Respawn - Gathering of Game Developers 2015

The talk will make the case for narratification rather than classical storytelling as the right way to create immersive and emotionally involving stories in games. Classical storytelling, produced top-down based on a game’s setting, more often than not creates a ludo-narrative dissonance, a disconnect between the told story and what the player experiences while playing the game.

The answer to this problem is a bottom-up approach, where a story is developed right from the gameplay. This approach is called narratification, a process of creating and implementing narrative elements that will render game narratives more intentional, reflective of the game as an art form, the gameplay patterns used in the actual game – and the way an individual is playing the game.

The talk will give examples of both approaches to show the different results.