While we have seen that a key element to ‘good’ educational games is the collaboration of game mechanics and context, it is important to point out that the design of games centres on play rather than story. Although this does not necessarily mean that both cannot be rigorously developed, a game is not a game without play – and a good game needs to play well (a determining factor that I will need to research and define for my process). So, if we do as Celia Pearce suggests and look at narrative in a ‘play-centric’ context (rather than a ‘storytelling’ context), we can better understand how narrative operates within games. To understand the narrative implications of games, you have to see it through a play-centric lens – as that is the foundation to the development of games, to play a story that functions within a relational system of rules.
Taking boardgames as an example, we have to look at the narrative being utilized as functioning on a more abstract level than a movie or novel. The ‘meta narrative’ as Pearce puts it, is a narrative overlay that provides a contextual framework for the game’s conflict. It answers why the players much achieve a certain objective, often striving to do so against other players. It is a metaphorical overlay for a mathematical and logical structure – the game’s mechanics. Pearce believes that the mechanics of the game can be separated from the narrative overlay, or the ‘meta-story.’ While these are separate elements of game design, it does not mean they cannot function together to form a unified experience or promote a certain kind of learning that could not be achieved separate by either element – mechanics or narrative. The key element to this experience is the player interaction. The player, through play, creates and moves forward the narrative – without them, the narrative has no power, or even existence. The author of the game enters the role of facilitator as the players become storytellers through their decisions and actions within the designed rules, processes, and constraints.
This creates a new ideology for narrative where game authors can be considered ‘context creators’, and play is the mover of narrative – of which the players are in control of. The game then becomes about the relationship between the characters and the world, and through that play and narrative development, the players become aware of how those relationships function. All of that movement of narrative is done so in a context that the author of the game created and must adhere to the mathematical structure that underlies it. The author has control over what system in which the narrative will unfold. That system can be representational to the processes of any structural system – including social and cultural ones as expressed by Ian Bogost in his work Persuasive Games. The Historia Francorum by Gregory of Tours provides an excellent narrative overlay since it has prominent characters, conflict, and innate drama since Gregory provides his own narrative. However, those narrative outcomes that Gregory presents do not necessarily unfold since the players drive the narrative through their actions. This plays into the power that counterfactual history, which can be explored through games, has to historical understanding as discussed by Scott Roberts.
Divided Kingdom, 561 