460 Int. J. Arts and Technology, Vol. 4, No.

4, 2011

Games, narrative and the design of interface

Jim Bizzocchi*, M.A. Ben Lin and

Joshua Tanenbaum
School of Interactive Arts and Technology,
Simon Fraser University,
250-13450 102nd Avenue,
Surrey, BC V3T 3A0 Canada
E-mail: jimbiz@sfu.ca
E-mail: Ben_Lin@alumni.sfu.ca
E-mail: joshuat@sfu.ca
*Corresponding author

Abstract: There is a potential disconnection between the experience of

narrative and the active decision-making necessary for successful gameplay.
Gameplayers must oscillate between a hypermediated participation in
game decisions, and the transparent pleasure in the narrative frame of the game
(Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Manovich, 2001). This paper analyses one critical
locus for facilitating player oscillation and bridging the gap between narrative
pleasure and gameplay interaction. Narrative dynamics can be designed directly
into the focus of active gameplay – the game interface. This paper identifies
and explicates four separate design approaches for integrating narrative within
the game’s interface: (1) a narrativised ‘look and feel’ of the interface; (2)
behavioural mimicking and behavioural metaphors; (3) narrativised perspective
and (4) ‘bridging’ and mixed-reality interfaces. These concepts are useful for
describing, analysing and understanding how narrative experience can be
instantiated within the game interface. Application of these concepts can help
to reveal useful strategies for conjoining ludic play with narrative pleasure.
Collectively, this approach is a step towards creating a common theoretical
vocabulary for discussing the phenomenon of narrativised game interface.

Keywords: narrative; interactive narrative; game narrative; game design;

interface design; narrativised interface; interactive experience; augmented
environments; arts and technology.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bizzocchi, J.,

Ben Lin, M.A. and Tanenbaum, J. (2011) ‘Games, narrative and the design of
interface’, Int. J. Arts and Technology, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp.460–479.

Biographical notes: Jim Bizzocchi is an Associate Professor in the School of

Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Surrey, British
Columbia. His research includes scholarly work in game design, interactive
narrative and the evolving poetics of the moving image. He is also a practicing
video artist, and is the recipient of a University Teaching Award.

M.A. Ben Lin received his Master of Arts from the School of Interactive Arts
and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Surrey, British Columbia,
specialising in the relationship between narrative and interface.

Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Games, narrative and the design of interface 461

Joshua Tanenbaum is a PhD student in the School of Interactive Arts and

Technology at Simon Fraser University in Surrey, British Columbia, studying
the dynamics of narrative and meaning construction in games and other
interactive environments. His Master’s Thesis was a close reading of the
popular game Oblivion from three perspectives: believability, performativity
and adaptivity.

1 Introduction: games and narrative

Narrative is a powerful and pervasive human phenomenon, with manifestations at play in

all aspects of our lives: personal, social, cultural and economic (Polkinghorne, 1988).
Like all contemporary cultural phenomena, the range of narrative manifestations is being
steadily influenced by the ongoing implications of computation and networking (Mateas
and Sengers, 1999). In this regard, interactive narrative may well be the ‘holy grail’ of
new media research and development. An entire subfield of AI research has grown
around the challenges of designing experiences in which narrative and rich interaction
converge: a testament to the difficulty of this problem. Even as designers and engineers
attempt to develop the technologies that will allow the dynamics of story and the
dynamics of interaction to coexist, much work remains to be done in the analysis of how
existing interactive experiences support narrative understanding.
The pleasures of gameplay interaction and the pleasures of surrendering to a story can
both be found in games, however it has been argued that they emerge from different
dynamics of the experience (Perron, 2005). Ermi and Mayra (2005) examine the
immersive qualities of electronic game experience, and separate the narrative pleasure
(‘imaginative immersion’ in their terms) from the ludic pleasure (‘challenge-based
immersion’). Narrative pleasure requires the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (Coleridge,
1905), while gameplay pleasure derives from the active collision of challenge and skill,
resulting in a rewarding state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). The flow state requires
both active participation and successful decision-making. Narrative pleasure is not
‘passive’ as is often mis-stated – both game scholars (Zimmerman, 2004) and media
scholars (Thompson, 1988) recognise that it depends on reader participation and
intellectual/
emotional engagement. However, narrative pleasure does require a commitment to the
imaginative storyworld and at least a partial surrender to the story experience.
Games scholars have vigorously addressed this question from a variety of
perspectives and methodologies: textual analysis (e.g. Davidson, 2009), experimental
game design/creation (e.g. Claypool and Claypool, 2009) and the application of artificial
intelligence research (e.g. Mateas and Stern, 2006), to name but a few. At the same time,
the games industry has made narrative an ongoing priority for development, creative
exploration and marketing. At the 2010 Game Developer’s Conference, 12 of the 72
panels and discussions in the Game Design track were devoted to narrative in games,
covering topics that included emotional characters, environmental storytelling, AI
storytelling techniques and writing for games (Game Developer’s Conference, 2010). In
2009, Roy Muzyka – CEO of Bioware – said “Narrative is one of the most powerful
forms of expression” (Remo, 2009). Narrative has the power to broaden the appeal of
games beyond what had been considered the ‘core gamer’ demographic of adolescent
462 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

