careers out of it since the days of Sumerian ritual. As game developers are increasingly looking to create meaningful virtual narrative experiences, looking back at the lessons learned by these masters becomes increasingly valuable. Today's Master is Jan Sircus,  place maker, storyteller, architect and designer. His almost 40 year career has had him working on everything from location-based entertainment (LBE), and theme parks for Disney, to Olympic resorts. Jan has spent a lot of time crafting interactive story in the real world, with huge teams with big dreams and big budgets. Today I'm hoping to see what virtual world creators can learn from his wealth of experience.

Stephen E. Dinehart: Jan, it's a pleasure, thanks for taking the time to speak with me. You are currently President of the Themed Attraction Association (TAA), Canada; can you explain what you do there?

Jan Sircus: The themed attraction association really brings together people that are involved in just about every possible aspect of creating what I would call story places. From very simple media experiences, in museums or exhibits, to visitor centers, science centers, entire places, expos, attractions and pavilions, theme parks all the way up to big international destination resorts. So it's a very big field, it goes from the small and particular all the way up to the big and general. People in the association could be economists and planners or designers, not just architecture and show designers but lighting designers, media people, filmmakers, producers and fabricators of various kinds; again a very broad selection of people. It's interesting, it's such a complex business in many ways, and not really fully understood; I'm always having to explain what our association is all about. If you think about theme parks, at Walt Disney Imagineering for example, literally under roof we had 300+ disciplines to put together a theme park, which is pretty substantial if you think about it. Especially when putting together something that is going to be a complex, fully integrated, coherent and consistent, from the smallest detail to the biggest idea, or vice versa.

SED: It also seems to me because your creations are real world experiences you have to address a full array of sensory possibilities?

JS: In some situations yes, but that doesn't always come into play. We wouldn't be necessarily doing that in say a museum exhibit, like you would be more inclined to do in a theme park attraction. So it depends on the application as to how far you go, and how many people and disciplines need to be involved. The theme park is the most complex, in my experience. But a lot of these general principles apply. You can do something like an expo pavilion with a tenth of the people and disciplines. It's a matter of the problem type and what needs to be brought to the solutions.It's one of those things, how complex is a story place? It depends on what the program is, what your audience is. If it is a place people are for the most part visiting only once, the way you would approach that design is very different from what you would do in a place where you are trying to bring people back, and need to refresh it and bring in new things to rebuild or remarket it and so on. Again the design strategy changes for the solution.

I recently stumbled onto ABC's new project "Earth 2100", as a transmedia project it blends TV, game, journalism, and web 2.0 functionality. On the surface, their site makes the project seems simple and proactive:

"In an unprecedented television and internet event, ABC News is asking you to help answer perhaps the most important question of our time -- What will our world be like over the next one hundred years if we don't act now to save our troubled planet?

"Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?"

While a very compelling question unto itself, when combined with clips like the one contained withing the article: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5045549&page=1 the theme becomes a bit altered and personally I found myself with a new perspective.

Eath 2100 looks like good old sensational news reporting guised in a 'social activism' shell. At the core of the experience seems to be a fear propaganda campaign aimed at increasing TV viewership. The marketing strikes some almost cliché basic psychological chords, low on Maslow's pyramid of needs, kinda like a kick to the viewers gut, it strikes at the very foundations of the human subconscious, safety and physiological needs.

When people get into to group psychological mindsets strange things can happen. Just look at what people are doing for McDonald's ARG campaign "The Lost Ring", watch this video below to witness the group psychology, I mean, fun, in action. Blending media and reality like this can be dangerous to audiences, in that, there are people out there that can be driven to great lengths when believeing this classic apocalyptic almost biblical forecasting. Change is important, but driving it through Ad sponsored fear, isn't my way of going about it.

It's not that I don't think this project isn't well put together. On the contrary, it's so well put together that grown adults are taking time out of their lives to enact corporate cross-media campaigns. It's powerful stuff, let's hope we see it used for the common good and not to fuel another Y2K.

