Conveyance of Narrative Through Digital Game Environments

Abstract

Generally, when discussion narrative in games, designers and researchers alike tend to refer to more traditional narrative devices. While some attempts have been made to include the game world itself into the narrative as well, research on this front is still relatively lacking. In this research, we focus on how much narrative players can learn from the game world and how this affects their experience with the game. By conducting an experiment where the participants explored a number of game environments and then explained the environments they think they saw, we found a number of elements within game environments that were responsible for conveying narrative and how much narrative these could convey. Additionally, we found that users used narrative to directly inform themselves of game-flow and found that a subset of participants also described the environments using emotive keywords rather than direct descriptions. Finally, we found that participants showed higher immersion rates in narrative environments, leading us to conclude that game environments are not only capable of conveying narrative, but can have a significant impact on user experience and can even influence how a user interacts with the game.