males: Brenda Laurel argues that structuring play around narrative construction can help
engage girls in games, and in the process grow the games market (Jenkins, 2000; Laurel,
2004).
In the first half of this decade, the role of narrative in games was the subject of a
heated debate within game studies (see the Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan (2004) text First
Person for a variety of essays that exemplify this conflict). Although the dust from this
moment in game studies history has largely settled, it is still useful to clarify our stance
on the overarching issues that lay in back of this debate. We do not claim that games are
primarily vehicles for narrative and storytelling - nor do we claim that narrative is of
critical importance in all games. Neither of these is true. The core pleasure of most
gameplay is probably to be found in the winning and losing, and the associated state of
‘flow’ engendered by the combination of challenge and performance (Csikszentmihalyi,
1990). However, we do maintain that for many games, narrative adds to the pleasure of
the game experience in significant and powerful ways. Perhaps more importantly, it is
almost impossible to discuss modern digital games without also discussing the ways in
which they give rise to emergent narrative meaning through play. Thus, our position on
the role of narrative in game experience is consistent with that held by most games
scholars today (Jenkins, 2004; Pearce, 2005; Salen and Zimmerman, 2004).
However, the difficulty of combining the pleasures of deep narrative with the
pleasure of active gameplay still remains. The necessity for ludic decision-making can
and does interfere with the intensity of narrative pleasure and suspension of disbelief.
Murray addresses this problem, maintaining that digital creators must transcend
‘suspension of disbelief’ and aspire to the ‘active creation of belief’ in order to bridge
that gap (Murray, 1997). Game designers work across a variety of dimensions in order to
realise a more robust narrative experience. They are correct to do so – there is no ‘magic
bullet’ for solving the difficult problem of interactive narrative. The challenge of
interactive narrative will be solved not through the blinding flash of a single brilliant
work, but incrementally, over decades, across a variety of separate fronts, by thousands
of designers, researchers and artists. This is exactly the same dynamic that led to the
creation of ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Birth of a Nation’ in film. They were indeed works of
genius, but their success was also based on incorporating and synergising a variety
of creative developments based on many years of previous work by a great many
individuals working across the industry. The achievement of a truly robust game
narrative will require a similar scale and range of creative development. To succeed, this
development must include significant progress across a range of interactive narrative
parameters: storyworld, character, emotion, micronarrative arcs and a narrativised game
interface (Bizzocchi, 2007). This paper concentrates on the latter.

2 Humanities methodologies for game studies: close reading in games

Our research draws on a rich humanities tradition of Close Reading, with roots in the
literary theories of John Crowe Ransom and the other ‘New Critics’ of the late 1930s and
early 1940s. Close reading is a technique for the detailed examination, deconstruction
and analysis of a media text. It is the quintessential humanist methodology, born in the
study of literature and adapted to other media forms such as cinema studies (Inman,
2003; Wolfreys, 2000). Close reading is a common strategy for explicating interactive
experiences, although it is often not explicitly or formally described as such. Murray
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 463

(1997) uses a number of close readings of games, television, film and literature to support
her arguments in Hamlet on the Holodeck. Manovich (2001) used a close reading of
Dziga Vertov’s film Man with the Movie Camera to guide his foundational discussion
of new media poetics in The Language of New Media. Throughout game studies, scholars
have used the careful analysis of their own play experiences to expand our knowledge of
the affordances of the medium. Most recently, Drew Davidson has begun to release a
series of books dedicated to rigorous scholarly readings of games called Well Played
(Davidson, 2009).
Close reading in games is a qualitative and subjective methodology, but when
performed systematically and rigorously it has the potential to generate valuable insight
into gameplay phenomena. As with its sister methodologies in the social sciences –
autoethnography, grounded theory and case studies – close reading relies on the ability of
the researcher to faithfully observe, document, evaluate and communicate his
experiences. The measure of a close reading’s value, then, is not whether it generates
provable ‘Truths’ but instead if it provides other scholars with useful perspectives for
understanding the poetics of creative works.
Games and other digital texts present unique challenges to researchers engaging in
close reading. They are ‘slippery’, changing with the player’s choices, play-style and skill
level. Many games are also vast in scope, requiring hundreds of hours to ‘read’ just once.
Both of these qualities resist the iterative and exhaustive methods that characterise
literary and filmic close readings. One technique that we have developed to help grapple
with digital texts is to isolate specific phenomena of interest through the use of analytical
lenses. As with any rigorous qualitative process, each analytical lens has the potential to
identify new ways of framing the phenomenon, which when analysed then reveal new
ways of framing the experience and so on.
Our initial lens was simply ‘narrative in the interface’. As we encountered more and
more cases of narrativised interface in games we were able to identify several other high-
order categories into which cases could be grouped. In the following section, we discuss
the history of this research arc, and provide an overview of the categories of narrativised
interface that we have identified.

