Ludonarrative Harmony and Engaged Narrative Drive: The Success of Unpacking and Inside.

I.                    Introduction

A ludo-narrative debate looms over the field of video game studies, where the field divides between scholars who emphasize the primacy of narrative elements and scholars who argue for the primacy of the gaming act.  As games have continued to blend their narratives in with their mechanics and the ‘playing’ of the game, the lines that once delineated the story from the game more clearly have become blurred well past distinction. This requires a reevaluation of how games communicate narrative to their players simultaneously with play.

Video games do not need to hold the player’s hand in terms of narrative, and yet they frequently over-exposit and give more information than what is needed, dividing the narrative from the playing of the game. Often, simply letting the player explore the world and engage with it diegetically proves to be fruitful enough without the overuse of things like expository textual elements.[1] We see this happen in games all the time, from dialogue games like Life is Strange (Dontnod, 2015), where the environment informs the player’s understanding of the characters in the story such as when a player learns more about the characters by seeing how they keep their bedrooms, to even more esoteric narratives like those found within games with little to no dialogue to speak of, such as Unpacking (Witch beam, 2021) and Inside (Playdead, 2016). Such games leave the narrative completely up to the player to extrapolate from the activities happening on the screen. These games leave the narrative for the player to figure out, using environmental clues and engaging the player’s point of view as a part of the story building process. I argue that the minimum required features to tell a story through videogames are: 1) an environment with elements, such as trees, architecture, and other mise-en-scène, that the player can see and 2) a player to play the game who has the narrative drive to see the environment is communicating a story. This “narrative drive” is inspired by Rick Altman’s work on narrative[2] and is the ability that the audience has to understand the objects in front of them as a narrative. Of which, Altman says, “without narrative drive on the part of the reader, texts are not read as narrative. Conversely, though narrative drive usually arises in response to specific textual factors, a strong narrative drive can generate the very factors necessary for recognition of narrative.”[3] This can be seen in reality when people interpret a rock in an empty field as being lonely, or connecting the panels of a comic strip as being related images that ultimately are joined together to form the comic whole.  The phenomenon when the player’s narrative drive engages with the environment and the elements within it, I call environmental storytelling,[4] requires less explicit exposition and more interpretation of recognizable visual signs and symbols by the player. By making a distinction in where narrative can be found in a video game – such as what elements within the game create the narrative experience and to what effect – we can establish another approach to narrative in the criticism of such a complex medium. Approaching games in terms of their ludonarrative harmony and environmental storytelling rather than relying on the explicitness of the story details helps determine if a game is effectively communicating its narrative.

Key to my understanding of narrative in videogames is a concept I call ludonarrative harmony, a kind of immersive state where both the gameplay and the narrative elements[5] are working together with the player’s narrative drive to produce a harmonious experience of the entire game. In order to understand how ludonarrative harmony is produced, I will first need to establish some of the ideas of narrative that underpin my approach to environmental storytelling, drawing on videogame studies and narratology. Having gone through the background of the field and of narrative in general, I will then talk specifically about storytelling as it pertains to the realm of videogames most broadly, including different theories of player engagement with video games. Next, we will explore environmental storytelling specifically before exploring ludonarrative harmony in two example games that rely entirely on the environment to communicate their narratives, Unpacking and Inside. Both of these games make for good case studies for narrative as they utilize little, in the case of Unpacking, to no, in the case of Inside, exposition. By relying on the environment and the player’s narrative drive, these games create a sense of ludonarrative harmony through environmental storytelling. This way, as games continue blending their stories and gameplay, scholars of video games will have the language to refer to whether or not this blending is harmonious or dissonant. Finally, I will consider what happens when the environment is not narrativized and the text is overly expositive and less is left to be filled in by the player by considering the game Goodbye Volcano High (KO_OP, 2023).

II.                 Background

Clint Hocking, on his blog Click Nothing in 2007, wrote a critique of the wildly popular role-playing game (RPG) BioShock (2K Games, 2007) where he lauded many of the features of the gameplay but found that the game suffered from a disconnect between the narrative that it told and the actions the player was expected to take to reach the end goal. This review, titled “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock,” establishes the base idea of ludonarrative dissonance:

Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game’s narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player’s ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.[6]

  As a story, BioShock is about the consumption and individualism of a society driving everything into ruin, causing it to collapse under the weight of personal gain. However, as a game, the action is focused around defeating every enemy that the player comes across, gathering as many resources as possible to complete the fights ahead. Because of the actions that the gameplay makes the player undertake, it necessarily subverts the themes and philosophical goals of the narrative. Thus, Hocking argues that the gameplay expectations and the narrative of a game can be set into opposition. Furthermore, when story and narrative work in opposition, these elements can push the player away from the gaming experience all together – as Hocking himself attests with his experience of nearly tossing BioShock aside all together.[7] This is not something that every player will care about, and given the success BioShock has seen over the years – earning it expansions as well as two sequels – we can confidently say many players did not care about the dissonance that Hocking perceived in his play through. What makes this dissonance important is that it points to both the narrative and the gameplay having an equal weight when it comes to how a player receives the game in question, the gameplay nor the narrative can be constructed apart from one another without risking disengaging the player from the experience of the game as a whole media object.

I want to explore the opposite of this experience, what I have termed ludonarrative harmony, the experience of a game where the gameplay and its story are harmonized and therefore engage the player through both the interactive and narrative elements to immerse them more deeply instead of causing this rift that Hocking identifies. Consider the game Bloodborne (FromSoftware, 2015): it tells a story about the discovery of cosmic truths in a Victorian-esque setting, and the player is tasked with preventing the end of the world and uncovering the source of a disease spreading through the game world. In the game, the story focuses on the dangers of discovery and careless use of the developments of science while the gameplay emphasizes exploration and combat to clear the game areas. Through the game play the player is faced with ever more difficult challenges that cause their character damage, and often just exploring can cause this damage, which effectively blends the elements of gameplay and narrative theming by making the gameplay loop of exploration and the damage one takes doing it reflect the narrative’s emphasis on the progress of science ultimately leading to the downfall of a society.[8] This is played out with the player character as a microcosm, who takes this damage mechanically as they progress through the levels of the game. By making the connection of the story themes and gameplay mechanics in this way, they create ludonarrative harmony for the player.

