Evocative, Enacted, Embedded & Emergent: Narrative Architectures for Immersive Storytelling
An expansion of Henry Jenkins’ framework as a toolkit for experience design
“[D]esigners don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces.”
— Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” 2004
In an interview last year with two immersive creators, I asked them to make a hard choice: if given only one aspect of immersive design: would they pick “world-building” or “narrative”? Of course, ignoring one is often at the detriment of the other. Most of the time world-building and narrative are intrinsically linked; creators find it is difficult for one to exist without the other or even to think of one in isolation. But given that immersive design is a second-order problem, and we think of making immersive theatre as creating “a play that you can ‘play,’” how can immersive designers create the best conditions for a satisfying narrative to emerge? What tools do they have to even try balancing authorial control with player interactivity, two aspects of design that often feel at odds with one another?
In The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution (1997), Celia Pearce first coined the term “narrative architecture”; in her book, Pearce argues that architects, either knowingly or not, create “nonlinear experiences with variable paths or outcomes,” just like interactive designers. These such architects are also creating stories. And in the later essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” (2004), Henry Jenkins discusses how the design of a game itself facilitates different kinds of narrative experiences.
To view game designers less as “storytellers” and more as “narrative architects,” is a perspective that immersive designers may find compelling although somewhat off-putting, particularly if their background lies more within the traditional confines of film, television, or theatre. Can an immersive designer even be a “storyteller,” per se, if all experience is created indirectly? What does it mean to “architect” a narrative space?
Jenkins goes on to describe four specific models for interactive narrative, as they apply to the creation of games:
• The evocative
• The enacted
• The embedded
• The emergent
Those well versed in game design may also point out that this universe of four different models is a longer list than the typical “emergent narrative versus embedded narrative” debate which is commonplace among game scholars. I find Jenkins’ more inclusive list to be increasingly relevant as virtual reality and themed entertainment are incorporated into the discussion around immersive art & entertainment. (More on this below.)
While these four perspectives were originally intended to apply to games and came about during an argument within the academic gaming community about the role narrative should even play within games, I also find these lenses to be useful for the evaluation of immersive experience design with regards to storytelling. Unsurprisingly, we can find examples of all four of these methods to be found within existing immersive experiences.
E is for ‘Evocative’
Firstly, the evocative type of narrative architecture primarily refers to narratives that reference existing stories in other forms of media, particularly those which already feel familiar to a specific audience through the use of known genres (most commonly sci-fi and fantasy) or pre-existing intellectual property. These worlds “draw upon our previously existing narrative competencies,” says Jenkins, and are comparable to “amusement park attractions [which] build upon stories or genre traditions already well known to visitors.” This method of evocation is something that the main “lands” found at Disneyland do very well: Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and Frontierland.
Usage of an evocative space is also obvious in experiences like haunted houses, immersive marketing pop-ups during gatherings like SXSW or Comic-Con, and even the large-scale movie-inspired events put on by Secret Cinema. After all, the most buzzed about things in the immersive world for a few years now have been recreations of environments from hit TV shows like Stranger Things, Game of Thrones or Westworld. But this can also backfire as audience members during the SXSW Westworld pop-up took the rich, detailed environment as a cue to go digging around, literally, for clues and puzzles to solve, which was not the designers’ original intent from what I can tell.
Also relevant to this discussion is recent work being showcased at location-based entertainment VR centers such as The VOID, where participants get dropped inside world-famous IP. For Star Wars, The VOID’s experience takes place in a pre-Rogue One world. For Avengers, The VOID drops you into Wakanda, post-Endgame. The use of existing intellectual assets primes the audience to expect specific kinds of events during the experience; participants also get parachuted into a specific location and place within a known universe. If you’ve seen either movie or have a passing familiarity with these universes, well, then prospective players have a good idea what to expect next without a more explicit onboarding process.
And perhaps the enduring popularity films like Tron and Blade Runner as eye candy are to blame the preponderance of virtual reality experiences that reference darkened infinite landscapes, blueprint-like grids, and heavy usage of neon. Selfie factories all seem to rely on a series of shared tropes as well, most commonly the infamous “pool of things” at the end of the experience, be it the sprinkle pool at the Museum of Ice Cream or the marshmallow pit at Candytopia, or any number of “thing” pits around the country.
The escape room world also leans heavily upon evoking themes that we as consumers of media know well from film and TV: prison breaks, murder basements, museum heists, or science labs, just to name a few.
Author and puzzle/narrative designer Laura E. Hall has also touched upon the use of the evocative elements to drive narrative, describing how immersive designers can evoke emotion by relying upon archetypes of form in order to “tell stories without saying anything out loud.” By drawing upon the look and feel of office spaces both in films like Brazil and The Lives of Others, as well as real-life Stasi prison offices, she and her team were able to convey a specific yet familiar tone in the design of an office space in their escape room, Spark of Resistance, though incorporation of elements like sparse furnishings, propaganda posters, duct pipes, and banks of old 1980s technology to evoke a sense of otherworldliness and distance in time. Usage of these archetypes of form allows designers to communicate without explicitly stating these themes to players.