3 Interface design and narrative experience

The work in this paper builds on an arc of narrativised interface research beginning with
Bizzocchi’s original work on narrative in the interface of the interactive CD-Rom
‘puzzle-game’ Ceremony of Innocence (Real World Multimedia, 1995). Bizzocchi’s
analysis revealed the use of two complementary approaches to help suture any
disconnection between active gameplay and narrative pleasure (Bizzocchi, 2001, 2003;
Bizzocchi and Woodbury, 2003). The first approach was a broad infusion of narrative
across all the mediated dimensions of the work: graphics, animations, sound effects,
music and font choice. All of these media components systematically added to the
pervasive ‘narrative texture’ of the work.
The second approach was to incorporate narrative within the design of the game’s
interface. This was the perspective upon with our research is founded. Bizzocchi
identified that the work’s interface was re-mediated in two distinct manners. At a surface
level, the look of the cursor was often transformed through the redesign of the icon. The
work consists of 60 puzzles to be solved, and many of the puzzles were assigned cursor
464 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

icons with a customised design, rather than the generic arrow symbol. These customised
icons tended to support narrative themes – either drawing on the ‘storyworld’ of the
puzzle, or reflecting the character primarily associated with the puzzle. More
substantively, many of the puzzles transformed the functionality of the cursor –
subverting our familiarity with the conventions of the GUI and the desktop, and
problematising the user’s ability to solve the puzzles. This made the gameplay more
challenging, but at the same time it reflected the dysfunctional character of one of
the protagonists. The user’s struggles with the cursor both reflected and reinforced her
sense of the difficulties of the protagonist’s personality. This analysis demonstrated that a
game interface can incorporate both ludic play and narrative sensibilities. Lin extended
Bizzocchi’s work, citing additional strategies for incorporating narrative within the
design of the interface. Lin (2007) described six strategies for locating narrative in
the interface. Our work takes Lin’s interface strategies as a starting point, but refines
them further, clarifying areas of overlap and extending them through new examples.
This line of research has identified the game interface as a critical nexus for the suture
of gameplay activity and narrative identification. A robust game narrative must be built
and reinforced throughout all aspects of the game, but the interface has particular
importance and utility in this regard. A narrativised interface can reinforce narrative
parameters such as character, storyworld and emotion at the precise point where
gameplay attention is inevitably focused. This is the perfect location to conjoin ludic
challenge with narrative pleasure.
Building on close examination of a number of games from a broad range of game
genres, we can identify four separate approaches to designing a narrativised interface:
x the ‘look and feel’ of the interface
x narrativised perspective
x behavioural mimicking and behavioural metaphors
x ‘bridging’ and mixed-reality interfaces.
The ‘look and feel’ of the interface refers to two separate concepts, both of which tend to
reinforce a generalised sense of narrativised gameplay. One aspect of this approach is the
incorporation of narrativised elements within the basic aesthetics of the interface look
itself. Another aspect of this first approach is more dynamic. This is the narrativisation of
game metrics as defined broadly, those active elements that provide feedback about game
progress and the state of the game and the player. Our second higher level approach is in
the incorporation of a narrativised perspective. The use of visual perspective was
originally tied into ludic concerns – the perspective needed to support effective gameplay
decision-making. As game design becomes more mature, these options for visual
perspective increasingly support narrative concerns as well – in particular identification
with character and deeper understanding of storyworld. Our third higher level approach is
the incorporation of behavioural mimicking – where user interaction reproduces the
behaviours of the character they are playing, or behavioural metaphor – where user
interaction is evocative of the behaviour of their character. Our final higher level
approach is the use of ‘bridging’ and mixed-reality strategies, where the boundaries
between the game interface and the real world are broken down to a greater or lesser
degree.
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 465

We will explicate each of these approaches in detail below, but we first wish to
clarify their purpose and limitations. We believe these four approaches can be identified
in a variety of games, and that these concepts are useful for describing, analysing and
understanding how narrative experience can be instantiated within the interface. Our
work provides a useful theoretical vocabulary for discussing the phenomenon of
narrativised game interface, and for understanding its effect on user experience. We also
believe that the understanding of these concepts in turn has the potential to inform useful
strategies for conjoining ludic play with narrative pleasure.
At the same time, we consciously limit our claims with regard to these concepts. For
example, we do not position this as a set of operational guidelines for interface design.
We believe that an understanding of these concepts may inform design orientation, but
recognise that these are fundamentally descriptive and analytical tools, not prescriptive
design tools. On a more theoretical level, we do not yet claim that they form a
comprehensive framework of distinct and separate concepts that cover this domain. There
may be other approaches to be discovered – we will certainly continue to examine this
area, and we welcome other scholarship in this direction. Further, it is clear to us that
these four approaches can be and often are combined – a specific interface design might
well incorporate two or more of these strategies. This redundancy of narrative
reinforcement and presentation is both common and effective in more mature media such
as cinema and theatre, and is a good model for the development of game narrative.
These clarifications are not intended to undercut our core claims: these strategies –
individually and mixed – can be identified in a wide range of game designs. Our concepts
provide utility in the identification, description and analysis of the relationship of
interface and narrative and these approaches offer the opportunity to conjoin the
pleasures of ludic play and narrative experience.