In his essay, “Video Games and the Pleasures of Control,” Torben Grodal states that the defining feature of video games is their interactivity, which separates them from other entertainment media such as film or television and provides the experience of “being immersed in a ‘virtual reality.’”[9] For Grodal, interactivity is how he defines videogames against film, claiming that the necessity for continuous motor input through a controller is what separates the two media, “The player needs to actively coordinate visual attention and motor actions.”[10] In other words, continuous coordinated physical input. For Christopher and Leuszler, the interactivity is characterized by ludic engagement, that is the “play” of the “gameplay” where the player is interacting with the game mechanics, the actual button inputs to progress, rather than the narrative elements, the objects and environments that communicate the story.[11] Amy M. Green associates interactivity with, “the tasks that players must complete to move to the next stage of the game,” echoing Grodal.[12] Accounting for these, interactivity will be used throughout this paper according to the shortened form of Grodal’s understanding, since it focuses more on physical input.[13] This approach to interactivity lends itself to a more mechanical view of the interactive aspects of games. Since limitless interactivity – that is, interactivity with as much freedom as the real world – is not possible, there are always bounds to the player’s ability to affect the game world, reducing the definition to only actions used to complete a game. The kind of interactivity I want to focus on for this paper can be described as: active and sustained input in the form of gameplay that is necessary for the experience of the game to unfold. This accounts for the interactivity of the games that I will be looking at near the end of this essay, as well as specifying that there must be some sort of game involved so as to not confuse what is an interactive narrative with a video game. It is important to look at interactivity from this perspective so that we can consider how the games use their interactivity in conjunction with the narrative drive to create a ludoharmonic experience

Thus, the discussion of what is more or less important to an immersive experience is nuanced and not simply a matter of the interactive components of the game itself. While a game that possesses ludonarrative harmony may be more conducive to an immersive experience, the term itself depends entirely on the audience wanting to be immersed in the experience. Both the interactive components and the narrative drive must be engaged for the audience to receive the narrative/immersion while simultaneously being dependent on the audience themselves to have an investment in the work they want to be immersed in.

III.              Narrative

            Rick Altman’s concept of narrative drive comes from part of his overall conception of narrative from his 2008 book, A Theory of Narrative. His theory suggests that narrative is made up of three basic parts narrative material, activity, and drive:

                        Narrative material encompasses the minimal textual characteristics necessary to                           produce narrative. Narrational activity involves the presence of a narrating                                    instance capable of presenting and organizing the narrative material. Narrative                              drive designates a reading practice required for narrative material and narrational                                   activity to surface in the interpretive process.[14]

Narrative drive accounts for the interpretive process that happens when the narrative material encounters a reader. As Altman puts it, “We may appropriately term this tendency to read texts as narratives ‘narrative drive.’ Narrative drive can derive from many sources: personal interests, professional mandates, or social expectations. While it may be conditioned by textual characteristics, it can never be wholly dependent on elements that are internal to the text.”[15] In other words, there is no narrative that exists without an interpretive element, which the audience provides based on their own experiences and cultural positioning.

The narrative drive is a particularly useful tool in the discussion of environmental storytelling and video games because environmental storytelling is reliant upon the reader due to the limited use of other, expected tools of narrative communication. We might, for instance, expect a narrative to be communicated through the use of text or dialogue or the use of a narrator’s voice or exposition in a video game. However, the use of environmental elements to communicate narrative requires less explicit language and more interpretation of visuals. It is the player’s ability to make a story through the interpretation of the visual elements that is described by the term narrative drive. This becomes very potent in the area of video games, where the elements that engage the narrative drive are not just passively viewed but can be interacted with and moved around or laid out specifically for the player’s benefit.

            Similarly useful is Altman’s concept of narrational activity, which is comprised of two subcategories, following and framing. Following is characterized by the presence of a character that the narrative follows, and the framing is characterized by the delimitation of the text that contains the narrative.[16] Framing is the definition of the beginning, middle, and end of a given narrative, but it also encompasses other things that give context to a given story, such as chapters, books, covers, additional details provided in the paratextual materials. In the realm of video game studies, this can include cut scenes, [17] box art, and other paratextual materials that are experienced before the player even begins the game itself. The music that plays as the game is started, which provides a sense of atmosphere, is also part of the framing.

Because of the additional contextual sense that narrative framing provides, it is necessary for us to consider it in the pursuit of environmental storytelling, since the framing sets the tone for the player to understand the visual elements within the game world and make sense of them as a cohesive whole that can be interpreted without a narrative. As Altman states of narrative more generally, “Without framing, texts are all middle; by the very act of framing, texts gain a beginning and end.”[18] This is especially interesting in the case of video games that are not only mostly middle but may also have middles that progress nonlinearly compared to media like books or films that do not differ by audience member. Because of their interactivity, video games may unravel in a different sequence or even end differently depending on the player, yet the number of in-game variations is always finite, bound by the possibilities in the game’s code.

It may be better to think of games having multiple variations of middle, while acknowledging that every middle is part of the same framing. For example, let us consider the game Until Dawn (Supermassive Games, 2015), which takes the form of a choose your own adventure where the player makes choices that affect the outcome of the game itself, as well as how many of the cast of characters survive the night in a cabin in the woods. No matter how hard the player tries, they can never add a new character to the roster that is already decided, nor can they follow a path that the game does not already account for. The details that make up the middle of the game may vary between players and playthroughs, though they are always at the mercy of what the game is programmed to be.

