“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.
Many of the things I will say I’ve said before, but in different versions. However, I wouldn’t bring up the conventions regarding the sharp line between the narrative and the game if it weren’t due to a recent patenting of an engaging game pattern. So hang in there as I intend to clarify a few things concerning game creators’ freedom within entertainment to explore and express themselves as meaning-makers to engage and motivate others. All links are collected at the end of the post.
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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.”
Have you ever wondered how surprises relate to our emotions beyond physical reactions and the horror genre? Would you like to know how a narrative constructor thinks in the creation of curiosity, surprises and suspense and how the cognitive vehicle of narrative works?
How the game industry understood narrative, wasn’t really a big issue (the problems should be found somewhere else). As I always worked within entertainment, I never thought of a narrative from any other perspective than to deliver a feeling of something worth spending time on and where the goal was to give something people didn’t know they were missing. Continue reading
KATARINAGYLLENBÄCK 
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