4 The ‘look and feel’ of the interface

Our first category also represents the most self-evident way in which interface and
narrative intersect. The visual and auditory design of game narrative is not restricted to
the specifics of character and environment constructions. Interface elements also perform
narrative work: they often serve to reinforce narrative themes, character information and
storyworld details. We have divided this strategy into two subcategories: interface
aesthetics and narrativised game metrics. The first category deals with the audio visual
‘story’ of the game experience, and the ways in which it can be used to express narrative
information. The second deals with narratively salient ways in which the interface can be
used to let the player know how well she is performing within the game.

4.1 Interface aesthetic

The simplest design intervention is to modify the look of the interface to reflect narrative
sensibilities – typically character or storyworld. This is consistent with the expressive
use of any multimediated form. Filmmakers will build a broad ‘narrative texture’ across
the entire expressive range of the work – decisions large and small on set, costume,
props, lighting, music, sound effects will all be made with the intention of reinforcing the
general content themes and emotional directions of the film. Game designers do
the same, and the interface is often modified to reinforce the narrative themes of the
466 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

game. Jenkins argues that ‘environmental storytelling’ is supported through embedding

narrative information within the scene, and a narrativised interface look is consistent with
that goal (Jenkins, 2004).
We can see an example of this in the real-time strategy game Warcraft III: Reign of
Chaos (Blizzard Entertainment, 2002). In Warcraft players control armies of avatars, in
one of four racially distinct factions: the Human, the Orc, the Undead or the Night Elf.
The entire look and feel of the interface for each faction is distinct, reinforcing the
aesthetic of the character units, the narrative of the race’s culture and history and the role
of the group within the larger storyworld (Figure 1). The designers extend the selection of
faction into every level of the interface: the menus, control panels and frames are all
constructed to mirror the architecture of their associated faction, and even the mouse
cursor is modified to represent a hand of a member of the chosen race (Figure 1).
The narrative interface in Warcraft is not limited to the visuals of the frames and the
design mouse cursors. The audio design of the interface elements also supports the
construction of the fantasy themed storyworld. Selecting menu buttons results in a
textured ‘thunk’, like an antique door latching shut. Compare this to the sound effects of
the menu buttons in Blizzard Entertainment’s earlier game, Starcraft (Blizzard
Entertainment, 1998), where selecting a menu option results in a futuristic computational
beep appropriate to the science fiction setting. By incorporating the genre and themes of
the game’s storyworld into the interface’s audio environment, these games are able to
create unified and seamless fictional environments that permeate all aspects of the play
experience.
As the visual appearance of the interface becomes more narrativised we also see a
move towards more diegetically integrated interfaces. In Black and White (Lionhead
Studios, 2001), the cursor becomes a hand – and then grabs the horizon in order to move
forward. This ‘hand of god’ reflects the omnipotence of the player in this ‘god-game’
experience. In Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2005, Nintendo Gamecube), the look of the
interface is similarly narrativised through a connection to functional affordance.
The player saves the current game state by accessing typewriters that are realistically and
appropriately located in various parts of the game world. When the player accesses these
devices, the saving/loading screen itself takes on the look of a typewriter, and the game
‘save’ command can be activated. This integration of the interface aesthetic within the
game environment can be even more pronounced. In Dead Space (Electronic Arts, 2008),
the interface is ‘projected’ from the suit of the main character, where it floats in space for
both the character and the player to see (Figure 2). One narrative consequence of this
decision is that the player is always present in the game world, even when browsing
menu systems, and so is never given any respite from the dangers in the environment.

4.2 Narrativised game metrics

An active area for ludic focus is the broad category of various game metrics. We define
game metrics here as any mechanism used by the game to provide feedback to the player
about the state of the gameplay or her performance within the game. To play effectively,
it is critical that the gameplayer pay close attention to these indicators of health, strength,
ammo, score, etc. These indicators can give the player an understanding of the current
status of her own avatar, of her progress through the game story and the condition of the
overall storyworld. These indicators must be ludically efficient – they must give
immediate and unambiguous information to guide gameplay decisions. However, they
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 467

can also reinforce the narrative dimensions of the game, and if designed well can support
both ludic flow and narrative immersion.

Figure 1 The interface panels and cursors for the four different factions in Warcraft III: Reign of
Chaos (see online version for colours)
468 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

Figure 1 The interface panels and cursors for the four different factions in Warcraft III: Reign of
Chaos (see online version for colours) (continued)

Source: Blizzard Entertainment (2002) cropped from screen captures.

Figure 2 The projected interface in Dead Space (see online version for colours)

Source: Cropped from screen captures.