            Finally, narrative material is comprised of action and character, both of which form the foundation of narrative momentum in a traditional sense. Of an absence of action, Altman writes, “we may have portraiture, catalogue, or nature morte, but not narrative,” placing action as a kind of ligature linking together the “separate substantives” that populate a narrative.[19] Characters[20] are described as a necessity for the “following” section of narrative activity, as a character being followed places the reader within the world of the story, and according to Altman, “The development of characters thus participates in the creation of a ‘diegesis,’ a posited level independent of the textual vehicle.”[21] 

The diegesis created by the existence of a character can look very different, however, depending on the game in question. For example, in Unpacking, the diegesis is established by the character through whom the game world is perceived, though this character is never fully given form or name, present only in their – or our, given the first person point of view – commentary on the rooms that the player unpacks throughout the game in the form of captions in a photo album.  In this way the world and its rules get established, though there is no human visible throughout the game as it is being played, giving the impression of empty environments.

In “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Jenkins proposes the idea of spatiality be applied to the narrative understanding of video games. Of spatial stories Jenkins says,

Games fit within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which have often taken the form of hero's odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives. . .[and] in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds.[22]

  For example, the path that the player finds themselves following in the linear exploration of the Kingdom of Lothric in the game Dark Souls III (FromSoftware, 2016) is a retelling of a familiar story of a knight’s quest to save their kingdom from ruin and taking a pilgrimage to achieve this end.[23] Another less esoteric reference would be the similarities of Super Mario 64, where Mario must go on a quest to save Princess Peach from King Bowser, to chivalric tales of knights travelling to save their romantic interests. However, tying this back to Altman, these games are taking a familiar narrative and framing them very differently by making them into explorable space that the player gets to engage with. Jenkins does not believe, though, that games fully reproduce literary stories, instead suggesting that they evoke an atmosphere that is not dissimilar to an amusement park ride.[24] Inside proves a good example for Jenkins, as the game is made up entirely of side-scrolling progress and puzzle solving, giving the story around the player as they progress rather than to the player by affecting or addressing them directly.

            Marie-Laurie Ryan also takes up the mantle of spatiality when it comes to narrative. Speaking on the spatial nature of storytelling, Ryan differentiates between space and place, distinguishing the former as generally timeless, allowing for freedom and movement, while the latter is shaped by context, history, and recognition.[25] To relate this to storytelling,[26] she says, “one could in fact say that locations acquire their status of being places though the stories that single them out from their surrounding space. . .[it is] because of their ability to evoke the places we love that we select the stories we read.”[27] In this quote, Ryan echoes the interpretive stance of Altman, suggesting that it is the person who experiences the space that determines if that space is distinguished as a place. Intertwining story and place in this way goes hand in hand with the project of environmental storytelling, as Ryan’s approach expects the audience to determine the significance of any given spatial place through their own context and personal history.

            To give an example of this intertwining and the audience’s individual interpretation of the spatial story, let us consider Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian, 2010). The majority of the game takes place in the Mojave Desert in the far future after a nuclear apocalypse takes place, leaving the area radioactive and barren of most plant or animal life. Throughout the game, the player must navigate this environment as well as interact with multiple different factions that all wish to have some say in the running of the wasteland. Where we see the intertwining of space and story is in the area of New Vegas itself, where the fortified and scrounged together new city exists on the ruins of the older Vegas, allowing the presence of casinos, gambling, and a hub of activity to have no further need of justification beyond the invocation of its place. This ties also into how personal histories can affect someone’s understanding of a given narrative space, as Fallout: New Vegas relies heavily on western settler imagery along with overtones of “what if the 1950’s had seen a nuclear apocalypse,” on top of it being set in – very altered – real world locations. Aesthetic elements, like the settler and americana-gone-bad, seen in this game through the use of lots of cowboy hats and the post-nuclear ruins of 1950’s towns in Nevada, USA, are understood by each player differently. While these may be nostalgia for some players as they hear the crooning music of the 1950s coming through a crackly in-game radio, other players who are less familiar or have a negative association with those aesthetics may find themselves less driven to engage with those elements of the game or may side with different factions who want to change the future development of the wasteland. In this way, the player brings their own understanding of the places and the symbols that the narrative invokes which changes how they view the story as well as how they interact with the gameplay.

IV.              Gaming and Storytelling

In her book Storytelling and Video Games, Amy M. Green works through how scholars might go about unravelling the narratives present in video games. She suggests that the same approaches and tools that can be used for understanding narrative in media like film and literature can also be applied to video games, “However, digital narratives go further in that they also require the player’s investment – the player’s willingness to have as a goal ending the story with the game being well played.”[28] As simple as a statement as this is to begin this section, Green is being very specific about what it means for a game to be considered “well played.” For her project, the voluntary component of playing the game is of the utmost importance, as the player must be invested in the game to have the game treated as well played.[29] It should be clear that Green has a particular kind of player in mind, and she describes them (as well as the games they play) as being “playful,” by which she means the player must do two things: be willing to suspend disbelief for the gaming experience and thoughtfully engage with the game they play like a thoughtful reader engages with a book.[30] With these two things, the player is then in a position to play a game well and “reveal the full story and its implications.”[31]

Gameplay, in this conception then, centers completely on the interaction by the player once they have committed to the act of playing a game well. The story, and how it is enacted, becomes the story that is navigated through the game mechanics, not dissimilar to the way that a book is read by engaging with the mechanics of turning the page. Enaction, however, requires the space to act, which is where there is a balance struck between the player’s understanding of the game world as well as the intention of the creator of the game itself. Referring to this balance, Green calls the game world a negotiated space where, “the player, via his or her agency, advances through that negotiated space to both glean and help create narrative meaning.”[32] We see this tying back to the concept of ludonarrative harmony through the engagement of the player’s narrative drive to help create the story through the present game elements. For instance, let us look back to Fallout: New Vegas: the wasteland is an open environment where the player is given free rein to wander around and explore, completing the main quest and side activities as they choose. Should the player in this environment come across a burned building with various figures and objects inside for them to interact with or observe, the narrative drive will act to fill in the story of what happened in that place. Imagine a burned building in the middle of a nuclear wasteland, inside of which are an unburned mattress, a tipped over locker, and some burned schoolbooks, the arrangement of these elements is up to the developers of the game, but what they mean together is understood by the player.

