By Artur Ganszyniec in Tips & Tricks — 01 Jan 2025

What is Narrative Design?

The first Polish encyclopedia, written in the 18th century, in its entry describing a horse, states simply: everyone knows what a horse is. When it comes to my chosen profession, which is narrative design, we seem to be very far from such a blinding clarity.

I entered the game development industry about two decades ago when I quit my well-paid but boring job as a data analyst in a telecom company and joined the production of the first The Witcher game. At that time the Polish gamedev was in its infancy, and almost no one on the team had any industry credentials or experience from previous video games. The game that started the now-legendary series, was made by previous students, sales representatives, butchers, architects, data analysts, etc. who learned the craft on the fly. It was an achievement in and of itself, but looking back you can understand why the game is a bit rough around the edges.

I am writing about it, because one of the areas we knew almost nothing about, and had to learn on the fly was ~~narrative design~~ how to tell stories in games. The term narrative design wasn’t even used back then. We had designers, and some of those designers wrote dialogues or designed quests. When I left CD Projekt and started teaching at the Lodz University of Technology, I used to call what I did story design. Because that was what we learned: stories in games were complex systems with hundreds of moving parts that couldn’t be just written (as books) or scripted (as movies). They had to be carefully designed.

But how? That was the question.

The industry understanding (or at least, my understanding of what the industry knew) at that time was that games had “gameplay” and they had “story”, and the story and gameplay mixed just as well as fire and water. They were designed by different people, had a different place in the production, and aimed at different things. When push came to shove, the story was always subservient to the gameplay, and rightly so.

At the same time, were redefining the RPG genre (or at least that was the ambition) with a big, branching narrative full of morally grey choices, and ripe with delayed consequences. We understood that the story had to play a major role in the production. But we were still learning on the fly how to make it work.

When I joined CD Projekt RED, the game had already been in production for some time and had already experienced at least one major reset, when it was decided that the playable character would be not a generic witcher, created by the player, but the legendary Geralt of Rivia himself. Who had died in the books we were adapting, and had to be resurrected somehow. That opened new exciting possibilities and posed some… problems. But I digress.

The beginning

My job was to write dialogues, but quickly I was made responsible for putting the whole story together, building a new game on the smoldering ruins of the previous iterations of the script. I’m still amazed that we managed to pull this off—I think we were a great team of passionate individuals, who knew too little to realize that what we were doing was impossible. But that’s a story for another time.

Today, I would like to focus on how it influenced my professional path and how it shaped my view on narrative design. I think I owe you an explanation because I plan to share the view with you over the coming months. So, what did we know about designing stories two decades ago?

We knew that designing stories in games was a specific endeavor. We knew that the novelist approach (in the strictest sense) didn’t work. The previous version of the game’s script had been written by a successful book author, who knew his trade, yet many ideas translated very badly to the actual production—bustling cities are cheap on paper, but when you have to model them and fill them with living communities with their day and night cycles, in limited time and within a limited budget, you start asking questions. And say nothing about the pesky players, who want to make their own decisions and are not as cooperative as a book protagonist fully controlled by the author.

But we couldn’t dismiss other, more established media, that would be insane. People writing books and movies clearly knew how to tell stories, and there surely was a lot we could learn from them. We just had to find a way to incorporate the old knowledge into the new medium we were working on.

Tangled roots

When I look back at the story team working on the first witcher game, I notice, that most of us shared the same hobby: tabletop roleplaying games. I am not saying Dungeons & Dragons, because it so happened that the most iconic RPG was practically unknown in Poland at that time. We had Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, we had Call of Cthulhu, and we had a few of our own Polish titles—and most of them were rather story- than combat-focused. And I think that was our prime source of knowledge about interactive storytelling: the experience of creating collaborative stories with a group of friends, within a (loose) framework of rules. With a video game like The Witcher, there was only one player per session, and we weren’t able to watch him play, and the rules had to be strictly enforced. But I think that the base experience of preparing a story as something the players would explore and try to break carried on from the table to the computer.

