Introducing The Pentacle: A Narrative Structure for Interactive Storytelling.

Author's Note: This is Part 1 in a 5 part series on Narrative Design structures. Stay tuned for discussions on Player Agency and the Pagan Concept of the Spirit, Using the Mimetic Circulation of folklore in Games, Narrative Sub-Routines, Adaptive Narrative Practice and more over the next few weeks!

In the worlds of literature, film and TV, story is everything. Without empathetic characters a dramatic driving plot and sub-textual themes, a book, movie or TV show becomes vapid and empty – derivative.

Video games, on the other hand require more than just story. Video games require player interaction, and getting both interactivity and narrative perfect, is in many ways, an impossible task. A game with great gameplay might become renown amongst players, but without a great story, it remains within a particular realm of art. Likewise, a great story with average gameplay can also receive praise, but will never rise above the initial sphere it is built within.

But a game with a great story AND great gameplay transcends both the “crunchiness” of good gameplay and the “loftiness” of a story-driven experience. A great game requires both, and to get both, you need great narrative design. Great narrative design looks for ways to balance these two important factors. Good gameplay should encourage you to seek out the story, and a good story should encourage you to play longer, harder, better.

Over the course of these articles, I’m going to pull back the curtain and reveal to you the hidden mechanisms of my work. I will hold nothing back. I do this to inspire writers, developers, and designers in the industry to build better, more emotionally and physically arresting games.

In this post, I want to begin by talking about the narrative structure of an interactive story – or at least my own version of one. I call this structure “The Pentacle” – a symbol of witchcraft and magic, and you will see, as we progress that my structures have been heavily influenced by ideas from occultism, pagan traditions and global folklore. There is a reason for this. A reason perhaps best summed up in the following quote:

“During legend performance, the boundary of narrator and audience blurs, transmission taking place interactively. The conversational nature of legend, in turn, adds to the believability of the narrative.” – Timothy Tangherlini, Folklorist.

The commonality between video games and myths, legends and folklore (and for the purpose of this blog, we will use those terms interchangeably) is striking – and something we will explore further in the future. Suffice to say for now, a successful game (whose purpose is to entertain with a narrative and gameplay) is exactly like the exchange between storyteller and listeners around a campfire in ancient times or today. By allowing conversation through the form of interactivity, between the player and the game (and developers), we make more believable the narrative world, and lock players into an emotional connection with the game.

But enough on that for now. Let’s look at the Pentacle.

THE PENTACLE OF NARRATIVE DESIGN

Immediately you can see that this model is non-linear by its very nature. This is because designing a game’s story is not your typical “Conflict to Rising Tension to Climax to Resolution” linear structure (although you CAN include that path within your narrative structure if you want). Instead, when writing a game, we are more-so populating a world. Game narrative is three dimensional – it has physicality to it, chaos, randomness, natural growth and natural destruction.

Consider the magic circle which surrounds the pentacle. You will see on the diagram, that this circle, asides from being filled with the Pentacle, is also filled with the term “story.” And story, in this context refers to the whole package – the game world itself. Everything that has been created to express the intentions of the developers to the player.

Within the magic circle lies the pentacle itself, and it is the pentacle we are most interested in. In an occult ritual, it is the pentacle in the center of the circle that the magician interacts with. They do this by placing ritual items in the corners of the star, or by performing gestures, or uttering magic words, from the center. They do this to engage with the spirit world and hopefully gain some form of enlightenment through the safety of the protective circle.

Likewise, in a game, the player (magician) steps into the safety of the magic circle (the game world) to interact with something that transcends our real world. The occultist calls it the astral realm, but we can call it the fount of creative passion, and we too can gain meaning from engaging with it.

So, when the player centers themselves in the pentacle, they embody the player character, through whom they experience the game world and hopefully achieve a kind of transcendence through.

But what do we place in the corners of the pentacle for the player to perform this ritual with? In one, we have LORE, in the other, DEEP LORE, in another, we have PLOT, then NARRATIVE, and finally PLAY. Let’s explore each ritual item in turn, shall we?

LORE

The ritual item of lore is the all the general world-building in the game. It’s geography, language, culture, religion, biology, horticulture and much more. Everything your game needs to exist as a believable world that actual people (or creatures) live in, is found and interacted with in this point of the star.

DEEP LORE

Depending on how you look at it, Deep Lore is either a sub-section of, or a different group altogether, to LORE. Deep lore are those elements of world building that are CRUCIAL to the understanding of the plot. In Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, Lore is the Elvish language of Quenya – it makes the world believable, whereas the backstory of Golem is Deep Lore, that is, it is crucial to understand so that one can understand the events of the plot.

PLOT

Speaking of, plot is simple. It’s what happens from start to finish, A to B (or A to B, C, D or E!), opening title to final credits. Plot can also, depending on the genre of the game, can be split into two parallel routes. The Action Line and the Relational Line. The Action Line details the physical events that occur to propel the player through the game world. Meanwhile, the Relational Line details the emotional events that occur between characters and within the player character (and indeed, the player themselves) as they are propelled through the game world.

NARRATIVE

The point of Narrative concerns itself solely with the mode of telling that is being used to show the player the plot, lore and deep lore. Narrative is similar to Story, in that it encompasses the entirety of the game, however it differs in that Narrative relates directly to the working parts of the game’s story – characters, items, enemies, pick ups, music, level design, etc. and how they are compiled to project the deeper themes and ideas of the game – those bits that the player is trying to receive transcendence through. Story might be a painting of a house, but Narrative are the blueprints.

PLAY

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we have the point of PLAY. Play is all about what the player does to interact with the world AND the plot. This is the core gameplay loop (or loops) and it is driven, like all the other “ritual items” by the player in the form of the player character or protagonist.

So you can see how all these working elements of the Pentacle are directed and explored through the guise of CHARACTER.

But CHARACTER needs to be explored further as well. Because dependent on the kind of player, you are going to get varying levels of engagement in terms of roleplaying. Some will explore the game world AS the character. Others might create a character for themselves and jump in and out of roleplaying them as they explore. Others still, might not roleplay at all, seeing instead, the player character – and by extension, the game world – as a box of tools that they can crunch together to receive a different kind of experience entirely (an experience that the author might humbly suggest is somewhat lesser in terms of transcendence).

So, how do we consider character?

We split Character into two, that’s how.

But this is a topic for next time as we explore the similarities between the player character, possessed by the player and the European concept of the spiritual and physical Doubles in part two: THE HOST AND THE DOUBLE…

© Copyright 2022 Nick Jones, All Rights Reserved.