In her book, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Bonnie Ruberg addresses this variance in player temperament and engagement with a game. One example being the practice of speedrunning[33] a game, which she describes as “a metagame. . .a secondary set of game-like practices that operates according to its own rules and treats video games as raw material for new modes of play.”[34] By virtue of being a type of metagame, speedrunning does not allow for the same kind of narrative engagement that would otherwise be intended by the developers, and the practice often includes finding ways to skip the cutscenes that would play the traditional role of storytelling in games. As such, then, the very act of speedrunning exists as an example of exercised player agency on the game itself, changing the goal of a narrative from its intended conclusion towards something that’s entirely player determined. For example, in considering the game Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022), the route that players must take to navigate the open world[35] in a speedrun is one that seems to move antithetically to the intended progress the game has in mind, typically forcing the player into more challenging areas than they might encounter early on through the use of glitches. Keeping narrative drive in mind, this form of engagement is not necessarily without narrative, though the experience will be much more heavily curated by the player’s perspective. By making the game curated towards the player’s perspective on events, they become more invested in piecing the narrative material together in a way that promotes the experience of ludonarrative harmony.

If players taking the reins in speedrunning is one end of the negotiated spectrum, then the other would be exemplified by the kinds of games termed walking simulators. These games typically are exemplified their lack of action mechanics, such as combat or competition, in favor of more emphasis on the environment and the narrative world around the player.[36] As such, these games negotiate more in the creator’s favor, as the gameplay and the agency of the player is much more focused on navigating the specific game world to engage with the story. This type of gameplay is found more recently in the Life is Strange series, where the player is placed in the shoes of a girl with time travel powers and must navigate through her life with this in mind. The gameplay has some minor puzzles within it, though most of the action takes the form of watching the consequences of the player’s actions as they unfold throughout the episodes the game is broken up into. As such, there is more of the narrative imposed by the developers as compared to the player, shifting the interpretation of the environmental elements to the developers as text, description, and exposition become more prevalent.

Narrative as it is specifically applied to the survival horror genre[37] of video games is explored in the essay, “Storytelling in Survival Horror Videogames” by Ewan Kirkland. In his approach, these games are, “the very definition of ludic video gaming,” emphasizing that, unlike walking simulators, there are gameplay elements that must be constantly navigated to reach the end state of the game, and failure to do so results in the end of the game.[38] The narrative of these games typically appears fragmented throughout the environment, in the form of notes, letters, recordings, or photographs that exist as things left behind by the other characters – living or deceased – in the game world.[39] These objects, when combined with the narrative drive of the player and contextualized by the environment that they are found in, create the horror atmosphere.

The classic example of this, cited ad nauseum by video game scholars, would be Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996), a third-person survival horror game where the player must uncover the source of the zombies roaming the mansion and escape. The game makes heavy use of notes left behind by the mansion’s previous inhabitants, found most often on their corpses or near grisly scenes, which give extra context to what was going on at the time they met their demise. Referring back to a similar case of using these notes and elements, let us look to Life is Strange again where the player’s primary mode of engaging with the world around them is through examining objects, much like in a horror game. When examined, the character that the player controls, named Max, will often give some kind of commentary about what she thinks of the item, typically informed by its surroundings. As the player, we get both the environmental storytelling about the object, where it was found, and how, but we also get the understanding of a given object explained to us through diegetic exposition.

V.                Environmental Storytelling

            In “Visual Narratives in Videogames,” Alessandro Soriani and Stefano Caselli develop a more specific approach to Jenkins’ original categories of environmental narrative: evoked,^[40] enacted,^[41] enacting,^[42] embedded,^[43] and emergent.^[44] They combine these with procedural rhetoric, and evocative narrative elements as a part of the way in which the audience receives the visual storytelling, approaching environmental storytelling through the lens of the process of exploring the environment.[45] Their conception takes a more authorial stance, as opposed to my conception that relies more on the notion of the narrative drive to give the audience the power of interpretation of the visual elements they encounter within their narrative environments. Rather than assuming that the author has the responsibility for every interpretation of their narrative space in a rhetorical position, the narrative drive provides the audience with yet another layer of interaction that takes place within the narrative – that is the one that takes place when a player understands the narrative their own way through the elements on the screen.

            Tanya Krzywinska discusses how these environmental narrative elements, buildings within the game, set dressing, etc., are left for the player to interpret and associate meanings between in her essay, “Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests and Backstories.” For Krzywinska, fictional worlds – beyond those that exist in video games – make use of symbolism that goes beyond the original narrative, which helps invoke a sense of realism for the audience.[46] In her discussion of World of Warcraft[47] (Blizzard, 2004) and how that game effectively works to convince its audience of its depth and immersion, Krzywinska suggests that one of the main components to its effective world building is the way the game uses mythology and the symbols that we associate with those myths.[48] Her example for this is the culture of one of the playable races in the game, the Night Elves, who have a history as survivors of a once great but now ruined society, as marked by the Greco-Roman style ruins that dot the areas of the in game world associated with them.[49] What makes this significant is the way that the designers use symbols that extend beyond just the diegetic world they created to invoke the player’s narrative drive to understand the environmental storytelling that they put in place. We can see this invoking the narrative drive by using associations that players hold outside of the game to make the narrative more readily understandable in the moment. By minimizing the effort needed to engage with the environmental storytelling, the design of the game further promotes a sense of ludonarrative harmony. This is because the player does not need to commit themselves to learning an entirely new set of symbols and meanings to understand the in-game cultures and histories.