Sometimes we eat our own hype way too much. It should come as no surprise that most current video game production models continue to treat story as a misnomer. Giving narrative teams small budget allotments, and for the most part treating writing as a disposable commodity it's no wonder the promises of high drama in games has fallen short. GTA4 was the fodder for an opinion piece by Justin Marks on Gamasutra today. A link was passed around the WSIG, and being the sheep I am, I clicked. Titled "Is Gameplay As Narrative The Answer?" the quote which drove me most was:

"After all the incredible advances in their game engine, why does Rockstar insist on making its story an accessory -- a needless, comparatively inferior element? More to the point, how did narrative become such a side bar to the real point of gaming, i.e. our ability to play out our deepest fantasies in a virtual world?" (1)

Story has remained icing on a gameplay cake for sometime. While previous generations of games used story as a marketing device, due to technological constraints, there is no reason that games should continue to remain compulsion loop inducing click fests bent on force feeding players stale repetitive mechanics.

"I say stop writing high-minded stories. Start writing games. And let the stories grow from them." (1)

Superficially a seemingly simple statement, but what Justin calls for here is something I've been protesting about for sometime. The fundamental models of game production need to restructured to create the environment for the development of these higher dramatic forms of game, or interactive narrative.

Mechanics, action, is the substance that we use to externally move through life, through reality. When video games developers stop mimicking old forms, and start actually creating sets of proactive story/play mechanics through which players can experience various forms of drama we will be upon a new form of game. It's not about better stories, but a well crafted balance of meaningful play and story. This new form will need a new name because many people are afraid of drama and games. Hell, some people just want to have Wii-bowl tournaments, know what I'm saying ese? For us seeking high-culture, we'll need to create a new form. The public is hungry for deep interactive stories, rest assured narrative will prevail.

1. Justin Marks. Is Gameplay As Narrative The Answer?. Gamasutra.com .2008

The formula shown above is for a Russian Folktale as described by Vladimir Propp in his book Morphology of the Folktale, the formula reads "A tsar, three daughters (α). The daughters go walking (β³), overstay in the garden (δ¹). A dragon kidnaps them (A¹). A call for aid (B¹). Quest of three heroes (C↑). Three battles with the dragon (H¹-I¹), rescue of the maidens (K⁴). Return (↓), reward (w°)." (1) While Proop's semiotics may seem too formulaic for free souls, in practical application his truth stands firm as Aristotle's Poetics. His structuralist approach to classical literary design easily adapts to interactive experiences, and clearly points to the exponential narratological complexity associated with non-linear experiences. In order to maintain narrative integrity throughout an interactive experience a rigid structure must be adhered to, narrative design was born into the world to bring classical structure back into modern storytelling.


Narrative design is a narratological craft which focuses on the structuralist, or literary semiotic creation of stories. Narremes, or story elements, are formulated into a cohesive narrative structure in such a way as to create a metanarrative or archnarrative for the reader/viewer/user/player. The term "narrative design" was described by Madison Smartt Bell as "[the] form or structure of...final importance to any work of fiction..."Bell (2) Believable narrative structures are created from well designed narremes. These elements rest within a greater narrative structure, think of the mushroom in Mario or the sword in the stone. Narrative design is the structuralist architecture of literary semiotics that together form a work of fiction. Creative adherence to a well designed narrative structure will result in greater entertainment value and thematic communication.

Entertainment is an umbrella of a term which has grown even wider in today's web 2.0 world; our span of fiction's have begun to take on many forms. "After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate - database."Manovich (3) Design of the story related elements, or narremes, of this database and their causal relationship as a metanarrative within said database is narrative design. Digital games are interactive database narratives. Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories, particular data - characters, images, sounds, events - are selected from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined by the player, through action and thought, to generate specific stories.(4)

Game mechanics give a player navigational functionality within the 'data-space' of multimedia narrative (game). "Choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences"Jenkins (5). Media theorist Henry Jenkins, continues to describe the crafting of fiction within games as narrative architecture. Crafting more believable interactive fiction requires coherent narrative design to ensure maximum entertainment value. When executed with skill, a narrative design strategy innately provides the reader/viewer/user/player/ with a wider cognitive palette from which they can self-author more emotive and visceral interactive fiction experiences. 

1. Vladimir Propp. Morphology of the Folktale. via Wikipedia 1928
2. Madison Smartt Bell. Narrative Design: A Writer's Guide to Structure. W. W. Norton & Company.1997
3. Lev Manovich. Database as symbolic Form. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
4. Stephen Erin Dinehart. RTS as Database Narrative. Narrative Design Exploratorium. 2007
5. Henry Jenkins. Game Design as Narrative Architecture. MIT Press. 200?