Jenkins (2004) points out that in interactive media such as electronic games, any
particular piece of narrative content may be lost, so “narrative information must be
redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts”. The advantage of
narrativised game metrics is that the player will be paying attention to these indicators in
the interest of effective gameplay. Their narrative dimension is a good example of an
expressive interactive design which not only supports ludic play, but also reinforces the
associated pleasures and emotions of the game’s storyworld. Preece maintains that an
expressive and dynamic interface has the capability to “provide reassuring feedback to
the user that can be both informative and fun” (Preece et al., 1994).
A simple and realistic example is the cheering of the crowd to indicate – and reward –
the scoring of a goal in a sports game. A slightly more stylized example is the avatar
design in Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts (Capcom, 1991, 2002). In the left of Figure 3, the
player has full health and strength – indicated by the robust suit of armour his avatar is
wearing. In the right side, the player has been hit by the enemy, has lost his avatar and is
running around in his underwear! This avatar apparel is a metric for the player’s health –
another hit will result in his death.
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 469

Figure 3 Screen capture, Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts (see online version for colours)

Source: Capcom Co. Ltd. (1991, 2002).

An elegant screen-based example can be seen in the Dead Space interface we discussed
earlier (Figure 2). In this game, the health metre of the character is represented by a tube
of glowing blue fluid along his spine, which slowly depletes as the player takes damage.
A more technologically intensive example is the force-feedback mechanism incorporated
in Logitech’s Wingman driving wheel controller (Logitech, Wingman). When used with a
racing game such as Gran Turismo 3, the wheel presents critical information about the
state of the gameplay to the user. The feedback includes the simulation of the effects of
momentum, gravity and friction on the car’s steering wheel and tires. For example, when
driving on dirt, the unevenness of the surface causes the steering wheel to shake and
rumble. Although it is not in the form of a quantified ‘metric’, this feedback directly
provides the player with essential and ongoing strategic information about the state of the
road. In the context of our argument, this also reinforces narrative immersion into
the storyworld of driving and further instantiates the player as an in-world character. This
design also acts as a reinforcer for another of our categories – behavioural mimicking.
The responsive wheel renders the behaviour of steering more realistic, and therefore more
narratively rewarding.
470 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

5 Narrative perspective

The role of point-of-view (POV), or perspective, has long been the subject of discussion
within game studies. In this section, we consider impact of perspective on the narrative
experience of a game. Historically the choice of which perspective to use was determined
by the ludic demands of the game – what visual POV allowed for the most efficient
gameplay – and by the technological limitations of the platform. Much work has been
done on the relationship between camera angle and ludic performance within games. In a
recent study, Claypool and Claypool (2009) compared player performance across three
different perspectives – first-person linear perspective, third-person linear perspective and
third-person isometric perspective – concluding that the third-person isometric improved
player performance in both navigation and shooting tasks.
However, these ludic choices also support narrative pleasures, typically either a
deeper identification with the player’s character, or a more comprehensive sense of the
game’s storyworld. In most cases, the ludic needs, the narrative dimension, and the visual
perspective of the game all align.
Perspective has been tied to immersion and character association, most famously by
Rouse (1999) who argued that the third-person perspective of Tomb Raider provided a
‘suitable distance’ between the player and her character, and between the player and the
game world. Rouse claimed that shifting from a first-person to a third-person perspective
changed the player character dynamic from one of ‘performing’ as the character to one of
‘directing’ the actions of a character. Technical implementation issues are certainly also a
factor in determining perspective, as Rouse points out: “certain game designs will cease
to function when viewed from any viewpoint other than the one they were designed to
use”.
In typical first-person shooter games such as Half-Life (Sierra, 1998), the first-person
POV shows the storyworld through the eyes of the player’s avatar – Gordon Freeman.
The only part of the avatar the player is able to see is the weapon the avatar is holding,
and the hand that is holding it. This visual perspective maximises the ludic efficiency of
the game – the player can quickly aim and shoot the weapon. At the same time, however,
this visual decision has a narrative outcome. The limited visual perspective of the first-
person POV has a strong psychological implication – it supports player identification
with character. There is no one else the player can identify with – the player IS Gordon
Freeman – seeing through his eyes while navigating space, avoiding dangers, and blasting
at aliens as they dash head-on towards the player. This is reinforced further within the
game’s enhanced version of the traditional ‘cutscene’. The player retains the ability to
move within space as the scene unfolds, while visual perspective continues to remain
entirely within the first-person POV. The player in effect functions both as a performer
and also as a cinematographer with the freedom to direct visual (and narrative) attention
wherever she sees fit. The enforcement of the first-person POV ensures that the player as
cinematographer/performer is still identified with the character/avatar Gordon Freeman.
The breadth of available perspective designs has changed over the history of
electronic gaming. Prior to the availability of abundant computing power, perspectives in
many video games were limited to the default two-dimensional, third-person omniscient
view of the gamespace. Typical of this era is the one used in many platform games such
as Mega Man (Capcom, 1985) on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console
(Figure 4). Although choice of perspective was certainly limited by the available
technology, this particular POV was ludically efficient, and supported some sense of
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 471