The relation between environmental storytelling and game mechanics is taken up by Espen Aarseth, as he also speaks about World of Warcraft in “A Hollow World: World of Warcraft as Spatial Practice.” He claims, in his essay, that it is the sprawling multicultural world that the game takes place in is essentially hollow – no more than a shell with no real depth – and that this is what makes the game successful.[50] The game itself does not pretend to boast a realistic world, neither through graphical details or an attempt to replicate the harsh challenges of living in a historic setting, preferring instead to give the players a smooth experience with somewhat cartoonish or storybook aesthetics and elements like magic that allow the players to fend off monsters in their power fantasy. As Aarseth points out, Azeroth “is in fact no fictional world, but rather a functional and playable game world, built for ease of navigation,” and it should be considered as such, more game than world.[51] Similarly, and echoing Jenkins’ sentiments about the way players engage with the game worlds, he describes the setting as being similar to the design of theme parks.[52] Having considered what Krzywinska and Jenkins have to say about the nature of environmental storytelling, Aarseth’s approach allows for a more easily implemented ludonarrative harmony, as the world is shaped to be pleasing and conducive to the play experience rather than the play experience being forced into a space not designed to be engaged in that way.

Thus, when the game world gives the player some but not all the narrative information and blends real-world symbols and those specific to the world itself, invokes the narrative drive of the player and allows them to experience the world as deeper than it may literally be. Though the use of this method of environmental storytelling, and avoiding overly expositive design, the player’s narrative drive can be invoked to the greatest potential and allow for the experience of ludonarrative harmony within the gaming experience. This is because the depth to which the player gets into the narrative of the game is left in their hands, giving a level of freedom that explicitly expositive approaches do not. The ludoharmonic state gives the audience freedom as well; freedom to get immersed in the game – should they choose – as well as the narrative they are interacting with, allowing for a game to be considered well-played. In the next section of the paper, we will discuss two games that go about the project of environmental storytelling and ludonarrative harmony very effectively, Inside and Unpacking.

VI.              Positive Examples

 Unpacking makes a particularly good case study for the effectiveness of ludonarrative harmony through the utilization of environmental storytelling. Released in 2021, Unpacking is a very short indie game, taking only three to four hours to complete from start to finish. It boasts an isometric view and a pixel art graphical style complimented by a chiptune soundtrack.[53] Over the course of the game, the player must unpack unlabeled moving boxes in rooms, apartments, or houses, over eight stages,[54] each named after the year they take place, 1997, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2018. There is no visible human throughout any of the levels, just the rooms themselves and the objects being unpacked and placed within them. The game includes light puzzle elements as well, as each stage cannot be passed until each object is placed in an acceptable location: a bathtub is not an acceptable location for a toaster, for instance. Once every object has been placed, the player is given a button prompt to finish the level, at which point there is a screenshot taken and the picture is added to a scrapbook with a caption, which is the only diegetic text or exposition in the entire game. Everything else must be extrapolated from the objects and the rooms that the player is unpacking.

In 1997, the player is given a brightly painted bedroom, with a loft bed and a desk, and a few boxes to unpack. As they open the box and begin removing items, they unpack toys, games, small books, some simple art supplies, and a lot of stuffed animals. It is immediately apparent that the player is unpacking a child’s bedroom by the objects, but more importantly they are unpacking the objects that are most important to a child, including specific action figures, a soccer trophy, and a framed drawing of a horse. There are no clothing items present in the boxes, which will become very prevalent in the future levels.

In 2004, rather than a single child’s bedroom, the player is given a college dorm, with a bathroom and small kitchen that must be unpacked as well as the bedroom. In this level, the player unpacks some art textbooks, a desktop computer, as well as clothing. Some of the items linger from the previous level, including a stuffed pig that appears in every level, as well as some souvenirs that accumulate, beginning with a mini double decker London bus from 1997 and a replica Eiffel Tower in 2004.

In 2007, the player is placed in an already furnished house, with rooms that cannot be accessed, implying that they are sharing a home with a few roommates. Notably, at this level, the player unpacks a framed diploma, suggesting they have finished whatever college they attended in the previous level. The challenge of the level being based in placing the objects that the player adds to the house amongst the belongings of other people who live there.

In 2010, the boxes that must be unpacked are in a smaller apartment, without space being made for the new objects to be added. This is the first level where the pre-placed objects can be moved and reorganized to allow for more things to be added. With only one bedroom, the implication is that this is a romantic partner’s apartment, which justifies the moving of background materials and adds an uneasy feeling about the lack of space being given for unpacking. Notably in this level, the player has a pet beetle, which was present in the unmovable background details of 2007, as well as a little blue ukulele.

In 2012, the room is the familiar childhood bedroom but with new furniture and some sewing supplies, as well as a bed, all crammed together much more snugly than the room had been in 1997. The objects being unpacked are significantly less than what was brought out in the previous three levels, though the quantity still leaves little space left to make the room feel uncluttered.

In 2013, the player unpacks into an unfurnished apartment with red brick walls and an office in addition to the bedroom, where some nice art supplies and drawing tablets are unpacked. In this level, there is much more space to fill out than in the previous three where the player has lived with others, making this the second solo living space in the game. Sadly, in this level, the player unpacks a drawing of a beetle with wings and a halo, suggesting that it had passed away between 2012 and 2013. Though in 2015, which takes place in this same home – now furnished – a new set of stuff packed in white and red moving boxes rather than the standard brown ones that had been used throughout the rest of the levels suggest that there is a new person who shares the player’s bedroom, suggesting that they are now dating a new person.