E is for ‘Enacted’
The physical act of “performing” an enacted narrative event when it comes to video games has nearly always been through indirect means, up until now. Players had to fumble their way through dialog trees by way of clunky controllers or figure out precisely which button to press at a particular point during a game.
But these days, with advances in AR/VR such as the popularization of wireless headsets for the home, like the Oculus Quest, and tracking technologies, participants can now directly enact narrative events.
In the episodic virtual reality experience Vader Immortal by ILMxLAB, players can pick up a lightsaber and swing their arms in combat, as if they were indeed a Jedi, as well as pull levers, climb ladders, and more as they traverse the virtual game space. The story progresses as they complete these specific actions, solving lightweight puzzles along the way. In Vader Immortal, in particular, it really does feel as if the player is in a galaxy far, far away and as the participant progresses, they begin to build a mental inventory of the types of interactions available to them in the world.
Wolves in the Walls has a similar effect, as participants hold a glass jar up to a wall to listen to conversation, pull and hold a door shut behind them, crawl under a table, or use a piece of chalk to virtually “draw” with Lucy. Other VR experiences would do well to emulate how the design of these VR experiences focuses on the “verbs” of the world and less so the “nouns.” This type of narrative design can not only serve to deepen the storyworld but also center the participants’ presence within the embodied experience. Participants can now find themselves directly enacting the narrative and moving the story forward using their own bodies. Recent scholarly discourse such as the proposal of an “embodied narrativity framework” (ENF) by Yotam Shibolet (2019, PDF) similarly tie together both the enacted and the embodied modalities. Shibolet posits that the most direct application of the ENF will be virtual reality experiences which can “capture real-time gestures and meaningfully represent and/or process them.” Works like Vader Immortal do just this, and more.
Jenkins also ties together the notion of micronarratives and enacted narratives, drawing upon Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin for inspiration. The individual scenes within the Potemkin may not appear to be directly related, but they work together and accumulate over time to produce a “profound emotional impact.” Despite not having a top-down, macro-level plot, the viewer still has a strong emotional reaction to viewing the film. Other scholars would seem to agree with this reading, as in “The Role of Micronarrative in the Design and Experience of Digital Games” by Bizzocchi, Nixon, DiPaola, and Funk (2013), where they argue that micronarratives incrementally create a higher-order meaning in the recipient’s mind and that the most effective micronarratives are are ones with these properties: they can be nested, they are encounterable in any order, and they can stack upon one another to build up to a bigger meaning.
So in an immersive experience like Then She Fell, looking at the ways that characters engage with participants, I see these scenes working in a quite similar fashion. Take dictation. Pick the type of tea. Listen while I tell you a story. Answer my questions about love. Paint these roses. Peer into the looking glass. These discrete scenes both shape the player’s emotional experience and have a profound emotional impact, without necessitating a traditional, linear plot trajectory that is unveiled over the course of the entire experience.
So rather than a list of four previous E’s: evocative, enacted, embedded, and emergent, perhaps we should now expand the second? I propose “embodied” narrative as a better term moving forward if we’re talking about immersive art & entertainment. We can now move from a “enacted” narrative which may be performed (or merely witnessed, per Jenkins’ definition) to an embodied narrative which encompasses the enacted and adds an additional layer of presence. I suspect we will continue to see more and more pieces in this vein, where story is not only enacted and but also embodied, as the crossover between virtual reality and immersive theatre continues to deepen. In the past year, we’ve already seen experiences like The Under Presents and Wolves in the Walls, where participants can essentially “live out” narratives in real-time in the virtually designed space.
E is for ‘Embedded’
Immersive designers have often relied upon the “embedded” narrative to communicate story beats, a technique is easy to identify in pieces like Myst, Gone Home, Firewatch, and their ilk. Many of these narratively driven games (aka the so-called “walking simulator” genre) rely upon participants exploring a designed environment, uncovering texts as they go. Similarly, Scout Expedition Company’s The Nest was driven by a love of these narrative video games.
The Nest was inspired by a love of “snooping through people’s personal stuff,” note the creators, as well as insights around how ordinary objects can be imbued with weighty, significant memories. Many immersive shows rely upon collections of ephemera to populate a world and give it more depth. I personally have rifled through many characters’ personal belongings, be it patient files in the doctor’s office of Kingsland Ward; scribbled notes in the detective agency within Sleep No More; the diary entries of Lex Pastore at the House of Eternal Return; or the notes and incomplete writings of J.M. Barrie as he struggled to finish Peter Pan. And there’s a reason why homes and offices figure so prominently within this genre: they can form a logical container that’s both familiar enough to encourage exploration and big enough to justify all of these mundane yet important artifacts being placed within the experience.