storyworld and narrative immersion. As electronic games have become a more mature
and powerful medium, game designers have borrowed visual techniques proven
successful in other media. Thus we now see a greater variety of visual perspectives in use
in today’s games.
In many games this has come to include the incorporation of user-selected POV. For
a long time the exception to user-driven perspective control was the ‘cutscene’, which
often took advantage of the suspension of ludic play to deliver a visual experience driven
fully by narrative concerns. However; recently, even cutscene perspectives are becoming
malleable. Perhaps the most elegant example of this is the cutscenes in Assassin’s Creed
(Ubisoft, 2007), which allow the player to shift between a number of pre-arranged
camera angles, effectively transforming the player into an editor and director for the
duration of the scene. In all of these variations, the relationship between ludic needs,
selection of visual perspective, and narrative implications is still critical and worthy of
examination.
For a strategy game such as Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (Blizzard, 2003) which uses
a god-view third-person omniscient (and isometric) perspective (Figure 5), the visual
emphasis is on the larger storyworld rather than individual avatars. The greater
visual distance and top-down perspective offers less visual involvement with the
characters, resulting in less emotional identification with individuals. However it offers
other advantages – both ludic and narrative. This view allows a greater degree of strategic
efficiency, reinforces the understanding and the narrative weight of the storyworld writ
large, and generally increases the ‘command-and-control’ agency of the player as a god-
like commander-in-chief of the gameplay and the storyworld.

Figure 4 Screen capture, Mega Man (see online version for colours)

Source: CAPCOM (1987).

472 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

Figure 5 Screen capture, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (see online version for colours)

This perspective also affords a particular narrative relationship between the characters in
the game and the player. In Warcraft III the player is the commander of her armies, but
she is not an invisible presence in the game world. Characters and game units – when
selected or issued commands – verbally acknowledge the presence of the player, even
going so far as to evince irritation if repeatedly interacted with (the canonical example of
this comes from the Orcish ‘peons’, who grumble ‘Why do you keep poking me’ after
several mouse-clicks). This particular relationship plays on the third-person perspective
of the player, reifying her role as a semi-omniscient commander who remains at arm’s
length from the game’s characters at all times.

6 Behavioural mimicking and behavioural metaphors

This pair of strategies is really just two points on a representational continuum. The first,
behavioural mimicking, deals with interactions in which the interactions required of the
player by the game directly and literally mirror their real-world counterparts. The second,
behavioural metaphor, deals with interactions that figuratively ‘stand-in’ for their real-
world counterparts. We describe interactions that can be located on either end of this
continuum, and also consider games in which the interactions are positioned closer to the
middle (e.g. as is the case with some of the interactions in Rock Band).

6.1 Behavioural mimicking

Behavioural mimicking merges the physical understanding of real world activities with
the ‘mechanics’ of the game play (a games ‘mechanics’ are the core activities and
interactions that lead to winning and losing). In this strategy, the physical behaviours of
the player’s gameplay interactions mimic those of real life actions. This takes the player
away from the artificial activities of the desktop computers graphic user interface or the
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 473

generic standard game controller. This class of interactive design can require special
interface hardware, but it has deep roots, going back to joystick controllers for flying
games, or steering wheel controllers for driving games.
Effective application of these principles underlies the pleasure of many arcade games.
Simulation-games such as the arcade skiing or paraglider games allowed the arcade
player the exhilaration of free motion through complete embodied interaction. Some of
the games on the EyeToy controller for the Sony PlayStation successfully used the same
strategy – notably the game Anti-Grav (Harmonix, 2004), which has the player
mimicking the moves of a skateboarder or surfer performing an aerial navigation through
a large three-dimensional storyworld as she races to the finish line.
Behavioural mimicking does not necessarily rely on specialised interface devices
(although special purpose hardware definitely affords opportunities to use this strategy).
It is possible to map gameplay interactions to more conventional interfaces in ways that
narratively mirror the actions occurring in-game. In Bully: Scholarship Edition (Rockstar
Games, 2008) on the Nintendo Wii, the spinning of the tumblers on a combination lock is
mapped to the rotation of the analogue stick on the Wii’s ‘nunchuck’ controller. As the
player rotates through connections, the controller provides a tactile and auditory ‘click’
sensation, neatly simulating the feeling of spinning the dial on a padlock. Similarly, in
God of War II (Sony Computer Entertainment Capcom, 2007), the rotation of the
analogue stick on the Playstation II controller is mapped to revolving cranks, and
turnstiles. By matching the behaviour of the player to the actions on the screen a narrative
bond between the game events and the player’s world is forged.
Höysniemi (2006) states that interactions utilising the mapping of real life actions
have two distinctive features: control realism and feedback realism. Control realism
“refers to how accurately game control simulates the equivalent behaviors in real life”
and feedback realism refers to “how realistic the feedback is that the game provides on
the player’s actions” (Höysniemi, 2006, p.68). A well-designed interface utilising this
design strategy should have high degree of realism on both the control and the feedback
of the interaction. In their examination of embodied and gestural game interface devices
in the game Rock Band (Harmonix, 2007). Tanenbaum and Bizzocchi (2009) describe
several additional facets of this phenomenon, including the relationship between ‘ludic
efficiency’ and the ‘granularity’ of the interface’s temporal and spatial response
capabilities. These observations illustrate issues of mimetic fidelity associated with the
recent explosion of novel game interface devices.
The current success of games with dedicated interfaces, such as Guitar Hero and
Rock Band, in conjunction with the expanding family of games on Nintendo’s Wii
platform, is transforming our expectations for immersive game interface design. These
gestural and embodied interfaces allow the experience of pleasures in three distinct
dimensions: the ludic, the kinesthetic and the narrative (Bizzocchi and Tanenbaum, 2008;
Tanenbaum and Bizzocchi, 2009). The effect on the narrative dimension is to elevate the
experience of character from identification with a screen-based avatar to fully enacting
the character with robust gestural and bodily interactions. In the process, the embodied
creation of character situates the player more actively within the storyworld of the game.
This is a major advance towards Janet Murray’s ‘active creation of belief’, and
contributes to a more complete suturing of any ludic/narrative disconnection.
The behavioural mimicking strategy can be seen as part of a continuum with our next
strategy: behavioural metaphor. The key difference is the degree of fidelity between the
functioning of the interface, and the activity which it represents. The three embodied and
474 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