Finally, in 2018, the player is unpacking an entire two bedroom, one and a half bathroom home. There are some significant additions to this unpacking experience, in the form of several books with images of some anthropomorphic animal characters that have been present throughout the stages, suggesting that the player has begun publishing children’s books, as well as in the existence of a nursery. At the end of this level, the player is given the credits with an ukulele song about unpacking that has vocals, which end with an image of two women with their back to the camera looking over a sunset, one with a baby in her arms and the other with an ukulele.

Unpacking relies on environmental storytelling for the narrative to be communicated to the player, and necessarily – therefore – their narrative drive. Without the narrative drive to see these stages as connected and telling the same story from home to home, the gameplay loop becomes simply organizing objects in various environments. Even then, the organization itself requires a recognition of the spaces within the game as being a childhood bedroom, a college bathroom, or a nursery to figure out how to solve the puzzle of where the objects belong. By relying heavily on the narrative drive to play the game, Unpacking makes the gaming experience especially focused on the narrative that lacks exposition, making the literal puzzle of finding the right location for objects work hand in hand with the puzzle of what is going on and who the player is playing as in the game. This also works because Unpacking is not an especially complex or long game, so the narrative mystery does not have to be sustained for many hours or amongst a complex play environment. The camera is always fixed at an isometric angle, with controls for zooming in and out of details and the pixel graphics give a nostalgic visual style that is enhanced by the calm chiptune soundtrack playing in the background. The game does not pressure the player with repetitive sounds or timers like other puzzle games, so being preoccupied with the experience and the simple gameplay challenges allow for a better environment in which to ponder the narrative going on. By letting all these lightly stimulating mysteries linger for the player, in addition to the little discoveries of each item that is unpacked from the boxes, the game of Unpacking and its narrative of discovery work hand in hand harmoniously, ludonarrative harmoniously.

Inside takes a similar approach to its narrative that Unpacking does, by dropping the player into the game with no information as to what the story will be nor text to explain what is going on. There is no paratextual information to speak of in terms of menus or description. Unlike Unpacking, however, Inside goes for something more insidious in tone with a desaturated world and a story that leans more into horror than calm domesticity. Published in 2016 by Playdead, a games studio in Denmark, the player directly controls the actions of a child in a red shirt as they wake up in a forest, running away from mysterious strangers towards an unknown goal. The game is presented in 2.5D, meaning that the dimensions somewhat change, and the background can affect the foreground, though the motion is entirely side scrolling like the original Mario games.

While Unpacking has clear cut levels with menus that move the player from one level to the next, Inside throws the player in with no menu at all, the progress made through the game has no loading screens. With nothing to distract the player – nor contextual clues outside of the diegesis – from the game happening on screen, they are faced with several grisly environments, though there are no distinct levels or stages otherwise delineated. There are three rough areas that make up the game which are, in order, The Forest, the Farmland, and the Facility, though these are not of equal length. The game has two endings, one of which requires that the player find all thirteen secret rooms to unlock; the base ending of playing through the game involves the player controlling a large blob of a creature and bursting out of the facility only to end up resting on a beach while the credits play. The secret ending, which involves deactivating thirteen orbs throughout the game in their secret rooms, shows the player deactivating a 14^th orb that seems to kill the main character, possibly disconnecting them from the game itself and leaving them inert without the connection of the controller to guide them. Whichever ending is taken as the true ending of the game, neither provides much context about the story or its ultimate conclusion, providing a bleak ending to a bleak experience.

In The Forest, the protagonist wakes up in the roots of some trees, only able to move forward by the rules of the side scroller. As they progress through the forest, the player must hide from and outrun various adult-sized human enemies who are seen in the background hunting down and capturing other people. The first time these people are seen in the background, it is while closing the back of a semitruck that has a bunch of docile people standing motionless inside it. The progression feels more like escape rather than moving towards a particular goal at this point in the game, especially as the player gets taught the gameplay mechanics like enemy vision, timing jumps, waiting for openings, and maneuvering around dogs, avoiding the hazards that become puzzles and challenges later on in the game. As an introductory area, it is by far the shortest.

In The Farm, the protagonist finds himself in a seemingly abandoned farm, full of rundown buildings, the remains of cars, and a few animals left living. There are no people in the area, though there are several dead pigs with parasites wiggling out of them, and one living one that proves to be a brief danger for the player, but becomes calm once the strange parasite is removed, hinting at some kind of control being imposed on the pig. This connection between the pigs and mind control is only strengthened when, to leave the farm, the player must use the now-docile pig to reach a helmet that allows them to control some human figures in the background, using them to solve a puzzle so that the game to progress.

The Facility is the third and by far the largest area in the game, comprising the back two thirds of the run time, and is broken up into several smaller areas. It is made up of several smaller areas that are marked by various numbers to indicate what sector of the facility the protagonist is in, though there are more numbers seen than explored. The player explores sectors two, three, and four. In sectors two and three, the environment is made up of flooded test chambers, offices, and some plant life that has blossomed in absence of attention. In sector four, though, the protagonist finds himself in the still-operational part of the facility, moving around scientists and office spaces, before finally stumbling across a large blob-like creature made of limbs called the Huddle.[55] In trying to free the huddle, the protagonist gets absorbed into the fleshy mass, giving the player control of the whole creature, and the last portion of the game focuses on escaping the facility as the strange creature.