Personally, I felt that I was ready for interactivity, but I lacked in the writing department, both on the low level of dialogues and the high level of the whole story structure. So I started studying. And because in the early 2000’s there were almost no books on writing for video games, I looked at the more established media.

Through the brambles

Getting good books on the topic in Poland, in the pre-kindle era, was not so easy so my early reading list was somewhat eclectic. But still, I learned a lot from those books: Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress, Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card, Screenplay: Writing the Picture by Robin U. Russin and William Missouri Downs (the new edition has a chapter on video games, the one I read didn’t), Storyboards: Motion In Art by Mark Simon (the chapter on storyboarding amusement parks showed me, how interactive experiences can be designed), and the unavoidable The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers by Christopher Vogler and Save The Cat!®: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder. If you are interested in stories in general, the books are still worth reading.

But the books left me wanting more, especially the ones focused on scriptwriting. They were full of specific and arbitrary advice, but they shied away from exploring the why. And I needed to understand the why to be able to use the knowledge in my profession—no game I ever worked on had a script in the movie sense, so all the advice focused on “this and this should happen on that and that page of your script” needed a lot of work to translate to the realities of video games.

Out of the woods

Over the years, I have been working on projects of all sizes and ambitions, from their conception, through prototyping and production to the release (or, as it happens, canceling), trying to see how good practices from other media fit into the area the story design for video games. At the same time, I was teaching how to make games, and that forced me to look at my craft and understand why we, narrative designers, do things the way we do.

During this journey, I finally stumbled upon a book that tried to answer the why of stories. Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them by John Yorke ties storytelling with the learning processes that happen in our brains, and based on that, proposes a structure that can serve as a universal starting point for designing a working story—it was written with movies and TV series in mind, but (at least for me) it translated well to video games. On some level, Yorke proposes the same approach as Brian Upton in his The Aesthetic of Play, where he constructs a theoretical framework for designing experiences such as games.

Those two books were the most important milestones on my personal way to the answer to the question about narrative design. Your mileage may vary, but I still heartily recommend both of them—just be advised that Yorke is much more of a smooth read.

My takeout was the following: there are reasons why stories look and function the way they do, and understanding the reasons allows us to design a strong structural backbone for any narrative that can then be fitted to the logistical needs of the production. For me, this was a game changer, because up to this point, I used to start with the logistics (how many levels/chapters are planned, etc.), and when I finally managed to fit the story into the allotted boxes, any (inevitable) change in the scope of the production yanked the rug out.

So what is narrative design?

Over the years, more books on writing and designing stories for games came out, but they either focus on a specific genre (AAA shooters, or visual novels) or propagate the view that “gameplay” and “story” are separate and even opposite things. I do not share this view.

The approach that I would like to propose to you, and elaborate upon over the coming articles, is that every game has its own narrative language. The language consists of the things we use to see as “story” and of the things we use to see as “gameplay”, or—as Marta Fijak put it in How and Why We Make Games—of static elements directed by the authors and interpreted by the players, and dynamic systems put in motion by the player, which give context to one another, and combined create the game’s narrative. In other, simpler, words: we should write texts, create characters and levels, and design systems that all work together to tell the same story.

As we know, games are hard to make, and the production process varies from company to company. But I believe, that if we want our games to make the best of what the medium has to offer, we need to treat them as a medium capable of telling engaging stories and put care into designing the narratives we want the players to experience.

To do that, we need people who can—of course—come up with engaging stories, believable characters, and dramatic plot twists. But apart from the art, they also need craft. They need to be able to design a consistent narrative language of the game and make sure that the directed parts and the systemic parts work in tandem. They also need to be able to back their ideas and the narrative language with a robust story structure that will survive the vicissitudes of an average game production process. To do that, they need to understand how and why stories work—both in general and in particular in games. This is what I see as the heart of interactive storytelling and the field of work of narrative designers.

Let’s leave it at that for today. I will elaborate on the consequences of that approach in the upcoming posts, and I hope that you will join me on that journey.

Thank you for your time.

Here you can find the books mentioned in the article: