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Structures of choice in narratives in gamification and games

Albert van der Meer
UX Collective
Published in
11 min readSep 9, 2019

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…

Published in UX Collective

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Written by Albert van der Meer

Audience Engagement & Behavioural Design Consultant, Writer & Author of Press Start // more info & services @ aestranger.com

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