Unlike Unpacking, where the story is communicated through objects that remain through a sequence of distinct levels, Inside draws the player in through a seamless world, and the puzzle-reward system of seeing how the previous areas are built upon to create a cohesive world by the end of the game, as confusing as that ending may be. For example, there is no loading screen when the player crosses from one level into another, nor when they perform any significant action – even dying does not lead to a loading screen, just a brief pause before being reset. Lacking any explicit exposition, the player is given freedom to interpret the events of the game according to what makes sense for them, rather than being told what the details are. By not being told what the details are, the player’s narrative drive is allowed to fill in the gaps, thus allowing for a differently engaging experience that gives them more control over how they understand the final narrative. For example, referring back to the mind-controlling parasite in the pig, and then the game mechanic of mind control that the player gains access to shortly after; these two pieces of information are placed next to each other, but the sinister implications are completely in the hands of the player to interpret. In another instance, the flooded chambers in Sector Three, there is a large orb surrounded by floating bodies, foreshadowing the tank in which the Huddle is found – a large orb where all the people are mashed together on the inside rather than floating outside. Connecting these two areas is not a necessary part of the game, but when paired with the light puzzle elements, the experience works together to provide immersion and ludonarrative harmony.

VII.           Conclusion

Having spoken about two games that achieve ludonarrative harmony through environmental storytelling and engaging the narrative drive of the player, I will now discuss an example of a game that does not provide this experience, Goodbye Volcano High (KO_OP, 2023).  This game blends the two genres of visual novel and rhythm action to tell a story of a musician in high school, except that they are an anthropomorphic dinosaur named Fang.[56] The entire game takes place over the course of a week, during which rumors spread that there is a meteorite coming to kill all the dinosaurs on earth (mimicking the actual meteor that killed the dinosaurs). It is worth talking about for two reasons: it fails to use its environment to its full effect and thus fails at achieving ludonarrative harmony.

In Goodbye Volcano High, the high school setting is never fully utilized. While there are back and forth conversations with individual characters and one scene where a mass of dinosaur-people is present as part of a light puzzle, there is never anyone in the background of the game or its scenes. Rather, every wide shot of the school or the town in the game is left devoid of dinosaurs in what should be very populated areas. While this makes sense in the later part of the game where the characters are all facing assured destruction because of the oncoming meteor, the certainty of their death is only made a part of the story in the very last bit of the game after a brief bit of time-skipping. Thus, the earlier empty space just leaves the game feeling underdeveloped. This is in part due to the generic nature of these background spaces as well, which take the form of – unpopulated – streets, building facades, and school interiors, which give the player little to latch on to when it comes to non-explicit narrative clues.

Similarly, the game struggles to engage the player through its mechanics. While the narrative is of a musician composing songs for their garage band, the actual moments where the player must hit notes to a beat in the rhythm action sections are completely optional and cannot be failed. While this may sound as though they are simply very easy, the reality is that the moment of engagement is lost in the absence of stakes. Rather than having a “game over” screen and blocking the player from progressing, or giving narrative consequences for failing to perform, the story moves on as if nothing had happened. The band acts as a narrative catalyst for the core conflict of the game, that all the band members are drifting apart as they come to the end of their high school careers, making the concerts that they play together very important, and the music is put across as though it should have some weight and impact to it. All of this falls flat when there are no narrative consequences for failing, removing the emotional stakes from this interactive component of the game. The other mechanical way that the player engages with the game is through making choices in the dialogue to affect conversations, befriending, or pushing away, the other characters that they meet. However, the consequences and ending remain unchanged no matter how the player engages with the other characters. This begins very early on in the game when Fang gets caught on their phone in class by a teacher and the two options that the player is given two options: to hand it over willingly or to insist to keep the phone. Both choices lead to a different reaction from the teacher but do not persist beyond the different reaction. The narrative tension is all brought to a head in the penultimate scene, that either disregards the player’s choice to push away other characters or seems out of left field as characters who were all befriended turn against the protagonist so that they can move past their issues and play one last big show. In this scene, all of the main cast of characters gather at the beach for a bonfire to talk about how they should handle the incoming asteroid that is set to clear the planet. However, in discussing their plans, regrets, and fears, the characters get emotional and begin fighting about perceived slights, after which the player can get an extra scene of dialogue with any of the characters, they have built strong bonds with. Regardless of who is spoken to, or who was befriended, the beach scene and the final send off concert both play out exactly the same. Through these two mechanical missteps, we can most clearly see what ludonarrative dissonance looks like: the misalignment of the mechanical structure and the narrative.

By understanding ludonarrative harmony and its relation to forms of storytelling, as theorists we gain another form of description that can be used to analyze these complex interactive narrative structures. It is this dual nature that video games have that allows them to work well, the interactivity working in harmony with the narrative elements or in dissonance with each other, and effectively engage the narrative drive of their players. A key part of these two aspects working in harmony with each other is the environmental storytelling that takes place, blending the interactive environment with the story being told. By looking at environmental storytelling as a way in which game developers leave gaps in the story for the players to fill in, the players are provided with another level of interactivity that goes beyond the one provided in just the mechanical use of a controller and an avatar, but also as creators with investment in the story itself.

Bibliography 

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Notes

[1] By text, I am referring to written, non-diegetic information about the narrative, what we typically associate with narrative. Instead, a narrative can be created simply through the environment of the game world and the player’s engagement with that world.

[2] An ‘environmental element’ as I am using it here is a piece of gaming architecture called an asset, which is a single rendered model that makes up a part of the game world. Examples of elements are most clearly visible in older games, such as the warp pipes in Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996) which stand out from the general texture of the ground; Expounded on in section III. Narrative, this concept of the narrative drive is adapted from Altman and his conception of the essential parts of narrative.

[3] Altman, A Theory of Narrative. 19-20.

[4] Environmental storytelling is not my concept, I am simply clarifying how it is intended within the scope of this project.

