I’m a game artist working on the intersection of character design, symbolic systems such as images, textures, or codes and technical pipelines. I often find myself wrestling with the tension between narrative and interaction, for example, what symbols, features, and textures convey what meaning. It’s basically not a design problem but something that artists deal with a lot, and it’s a philosophical one. What does it mean to tell a story when the player is also the storyteller through his/her inputs?
Traditional narrative is authored, linear, and symbolic. It’s about control that shapes meaning through structure. Interaction, on the other hand, in media is emergent and systematic; it’s player-driven. It’s about agency, the capacity to act intentionally and make choices that bring meaning. Now when these two collide, things get messy.
Ernest Adams, who is a game design consultant and writer, once wrote, “Interactivity is the almost opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power” (Adams, 2004, p. 168). This quote, from Fundamentals of Game Design (New Riders), has a significant impact. It captures the core dilemma: how do we preserve symbolic meaning when the player can disrupt it through interactivity?
If you look at Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s 2005 game called Façade, they have tackled this situation using AI to simulate emotional narrative arcs, basically a progression of the character’s emotional state through a story, showing how their feelings evolve in response to events. Mateas and Stern are trying to, or argued that, narrative and interaction aren’t opposites; they are design challenges to be reconciled (Mateas and Stern, 2005). Their solution was to embed symbolic grammar into player choices, making interaction itself diagnostic, meaning it reveals player intent.
This resonates with my own practice as, even though I’m not scripting gameplay per se, my texturing work embeds symbolic meaning into the visual and material surface of interaction. The material appeal drives symbolic interaction. The player doesn’t just see the story; they enact it. Why? It’s because the player resonates with it.
If you look at what Henry Jenkins offers, he has a whole other perspective in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Jenkins suggests that games don’t need to tell stories the way films do. Instead, they can stage narrative possibilities using spaces, which I assume are levels where symbolic meaning can emerge through play (Jenkins, 2004, p. 121). That’s powerful; it means I can create characters and character mechanics that act as symbolic containers, which then become tools for the players to explore their own unconscious grammar.
In games like Disco Elysium, Silent Hill 2, or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, the player’s choices become symbolic diagnostics. The game doesn’t just tell a story; it lets the player confront emotions, whichever they may be. That’s why the debate matters to me. It’s not just about structure; it’s structure that derives meaning. (Kudos to game reviews).
So, when I design a character, a shader, or a node system, I usually think about how it fits into the larger grammar. I don’t think the debate is about choosing sides; it’s about building bridges. Narrative and interaction aren’t enemies in my opinion; they are collaborators. As a game artist, I have the pleasure of being the architect of that collaboration.
References:
Adams, E. (2004). Fundamentals of Game Design. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. P. 168. Publisher: Pearson Education. Copyright 2014.
Jenkins, H. (2004). Game Design as Narrative Architecture. In K. Salen & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (p. 121-130). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mateas, M. & Stern, A. (2005). Interaction and Narrative. In K. Salen & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (p. 643-657). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
