Interactive Narrative Design - Week 3
06/10/2025 - /10/2025 / Week 3
ChenYuhan / 0378131
Interactive Narrative Design/ Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylors University
Week 3
ChenYuhan / 0378131
Interactive Narrative Design/ Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylors University
Week 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INSTRUCTIONS
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LECTURES
Character → Who do we follow? What are their motivations and flaws?
Setting → Where and when does this take place?
Conflict → What drives the tension? What obstacle must be overcome?
Plot → How do events unfold?
Theme → What is the message? Why does it matter?
What Makes a Good Narrative System:
All five elements—character, setting, conflict, plot, and theme—work together as one emotional system.
Every action or discovery reinforces the story's central emotion or idea.
The player isn't just watching the story—they are performing it through their choices and exploration.
Meaning emerges when the world, story, and player experience all align.
What Makes a Good Character:
Clear goal and motivation.
Believable flaws and change over time.
Player can empathize or identify through play.
Prompt: What will players learn about your character through what they do?
Developing Effective Settings:
Visually and emotionally matches tone.
Rewards curiosity (environmental storytelling).
Feels alive—changes with story or player action.
Creating Effective Conflict:
Stakes are clear — failure means something.
Challenge grows with tension.
Choices reflect moral or emotional struggle.
There is consequence to choices and actions
Crafting an Engaging Plot:
Clear goal and rising challenge.
Key decision points - choices with consequence
Emotional pacing — quiet and intense moments.
Player decisions drive the plot; not the other way round
Creating an Effective Theme:
Universally relatable (freedom, loss, love, control).
Shown through gameplay, not told through dialogue.
Consistent with tone, art, and ending.
WEEK 3
In this class, we learned the five elements of narrative (character, setting, conflict, plot, theme) and introduced them through a simple animated video. (The story tells about the redemption between a disabled child and a disabled puppy)
After watching another video, we performed the following exercise.
1. Character
• Motivation:
◦ Small Robot: Its core motivation is to collect emeralds, but during conflict, this motivation shifts to greed (a desire to monopolize the extra gems).
◦ Large Robot: Its core motivation is to obtain gems. During conflict, its motivation is to uphold what it considers fair, and to achieve this through force (hunting down).
• How Actions Reveal Character: The small robot's final "counterattack" demonstrates its resourcefulness, but its subsequent "shutdown" exposes its fatal flaw—its short-sightedness. The large robot's shift from "cooperation" to "hunting down" directly demonstrates its belief in the simplistic logic of "might rules."
2. Setting
• Setting: A world where emeralds must be extracted from stones. This environment inherently requires a combination of "detection" and "disassembly," naturally fostering cooperation.
• How the Environment Reflects Emotion or Theme: This resource-scarce environment symbolizes any real-world situation that requires collaboration for survival and development. The harshness of the environment highlights the fragility and preciousness of cooperative relationships.
3. Conflict
• Type of Conflict: A conflict between characters (small robot and large robot), essentially an internal conflict (greed versus survival).
• Cause of Conflict: The immediate cause is a resource allocation issue (how to distribute an extra gem). The underlying cause is the breakdown of the cooperative agreement and the imbalance of power.
• Resolution: The conflict is resolved tragically and devastatingly. Through violence and counterattacks, both sides perish.
4. Plot
• Exposition: The small robot excels at detection, while the large robot excels at disassembly. The two begin to cooperate.
• Rising Action: The cooperation is successful, the gem is evenly distributed, and a balance is established.
• Climax: An extra gem becomes available, and the small robot attempts to seize it, leading to the large robot's pursuit. This is a crucial turning point that determines the direction of the story and the fate of the characters.
• Falling Action: The small robot successfully counterattacks and kills the large robot.
• Denouement/Resolution: The robot shuts down due to a loss of energy supply. This ending is the story's emotional turning point, a sudden descent from apparent triumph into profound despair.
5. Theme
• The story's message or truth: The core theme is that "in relationships, greed and short-sightedness lead to mutual destruction." It serves as a warning that true wisdom lies in maintaining the long-term health of a system, not in striving for short-term gain.
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