The “Meaning-maker’s space” is a path that winds toward a new narrative system that corresponds with players and the dynamic behavior of games. As part of the “Putting into play” series, it leads the way toward designing engaging and motivating experiences based on how our thoughts, learning, and emotions interact.
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“Putting into play” is a series that aims to shed light on how to design engaging and motivating game experiences by exploring the interplay between our thinking, learning, and emotions. In the final three parts of the series, covering cognitive aspects of narrative game design, I will fulfil a promise to show how you think when setting the core pillars intended to engage players’ thoughts and feelings.
“Putting into play” is part of a project whose goal is to offer a hands-on approach to the design of an engaging and dynamic game system from a narrative and cognitive perspective. The series illuminates how our thinking, learning, and emotions interplay when the designer proceeds from scratch to reach the desired goal of a meaningful and motivating experience.
Before initiating the hands-on process of organizing thoughts and feelings at the start of the design process, I will explain the dynamic forces behind your prime tool as a narrative constructor. The tool is more of an advantage derived from the rapid pace by how our mind is processing information that you employ in the same manner as a magician engages the receiver’s perception, attention, and awareness.
Continuation of Part 2, Putting into play
Realizing that our restraint to embrace the cognition-based method, Narrative bridging (Boman, Gyllenbäck, 2010) was a matter of control due to the lack of a clear description of how our mind works, and where the familiar story structures and templates constituted a safety. The thorny issue I faced was how to make people aware of their thinking as to access our core cognitive activities. If you have tried talking to people about their thinking and how it works, you will then also know that it is the trickiest thing one can do. If not handled with care, people will, at the most, become aware of you by comparing your thinking with theirs: opinion and meaning-wise. The awareness I am talking about isn’t about being smart or skilled. Instead, it is a matter of being conscious of the mind as a way to become conscious of how emotions, attention, desires, beliefs, and intentions relate to our causal thinking and understanding.
The series Putting into play is part of a more than a one-year-long project which began when I received a request from readers. They had noticed how the cognition-based method Narrative bridging (Boman, Gyllenbäck, 2010) provided an overlook and control of the organization and arrangement of the information (also known as plotting) in the design of an engaging and dynamic game system. Since it is one thing to show how narration and cognition interplay as systems in a game that already exists of which the outcome can be evaluated, but quite another to start from nothing when putting thoughts and feelings into play. When readers expressed curiosity in learning how to use the method from absolute scratch in a hands-on tutorial, a ten-year-old conundrum reemerged concerning the minds-on part of the process.
On request, the text provides a short guide to the 7- grade model of causal cognition that was mentioned in the series “Narrative bridging on testing an experience” (links to the series can be found at the end of the text), and where the framework for the model can be found in the publication: “Tracking the evolution of causal cognition in humans” (2017), written by Marlize Lombard, professor in Stone Age archaeology, and Peter Gärdenfors, professor in cognitive science at Lund´s University (see reference and link to the publication at the end).
As the series is about how to ensure the quality of an experience from a narrative perspective beyond structures and templates, there are two recent structures that I haven´t mentioned yet that we will have to pass on to access the narrative from a cognitive perspective.
I wonder if you remember the feeling that slowly came over you when you wrote what would become your last letter to Santa? If you have never written to Santa or, you are still writing, maybe you have the experience of buying a lottery ticket and is thus able to recognise the feeling of doubt when questioning your beliefs, intentions, and desires, as to why you are putting hopes into something you know won’t correspond to your desires? The feeling I´m trying to describe is the same I have every time I return to science in matters that concern the narrative, which is complicated, to say the least. So in January, I decided to settle the relationship, with the same confidence I had when writing my last letter to Santa I wrote my last words to science in my text “Are you a man or a mouse.”
KATARINA GYLLENBÄCK NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION 
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