gestural interface devices in the Rock Band game provide a good illustration of this
continuum and its relationship to narrativised gameplay (Tanenbaum and Bizzocchi,
2009). The Rock Band guitar interface has some narrative connection to playing a real
guitar, but the functional connection is metaphorical. As Arsenault (2008) has discussed,
the guitar controller evokes the playing of a real guitar in broad strokes, but the specifics
of the interaction do not clearly map onto actual guitar playing. It actually is used to
channel and test the timing match of the player with the music stream, not to produce
anything like the richness of a real guitar sound. The Rock Band microphone, on the other
hand, requires an interaction that closely mimics real singing in order to yield ludic
success. This highly literal mapping of voice input to vocal interaction is a design choice
in Rock Band: the microphone could also be mapped along more metaphorical lines, such
as mapping the pitch of the voice to the altitude of an aircraft in a flight simulator. This
mimicry-metaphor continuum can be seen as an axis of literal to abstract in its
representation of real-world behaviour. The mimicking behaviour of the microphone is a
more literal translation of the real, while the metaphorical connection of the guitar is
a more abstracted translation of the real. In this regard, Rock Band’s drum controller lies
in between the other two devices: more literal (mimicking) than the guitar, but more
metaphorical (abstract) than the microphone. All three, however are more literal than the
highly abstract standard game controller, and their embodied and highly representational
play provides players with stronger connections to the characters and the storyworld of
the rock and roll performer (Figure 6).

6.2 Behavioural metaphor

An interface can suggest a connection to real-world behaviour rather than completely
mimic it. This creates a metaphor rather than an identity with existing behavioural
patterns, and is a well-understood strategy for the effective design of interface. Lakoff
and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By (1980) provides the foundation for much of
the HCI literature around metaphor and interface mapping, by proposing metaphor as a
central component of how humans structure their understanding of the world. In 1990,
Thomas Erickson described how Apple Computers used interface-metaphors to increase
the usability of the desktop computing environment (Erickson, 1990). This strategy
underlies the standard GUI interface for most contemporary personal computing – the
desktop, with its files, folders and trash can. A well-designed metaphor can make for an
interface that is easy to learn and functional. More recently, Barr et al. (2004) have
developed a semiotic approach to interface metaphor that frames metaphor as a
mechanism for signifying a range of possible designed meanings. In the context of our
argument, a metaphorical interface can also be expressive and impart character and
storyworld more effectively.
Our previous example of the cursor-as-hand in Black and White (Lionhead, 2001) is a
good illustration of the narrative expressivity of a behavioural metaphor. We noted that
the hand is a representation of the god character the player assumes, and the ‘grabbing’
and pulling of the horizon is a god-like method of changing location. Note carefully the
incorporation of an accompanying shadow of the hand in Figure 7. This shadow
reinforces the fact that this is not an abstract and narratively neutral interface icon, but is
rather a dynamic representation of player character that is fully integrated within the
game’s storyworld.
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 475

Figure 6 Metaphorical and literal interface narrativisation in Rock Band (see online version
for colours)

Figure 7 Screen capture, Black and White (see online version for colours)

The designers skilfully extended this functional metaphor directly into the game’s
navigation. In many other similar games, player clicks on a location in the storyworld
where they want to move, and the game perspective then migrates towards the selected
direction. However in Black and White the players do not ‘click-and-float’, but extend the
hand cursor towards the horizon and then pull the horizon, dragging the intended location
to the player. Not only does the dragging action of the hand-cursor efficiently change
player perspective by this dragging of the landscape, but also it dramatically and
effectively reinforces player character. In this game the player is a god-like figure,
and the dragging of the landscape makes that narrative connection clear and palpable.