[5] A ‘narrative element’ as I am terming it here refers to the text within the game as well as any other object used to communicate the story to the player.

[6] Hocking, “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock.” n.p.

[7] Hocking, n.p.

[8] I explore further in an unpublished essay, “Bloodborne: A Study of Environmental Narratives and Ludonarrative Harmony.”

[9] Grodal, “Video Games and the Pleasures of Control.” 197.

[10] “Controller” is being used here to cover all forms of input devices used to control a video game, such as a mouse, keyboard, joystick, arcade cabinet, etc. It is the interface that connects the human to the game; Grodal, 202-204.

[11] Christopher and Leuszler, “Horror Video Games and the ‘Active-Passive’ debate.” 2-3.

[12] Green, Storytelling in Video Games. 19.

[13] Physical input can be argued as a necessity for most if not all types of communicative media, however, this is not an argument integral to this paper.

[14] Altman, 10.

[15] Altman, 19.

[16] Altman 15-18.

[17] A cut scene is a – typically brief – video that is used to ‘cut’ between parts of a game. Typically, this is used to give some additional exposition to what is going on, move the story along, or simply to hide the mechanical loading that the game is doing in the background to set up the next part of game for the player.

[18] Altman, 18.

[19] Altman, 11.

[20] Further exploration of the presence of character regarding environmental storytelling will be discussed in the Positive Examples section, as Unpacking does not possess a focus character on the screen (at least visibly, though their presence haunts the gaming experience) while Inside is centered around the exploration of a world with a character that the player controls.

[21] Altman, 14.

[22] Jenkins, 5.

[23] I explore further in another unpublished essay, “Pilgrimage and the Lands of Lothric: The Medieval Narrative in Dark Souls III.”

[24] Jenkins, 6.

[25] Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2. 86.

[26] At this point, the concept of Narrative is going to be used somewhat interchangeably with Storytelling. This is because narrative is broad, and storytelling encompasses narrative but focuses it into telling a story.

[27] Ryan, 86.

[28] Green, 22-23.

[29] Green, 22. This only applies to games that actually have narrative ambitions, which Green states not all games do on the very same page.

[30] Green, 20.

[31] Green, 25.

[32] Green, 37.

[33] Speedrunning is the practice of playing a game with a particular goal in mind (typically the ending credit sequence) as fast as possible by any means necessary.

[34] Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer. 193.

[35] Open world refers to a game in which the player is allowed to move freely through areas, as opposed to a closed world, where the player progresses through closed off levels that must be beaten to move on to the next area.

[36] Ruberg, 201.

[37] Survival horror games, exemplified best by the Resident Evil series of video games, are typically games that involve the player struggling to manage resources and overcome puzzles in the midst of horrific environments and monsters.

[38] Kirkland, “Storytelling in Survival Horror Videogames.” 64.

[39] Kirkland, 67.

[40] “Evoked visual narratives refer to those situations where the fact that some videogames are set in scenery/backdrop already known to gamers may ignite a process of anticipation that allows the game narrative context to exercise a greater sense of involvement by evoking what the player already knows about such contexts.” Soriani and Caselli, “Visual Narratives in Videogames,” 495.

[41] “Enacted visual narratives can be considered all the cases where game designers’ stage in-game scenarios where players are called to 'solve' the situation by means of creating or perturbing a graphic element (or a set of them) that immediately becomes an integral part of the game world, thus activating a narrative sequence.” Soriani and Caselli, 495.

[42] “Enacting visual narratives refer to all those visual elements staged by the designers with the intention to suggest to the players an action with a specific scope.” Soriani and Caselli, 495.

[43] “Embedded visual narratives refer to those visual elements intentionally positioned by developers which contain information about the context of the game.” Soriani and Caselli, 495.

[44] Soriani and Caselli, 485; “Emergent visual narrative concerns all those games that allow the creation of graphic assets by the player, such assets assuming that for the person they have meaning within a context of reference absolutely internal to the subject.” Soriani and Caselli, 495.

[45] Soriani and Caselli, 477-478.

[46] Krzywinska, “Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests, and Backstories.” 385.

[47] World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, where players interact with each other and explore the fictional world of Azeroth together in real time. This world is populated by various cultures with extensive histories as the game has continued to expand and hold popularity 20 years later, as of time of writing, March 2024.

[48] Krzywinska, 387.

[49] Krzywinska, 388.

[50] Aarseth, “A Hollow World: World of Warcraft as Spatial Practice.” 111-112; Much like previous authors, its best to keep in mind that Aarseth is publishing this essay in 2008. By the time the essay had been published as part of the collection, only two of the game’s expansions to the world and lore had arrived, The Burning Crusade (2007) and Wrath of the Lich King (2008). However, in the years between Aarseth’s writing and my own, a total of nine expansions have been released, with three more announced for future release dates. Suffice to say, the world may be somewhat less hollow after 20 years of play and development.

[51] Aarseth, 118.

[52] Aarseth, 119.

[53] “Indie Games” – short for ‘independent’ – refer to those games by small development studios that are released by small publishers. Typically, these games boast a smaller play time, more emphasis on artistic style over cutting-edge graphical fidelity, and overall, a heavier reliance on narrative. There are always exceptions, but these are the traits usually associated with them.

[54] Stage and level in this paper are interchangeable. They both refer to a unit of the game that must be completed to move on to the next unit.

[55] This name is not present within the game, this is just how the creature is referred to by fans as well as the developers, as is present within the game’s file names.

[56] A ‘visual novel’ typically involves a branching narrative based on player choices, branching narrative structure, a character focused story, and visual elements to show the player who the characters are and some basic scenes they are in, usually with very minor animation; A ‘rhythm action game’ is usually a game where the primary activity within the game is based on music, rhythm, keeping time, and colorful visuals that match up with the timing of the player.