Crafting Narrative For Serious Games
Finding The Right Story For Your Audience Is A Winning Play
Before I was a full time serious game designer, I was a actually a game writer. This transition was natural for me, since I started my game design career making tabletop roleplaying games for fun.
As a game writer and an RPG designer before that, I understood well the power of storytelling when it comes to play. Most games seek to tell a story of some type, even if they do it differently from other forms of media. Stories do many things for games that are essential for their success.
- Stories motivate players through a narrative hook: Players keep playing to find out what happens next!
- Narrative adds stakes to play actions, making it feel more rewarding when success is attained (beating the bad guy, saving the day, etc.)
- The game’s world adds context to the rules of the game, making them easier to understand and use. A player knows instinctively to jump over a spike pit without having to be told to do it.
All of these are powerful, but they can backfire if your story is not interesting, has poor stakes, or if the games’ rules and world don’t line up. This last is sometimes called ludo-narrative dissonance, meaning the way the game behaves mechanically does not line up with story expectations.
The above applies to games as a whole, but what about serious games? How important are story elements when a game needs to teach something, change behavior, or drive engagement for a research project?
In a word: Very.
No game’s goals can take effect if players quit playing it, and when the aim is to explain something important about how the world works, having the game rules line up with the real world is often critical.
If you’re working on a serious game right now, here are some rules of thumb to help you craft the right narrative.
Hooky-ness vs. Accuracy
One question I am frequently asked is, should I try to make the most exciting story possible, or should I make sure everything in my game is scientifically or societally accurate?
This is a great question, and the answer is: it depends on your audience, but usually story trumps realism.
Here’s the exception.
If your game is inaccurate, these inaccuracies can dispel the power of your game. Experts and policy makers who recognize these inaccuracies will lose trust in your game as a whole, and instead of having a valuable debrief around the meaning of the game, they will likely focus on your “mistakes,” even if the game itself is well designed.
This has happened to me! In the 2010s, I worked on a game called UpRiver about flood prediction and preparedness in Zambia. The game we designed taught everyday people living in flood plains that these dangerous weather events can be predicted and prepared for. People loved the game. It was incredibly fun, and after playing it both children and adults understood the principles of flood prediction and weather reporting! It was a huge win.
However, the game was never implemented. Why? We neglected to engage policy makers in its design, and it therefore lacked accuracy in certain ways, such as how ground water affects flooding. These inaccuracies became such an issue, that the game was shelved.
For later projects, we always brought in experts much earlier on and had them triple check the stories and characters to make sure they were realistic.
So if your audience includes scientists, policy makers, politicians, or other highly-educated professionals, double down on accuracy. Ditto this if what you are building is being billed as a “simulation” as opposed to a game.
If your audience is youth, casual players, or adult new-learners, then making your narrative more straightforward, exciting, and hooky is more important. After all, your serious game can’t have impact if people quit playing it.
Responsibly Representing People, Places, & Culture
Another common problem with serious games is representation. This has less to do with scientific accuracy, and more to do with politics, empathy, and inclusion.
If you design a game that touches on real social identities, for instance racism, sexism, poverty, bias, or even geo-politics (and let’s face it, there are aspects of these in all real-world problems that need to be solved), you may be tasked with sensitively and responsibly representing real people, places, and cultures in your game.
Where should a game about failing health systems be set? Will people feel called out if you set it in their country or community? How do you depict characters in a game about poverty? What racial and ethnic demographics should you depict them in? How do you make sure you are not re-enforcing harmful stereotypes about groups of people in a game about sexual health or addiction?
These are difficult questions to answer, but there are a variety of tactics you can use to tackle them and avoid potential harm.
Abstract Everything
To avoid offensive depictions of people and places, don’t depict them at all. Yes, it’s a bit galaxy-brained to totally remove the people your story is about from your game, but if your focus is on system-thinking, it can be the right move. It allows anyone, anywhere to apply the game’s teachings to their own cultural context without preconceived notions. It leaves room for imagination and play. And it offers room for rich conversation in debrief when a facilitator asks the players what they saw and interpreted from the game.