7 ‘Bridging’ and mixed-reality interfaces

The last strategy is on the border of electronic gaming, and bridges that domain with the
real world. One could choose to see this as an extension of behavioural mimicking to
include the broader world in which we live. The critical difference is that in these
‘bridging’ or ‘mixed-reality’ interface strategies, the ‘magic circle’ of the game is
explicitly made porous. In these games, the real world becomes in some ways a part of
the game interface as well. The games that most explicitly commit to extending the magic
circle to include the real world are sometimes called ‘Alternative Reality Games’. The
most complete example is perhaps the game Majestic (Electronic Arts, 2001). This
476 J. Bizzocchi, M.A. Ben Lin and J. Tanenbaum

conspiracy game involved the interventions of a shadow government, and the gameplay
bridged into the player’s real world life. Its motto was ‘it plays you’, and the gameplay
channels included telephone calls, e-mail messages, AOL Instant Messenger, fax
messages and visits to special websites. The game suffered from the unfortunate
combination of subject matter, intrusion into the player’s real world and the
overwhelming cultural reaction to the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
There have been a number of similar alternative-reality games or ‘game-like’
experiences, including The Beast, a mixed-reality murder-mystery that involved a
combination of voicemail messages, websites, e-mail messages, faxes and fake ads. The
Beast was in fact a marketing device for the Spielberg movie Artificial Intelligence.
These and other alternative-reality games extend the game-interface and game narrative
into real-world media channels.
There are a number of other games or game-like activities which situate the game
environment and interface at least partially in the real world, and in the process blur the
boundary between the virtual and the real. The Tamagotchi toys inhabit one end of this
spectrum – self-contained electronic toys where the interface becomes a form of a real-
world pet we carry around with us in our daily lives. At the other end of the spectrum,
games like ‘geo-caching’ use the electronic interface as a path to the real world gameplay
and ultimate prize.
A subtler example of this bridging strategy can be found in the game BokTai: The Sun
Is In Your Hand (Konami, 2003) developed for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance (GBA)
portable console. This game is very much like other role-playing games where the player
assumes the role of the main character and goes through a series of dungeons, fight
bosses, and level-ups of traits and weapons in order to follow the gameplay and the
storyline. What makes Boktai special is a unique device built onto the game cartridge – a
‘solar sensor’ which measures the amount of sunlight. The main player’s character,
Django, must attack vampire enemies using a gun that shoots sunlight. In order to
recharge the gun, the game system requires the cartridge to be exposed to real sunlight.
When there is strong sunlight, the gun charges quickly and effectively. If sunlight is
insufficient, the player has limited power, and must change her strategy from fighting
enemies to hiding and avoiding contact.
Another bridging feature of Boktai is the synchronisation of the time in the game to
real world time. When the player first plays the game, it asks her for the current time in
the real world. It then sets the games storyworld time to real world time. Events in the
game storyworld then correspond to real world time: game birds chirp in the morning,
the direction of the sun changes as the day passes, and the game world dims at the same
time as the real world. Other game events are affected by the time of the real world; e.g.
game puddles dry more quickly during the sunlight hours. Thus the real world is
extended into the Boktai game and interface.
Prior to this, Animal Crossing (Nintendo, 2001), used a ‘real-time’ awareness of the
date and time to trigger in-game holidays and events that corresponded to the real-life
calendar. It also included an unusual ‘travelling’ feature in which player characters could
take ‘trips’ on physical memory cards between game villages, ‘boarding’ the card via an
in-game porter in order to be transported to locations on other player’s consoles. More
recently, Little Big Planet (Media Molecule, 2008) uses the camera add-on for the PS3 to
allow players to create custom in-game ‘stickers’ by taking pictures of themselves. This
bridging strategy maps the player’s face, body and surroundings back into the game
world. In Little Big Planet one of the central features is the ability to create custom
 Games, narrative and the design of interface 477

content and environments: the core narrative of the world is one of personalisation and
customisation. Players are encouraged to modify the world, and to invent and share new
levels. By incorporating the world of the player back into the game world, the camera
reinforces this narrative of creation.
In the above examples, whether they are labelled ‘bridged’ interfaces, ‘alternative-
reality’ games or ‘mixed-reality’ games, the boundaries of ludic play, narrative play and
reality become blurred. Story and gameplay, the electronic and the real, interface and
existence – all become mixed and intertwined.

8 Conclusion

Cinema dominated the media culture of the 20th century through its ability to present
powerful and engaging narratives. Cinema relied on its ability to support ‘suspension of
disbelief’ and immersive commitment to the film’s storyworld. Electronic games are
challenging that hegemony, relying on challenge and flow to build engagement and
immersion of a different order. At the same time, we are learning to add the pleasures of
story to the pleasures of gameplay. As the interactive medium has matured, its ability to
add narrative depth to ludic engagement has steadily increased. However, for game story
to reach its fullest potential, creators, artists and scholars will need to understand and
further develop game narrative across a variety of dimensions: game characters,
storyworlds and plots.
A critical direction for this development is the incorporation of narrative themes and
sensibilities at the focus of interactive gameplay – the game’s interface. This focus has
the advantage of adding a narrative dimension to the heart of the ludic experience.
We have identified four strategies used by game developers for achieving that end. We
believe that ongoing creative work utilising these strategies will result in even stronger
instantiation and support of narrative within game interfaces of the future. This progress
will synergise with the development of other advances in game narrative: believable
characters, more robust and immersive game storyworlds, more responsive development
of plot, increased micronarrative coherence, more effective presentation and elicitation of
narrative emotion. In conjunction with these parallel developments, the narrativised
interface will create a more robust narrative experience, and in the process help to make
future gameplay even more engaging and rewarding to a broader audience.

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