If you wish to converse with me,
define your terms.
- Voltaire
Story, Plot, Narrative
There are no other terms in the games industry as confused and misused as story, plot and narrative. It’s not that surprising, actually. What these terms refer to are aspects of our daily lives, they shape the way we experience the world and the way the world experiences us.
When I mention story, plot or narrative in my writings, I’m referring to specific categories that signify specific concepts. The definitions I use are the one that have been used in literary criticism for over a hundred years. If you don’t think my definition of story is right, then fine, when I say “story” you can think whatever word you want. What’s important are the concepts, not their labels.
Story is an abstract, intangible chronology of events brought about by actants.
I can tell you the story of The Lord of the Rings over lunch, I can read it over the course of roughly 1500 pages, or I can watch it over the course of 11 hours and 23 minutes. Each telling omits, adds and even slightly changes the small details of events, characters, settings, etc, but in the end we all agree that it’s the same story.
Plot is the way the story is told; that is, a plot is a single manifestation or expression of the virtually infinite number of ways you can tell a story.
Each version of The Lord of the Rings (mentioned above) shares the same story but tells it through slightly (novels vs. movie) or significantly (synopsis vs. novel) different plots.
In writing, every sentence is meaningful to the plot. Every description, every action, every character is meaningful in some way (whether intentionally or not). In film, the same is true of every shot, every cut, every pan, every line of dialog, etc. You change a jump cut to a slow pan in a horror movie and you change the tone of that scene, or the effectiveness of a scare. Every little aspect comes to shape the way the story is told, and so every little aspect affects the plot. This is true even in games.
Narrative, now here’s a tricky one. Simply put, narrative is the way we experience the world. Period. Whether we’re reading a book, watching a movie or playing a game, the way we experience reading, watching and playing is as a narrative. That doesn’t mean games are narratives, just that they’re experienced as narratives.
Actant or Character
When we think of characters, we often imagine them as living, breathing agents that live in a fictional world, that have a psychological reality to them and that affect the world around them. There’s nothing wrong with this view, but literary criticism proposes a more useful way of looking at characters. This different perspective calls them “actants”.
Actants aren’t units in a story; they don’t exist and affect the fiction as agents, “causing” things to happen. Instead, actants only exist because you want a certain action in your plot to occur. It’s a subtle change of perspective that has you constantly acknowledging the fictionality of the plot, the fact that the story is a construction. Uncle Ben doesn’t die at the hands of some burglar because one rolled lawful good and the other chaotic evil, or because the burglar had a higher agility score, or because the burglar had a bad day, really needed the money and got careless. The reason Uncle Ben dies at the hands of some burglar is to provide the realistic motivation needed by the plot to fulfill Peter Parker’s transformation into the friendly neighbourhood Spiderman we all know. As far as Spiderman’s origin story goes, that’s the only reason why the actants of Ben and the burglar exist in the plot.
Coherence
Coherence can be simple, as in making sure that the units and rules in a World War II themed game somewhat accurately reflect the peoples, places and weapons that a player would expect to experience during World War II, at least in such as way that it does not break the player’s suspension of disbelief.
The kind of coherence that I’ll be writing about is more aligned with literary coherence. This coherence happens when author intention (but not necessarily), literary themes and story meaning align and are reinforced by the structural components of the “telling”, the plot. If a movie has ever made you cry, it’s likely because the way it told you the story is coherent with what it was trying to have your experience.
Procedural
For this one, we can start with a generic dictionary definition:
- a: a particular way of accomplishing something or of acting b: a step in a procedure
- a: a series of steps followed in a regular definite order b: a set of instructions for a computer that has a name by which it can be called into action
Thank you Merriam-Webster. Taking this a step further, procedure is therefore a manifestation of computational expression. In other words, if you consider that computer simulation is achieved through the computation of data, then the procedure that the simulation follows to compute that data is the the expression of those computations.
Clear as mud.
Procedural Plot
Procedural plot, following the above definitions, is the plot expressed by a game’s units and rules.