Abstraction can take the form of allegory, setting the game in a mythical, mystical, or alien world, or even by reducing the games’ components to symbols and values.
There are risks to this approach, however. If your abstraction is not clear, people will not understand the meaning of the game. Additionally, the emotional resonance of abstract or fantasy depictions is not as acute as when you show real people with real problems. And communities can even resent being abstracted into fantastic elements. After all, these games are about real people whether we say so or not, and representing a person as an alien can be… alienating.
One last word of warning: do not abstract people by representing them as animals. In many cultures, certain animals have racially and religiously charged overtones. You can probably think of some in your own culture. So don’t do it!
Build Fictional Stand-Ins
A step removed from abstraction is fictionalization. With this tactic, you invent realistic but novel cultures, nations, ethnicities, and individuals to tell stories that feel real. This is more work than a pure abstraction, but the reward is a game that rings more true. If you’ve done your job right, people will still be able to lay on aspects of their own culture onto the fictional world, but with an even greater emotional punch than with a full abstraction.
The basic approach is through amalgam. You take aspects of many different cultures that share a similar problem (climate change, corruption, unemployment, etc.) and you build a fictional world inspired by many places and people that depicts none of them exactly. These story worlds can be regional, drawing inspiration from multiple countries of a region like North Africa or Central America, or it can be an entirely alternate Earth with realistic but totally new cultures.
When you do this, it remains essential to avoid harmful depictions, so be sure to consult with cultural experts throughout your proccess.
Maximum Fidelity, Maximum Engagement
The last approach is to dive into the deep end and strive for full fidelity to the real world. Doing so responsibly is challenging, and cannot be done without great engagement from local partners. This involves research, workshopping, ethnographical tools, and working hand-in-hand with natives of that culture, whether they are proxy players, academics, activists, or volunteers from partner organizations.
Make these people a part of your team, not just a consultant or committee that gives advice. This process is not about providing cover for your work or checking a box, it’s about creating a rich and true depiction of a people and a place that acknowledges problems in a realistic way.
Doing this right takes a commitment, but it will make your game resonate much more strongly with a local audience.
Even with your most earnest effort, things can still go wrong, however. Sometimes issues just aren’t black and white, and even your imbedded cultural experts may disagree on how things should be depicted. You may find yourself wishing you’d abstracted things after all.
Forget Procedural Rhetoric, It’s About Characters
Are you a game scholar or serious game designer? If so, you probably know a lot about procedural rhetoric. If you don’t, the idea is actually a simple one.
In short, this concept states that games make meaning through their rules, systems, and actions. Therefore, by laying political, social, and scientific concepts onto these games, we can convince a player of an argument (such raising taxes is bad, or washing your hands after you use the bathroom is good) through play.
After years of working in this field, I’ve come to the conclusion that procedural rhetoric isn’t good for much, and is probably less effective than almost any other means of convincing some one of an idea. When games that employ it are measured, they tend to have no effect or even the opposite effect. I’ve written about this idea in the past, if you’re curious.
If you really want to convince somebody of your way of thinking, character-driven narrative is much more powerful. Studies (and history) have shown that people can easily empathize with one person or character, but multiplying them out into a larger population quickly reduces that empathy. As Stalin once said, one death is a tragedy; one million, a statistic.
This is why a striking, evocative photo of a person suffering is so much more powerful for spurring action than a lengthy article laying out all the particulars of a problem, even though the latter is fuller and contains more context.
You can see the power of an emotional appeal in a variety of popular games like “The Last Of Us,” series which makes a young girl the face of a story of survival in the apocalypse as well as in gamified apps like Duolingo, which introduced a cast of fun characters in an update several years ago and saw boosted engagement as a result.
But like everything else, sympathetic characters are hard to create and require intimate knowledge of your audience. The character must be realistic, smartly depicted, and at the right level for your audience.
Do this, and your product will engage, motivate, and teach in a way only the greatest games can. Neglect it, and your story will be over before it begins.
Sam Liberty is a serious game designer and gamification expert. He teaches game design at Northeastern University.