The Nest plays out primarily in this “embedded narrative” genre. The production is an intimate, structured experience for one or two people at a time, with a single path forward, gated by very lightweight tasks. While the show has elements in common with escape rooms, to even call the tasks within The Nest “puzzles” seems inaccurate as the difficulty level is purposefully kept low and all players reach the end of the experience. Participants discover fragments of the main character’s memories by finding and playing audio cassettes left behind by the deceased, Josie. The story is literally scattered throughout the space: left in desk drawers, old lockers, locked suitcases; players discover and assemble information scattered throughout the space with some surprises along the way. There are clever sound and lighting cues and even verbal hints given via rotary telephone, if they get stuck. The order with which the participants find these tapes and the specific tapes that they find during The Nest can also alter their perceptions of the events which are recounted on these audio recordings, mentally reconstructing the plot of Josie’s life as they see fit.
E is for ‘Emergent’
Lastly, I want to examine the final item from Jenkins’ list: the “emergent” narrative. The classic example here is The Sims, a simulation game where the player creates virtual people called “Sims” and places them in homes, to live out their lives, not necessarily with a specific goal or win-state in mind.
“Emergent narratives are not pre-structured or pre-programmed,” says Jenkins, “taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself…. Will Wright frequently describes The Sims as a sandbox or dollhouse game, suggesting that it should be understood as a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories….”
This type of design can be found in the immersive world through a highly participatory experience like Chaos Theory, which relies heavily upon audience response to specific prompts throughout the course of the evening, or The Bunker, which relies upon procedurally generated narrative to determine one of a multitude of different possible endings.
Or perhaps better suited is an anecdote from one of NoPro’s LA writers, KJ Knies, and his partner Sara Beil, who detail a summer day spent at the Ghost Town Alive experience at Knott’s Berry Farm: they and a group of friends entered an immersive environment — the fictional town of Calico — filled with actors and decided to upend the scripted plot by setting up a bachelor competition for Calico’s school teacher in order to find her a date for that night’s dance, somehow talking their way into adding an announcement for the contest to the town newspaper and getting the actors to show up at a particular location outside their pre-set schedules. Throughout the course of the day, Knies and his friends derailed the show enough and enticed the actors to lean into the emergent storylines so much so that they soon found themselves being tailed by stage management.
This sort of emergent activity mirrors what we can find if we examine Nordic LARP, particularly any one of a number of LARPs where the participants come together to create an ending, one which is not predetermined and co-created between the players. In “Role-Play, Improvisation, and Emergent Authorship,” Northeastern professor Celia Pearce describes one such LARP:
A group of about a dozen people are “coming to” in the living room of a small apartment, awaking in a blurry and hung-over state after a night of reveling. Following an audition at a prestigious theater academy, the otherwise competitive crew decided to throw a spontaneous party at the flat of one of their members. As they begin to compare notes and piece together the events of the night before, conflicts emerge, indiscretions are revealed, and they struggle to find an explanation for the mysterious disappearance of their host.
Which of the following does the above scenario describe (circle one)? (1) A real-life situation, (2) the opening scene from a movie, (3) a stage play, (4) an improvised performance, (5) a game.
If you answered 5, you were correct. The epigraph that begins the chapter describes the opening moments of a game, specifically a genre of game known as a live action role-playing game (or larp) titled Prayers on a Porcelain Altar, or more colloquially, The Hangover Larp.
Pearce concludes, “in this new paradigm, the craft of interactive narrative becomes the art of world-building and system-creation, to develop contexts for narrative to arise emergently through group interaction.”
To sum up, our four forms of narrative architecture, now applied to immersive art and entertainment, now become:
- The evocative (SXSWestworld)
- The enacted and embodied (Then She Fell, Vader Immoral, Wolves in the Walls)
- The embedded (The Nest)
- The emergent (The Hangover LARP)
So it would seem, if we apply Jenkins’ narrative architecture framework — one that was originally intended to bridge the gap between mechanics-focused and narrative-focused game scholars — to immersive design, we find quite a neat set of parallels between immersive, experiential design and game design. That said, is one necessarily better than another? Is there a specific type of narrative architecture that is most relevant to the immersive designer? What’s an immersive designer to do?
I should note that these four architectures are not mutually exclusive nor are they necessarily in conflict with one another; experience designers may mix and match them as they wish and should mix and match them as they wish. I prefer to think of these four modes not as a series of quadrants on a set of x- and y-axes nor as spread out on single spectrum, but rather individual tools at the designer’s disposal.
Let us experience these four architecture types in all their possible permutations. Perhaps immersive designers play too much in the sandboxes of the evocative space and embedded narrative without asking how else we can bring stories to life. Perhaps we can make more real-life spaces filled with embedded artifacts that can whisk us to another universe. Or create more evocative spaces that can spark emergent narrative through roleplaying with player collaborations happening in public. Or design virtual reality experiences that allow participants to move from storytelling to story-living and story-doing. Conceive of these types of narrative architectures as tracks on the immersive mixing board, if you will, to your immersive symphony. Imagine now a vast console of tracks, which allows makers to turn various “instruments” up and down as needed for a particular project or idea. This board is as wide as possible — one that extends far into the distance; and, I now implore you, to go forth and make beautiful music.
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