I wasn’t sure whether to post this. Since I only got a 7 for it (a C on the ETCS scale, roughly a B on the U.S. grading scale), it’s the lowest marked university paper I’ve ever turned in, and sadly I think that’s completely fair. I prioritised Game Design over Game Theory, but most of all I got lazy.
I wrote the paper in literally a couple of days before it was due, I didn’t meet with my advisor at all, and I spent next to no time searching out material to base it on. As an academic work, it’s piss poor. There are barely any references, the structure is weak, the problem itself is poorly stated and even more poorly answered, and the conclusion is completely rubbish – my usual Achilles heel.
All that said, as a sort of super-extended blog entry, I really rather like it. I think I make some good points, I cover the most important aspects of the topic, and I explore three carefully selected examples of games that have approached the concept of Embedded Narrative in different ways. I’m strongly considering to write my master’s thesis about this topic, and just do a proper job of it next time – Embedded Narrative is a concept that interests me to no end.
So take this for what it is: an embarrassingly lazy academic paper narrowly redeemed by proficient writing, but worth a read for game design enthusiasts.
You can download it here shaped like a PDF:
Embedded Narrative in Games 
It’s 8 pages and weighs a mere 212 KB. By all means drop any thoughts you might have on the topic or other feedback to the paper as comments on this thread.
Perceptions of academic success aside (because I’d be willing to argue having one C/B as the worst grade is still pretty good…
, I agree this is a highly interesting (and complex) topic to look at. Game developers, these days, are presented with the opportunity and challenge of going beyond developing an accessible, somewhat fun, goal-driven mechanic.
Traditional cutscenes, I would say, are still a valid tool to explore, precisely for a developer dealing with turning an established movie license into a game, as being able to control the camera movements can help create a similar look and feel – or at least call back to the original.
Embedded (or “emergent”) storytelling provides a valuable addition or even alternative to that. It’s a great way, in my opinion, to make a game world appear more believable, as it calls back to reality, which is profoundly about the choice of seeking out information, in order to analyse, understand and learn. There’s always more stuff out there if you chose to invest the time and effort into it.
Many games, on the other hand, create the impression that only whatever the player’s avatar or, at best, the few characters central to the plot do is in any way important. The rest of the world, suggestively, seems to be waiting around for them to show up and do whatever it is they do. The world of the game, thus, seems just barely large enough to hold the plot itself, it doesn’t seem like a believable world.
The interesting question, I think, therefore is what kinds of stories can be told in embedded or emergent pieces, which element of the game’s fictional world they should focus on. Now, if a lot of players might, by design, miss or disregard some, most of or maybe all of those pieces, it can’t be highly important stuff that those players would need (and therefore, lack) to complete the game. Yet on the other hand, it would have to be meaningful enough stuff that it helps provide more of an understanding (or a deeper one) of certain events or the game world itself.
This is where and why I disagree with Arkham Asylum’s way of trying to push players towards these pieces with the mechanical motivations of experience points, “You’ve found item no. 27 in the big clue hunt, and there was much rejoicing” kind of achievements or additional items. There shouldn’t have to be an arbitrary motivation to go looking for this kind of stuff. Therefore, I consider games such as System Shock or Deus Ex better representations of embedded narrative.
Regarding the latter, what I find interesting is not just the datacubes, book excerpts, newspapers and emails, but that many characters the player can interact with provide pieces of embedded narrative, as well. Sometimes, these optional conversations can inform the plot, by receiving important information or items (the bum in the basketball court who, if saved from thugs, tells JC a password – or the character at the gas station which provide a key for the sewer entrance), but most of them really just serve the purpose of fleshing out the world and providing more detail and/or atmosphere to it.
One complication I still see when using embedded narrative is that other elements of the game design could clash with it. This is one particular reason why I’ve personally found playing BioShock rather conflicting and a bit irritating, because while the use of embedded narrative suggested a more open, more complex world, filled with people with acutal motivations and fears, the actual reality in the game seemed to be all but zombified eg. spliced up people waiting around to put up a fight. It played a lot less complex to me than I expected it to – in case of which the more emergent narrative aspects were more of an illustration of what I might have thought or wished the game could have been like, had it not been designed with the intention of both catering to people who don’t give a damn about story as well as providing frequent “snacks” for those who do at the same time. I would, for example, have seen a lot more flexibility and potential in putting the setting to somewhere earlier in the city’s demise, with somewhat “safer” areas where some kind of attempt at normal, everyday underwater metropolis lives still continuing, and more open, non-linear environments were the zombielikes and monstrous variations have more or less taken over.