Structures of choice in narratives in gamification and games

Over the past few months, I’ve immersed myself, or deep-dived to use topical jargon, into creating narrative adventure experiences for teams and/or groups in corporate or educational environments. And with creating these experiences, I’ve explored a great many variations on how to bring across an activity that is supposed to allow for an environment where certain skills can be applied and practised, while keeping it engaging as well.

My ‘go-to’ to keep anything engaging, and by extension therefore entertaining, is to add an interesting narrative to the experience. People love a good story in which they can immerse themselves. As I developed these experiences, which I call adventures as they are activity-based narrative experiences, I tried to create some sort of standardized methodology. I realized after a while that you essentially need a toolset of narrative structures that you can use as a base to work from when building these adventures.

The key purpose in these adventures is that the player has a sense of agency and that this sense is augmented through offering choices, hopefully, meaningful ones. The structure then of these adventures becomes a branching network of possible choices. So, my first lesson was visualizing these networks, through the use of a kind of topological design that represented those structures.

I looked at network theory and how it, with the concept of nodes and paths, could aid me in better representing intended player journeys through an adventure. Researching this and from my own experience, I came up with a few narrative structures that I would like to share with you. These have become the tools in my storytelling box when I start the process of building a new adventure narrative.

Structures, networks and choices

I’ve chosen to list six types of structured narrative networks that I have come across, used and/or experimented with. It is important to know that each of these is based on the idea that they all start with a goal, either stated or player-defined, which then should have the effect of motivating the player to reach a resolution. The story aspect added on to the goal is the incitement to the player, giving them a sense of agency. As the player moves through the…