The Game Narrative Reader, Zeroth Edition
Summary: I've collected a curated, thematic link page of important essays and articles about video game narrative. It lives at gamenarrativereader.org. Read on for whys and hows.
Right now, the games industry is undergoing catastrophic contraction; others have written extensively about what's going on, in more detail, elsewhere. I do believe that, eventually, it will start to grow again. When that happens, new people are going to come into the field and they're going to be dealing with a discontinuity in practice and in knowledge created by the presently-burning wildfire of layoffs and studio closures.
But even in good times, video games have a really limited institutional memory. Big studios churn themselves over time, and the knowledge they accumulate internally tends to only make it out in trickles—through the initiative of individual practitioners who spend their own time and money going to and giving talks at events like GDC. Indie teams often don't survive their first game.
This creates a number of problems. One of which is that we keep having the same conversations over and over, inventing the same ideas from first principles. There's a lack of common reference points for how to think about making video games. I think narrative in particular is very vulnerable to this for a number of structural reasons. People come into the field with a very diverse mix of academic, hobbyist, or work experience. Tools and workflows vary widely. This can be really positive, but it also makes it difficult to have even just basic shared terminology around narrative design.
This is somewhat exacerbated by a lack of widely used books on narrative design. There's not a ton of literature on the subject to begin with, but even then you can't assume that someone has read any of it. People tend to learn on the job, come from hobbyist communities, or have a background in writing for a different medium. And it's even harder for folks who are not themselves game narrative workers but who would benefit from having some grounding in the field—whether because they work closely with narrative in a game studio, or because they are critics writing about game narratives—to find those kinds of resources.
However: the resource that does exist is a lot of good writing about this subject that's been published on the web, for free; Emily Short's blog is by itself already an incredible resource, and really the first thing I have pointed people towards for years—rather than any traditionally published book. But, especially in an increasingly fragmented and hard-to-search web, I think curating this kind of material becomes enormously valuable.
So for the past couple months I've embarked on an effort to do exactly that. The Game Narrative Reader is a curated link page of articles and essays about video game narrative design, writing, and narrative production. It's modeled on an old-fashioned anthology textbook, not unlike the ones you might have read in undergrad humanities courses. It collects 26 articles spanning 25 years of writing from 13 game developers on the subject of how we build game stories.
You can now find the Game Narrative Reader at gamenarrativereader.org.
My sliver of formal higher education happened in film school, where film theory and film criticism is generally taught from books that often are just collections of reprinted articles that originally appeared in periodicals. A lot of the process of how "film theory" was constructed in the 20th century consisted of someone canonicalizing a bunch of ephemeral writing out of journals or the pages of magazines like Cahiers du Cinéma.
This is, selfconsciously, an attempt at doing something similar for a theory of video game narrative design. Because all of this writing is on the web, I don't need to reproduce it—I can just link to it, and consequently also give readers a door to all the other really valuable writing all of those writers have done over the years.
The collection tries to stitch together ideas from the interactive fiction community, from professionals who have worked at different scales of video game production (from small indies to AAA), and from academia, with the goal of trying to ground those future discussions in a more widely shared body of theory and practice.
But of course, it is also necessarily incomplete, which is why this is the "zeroth" edition, and is also where you come in. Necessarily, any curated set like this will reflect the blind spots of the person curating it (namely, me). I reached out to a pretty diverse network to help me compile this, but it's not like I know everybody in video game narrative.
Putting this version of it out into the world at this stage is really about broadening the circle of people who've seen this and who are able to point me to other sources and other expansions to the existing index. I think there's a lot of room, especially, for more material about AAA narrative production pipelines; on the nitty-gritty of writing (style, prose, dialogue, etc); and on more and different approaches to procedural or storylet narrative.
Certainly the collection reflects a significant bias from not just whose work I am aware of but also who has done the work; so if you're a narrative designer or a video game writer, consider this a prod to not just email me to tell me about things I should know about, but to write them. I definitely wrote a couple things specifically to fill gaps in this collection!
I welcome any and all suggestions, corrections, criticism, or other feedback. As always, I can be reached via email.