Chapter 20 — Further Reading

A curated list for going deeper into game narrative theory and practice. Organized by kind: essays, books, and long-form video talks. Pick one from each category and you will meaningfully advance your understanding.

The Essays That Built the Vocabulary

Clint Hocking, "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock" (2007). The post that named the problem, written on Hocking's blog Click Nothing. Short, direct, and still the clearest articulation of the concept. Several preserved versions circulate online; search for the original or archived copy on Internet Archive. If you read only one thing from this list, read this.

Clint Hocking, "Ludonarrative Dissonance Revisited" and subsequent essays. Hocking returned to the concept multiple times across the years, refining and complicating it. These follow-ups are valuable for seeing how the idea matured.

Jesper Juul, "Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives" (2001). The "ludology vs. narratology" debate — whether games are primarily systems or primarily stories — dominated early game studies. Juul's note is a canonical entry point. The debate is no longer active in the form it took in 2001, but the vocabulary it produced still shapes how we talk about games.

Henry Jenkins, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" (2004). Introduces the idea that levels themselves are narrative spaces — an idea Chapter 22 of this textbook expands on considerably. Jenkins's essay is widely anthologized and is a foundational reference for environmental storytelling.

Ian Bogost, "Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism" (2006). Influential in framing games as systems of procedural meaning. Bogost's later work Persuasive Games extends the argument.

Books on Narrative Design Practice

Richard Dansky, Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames (2nd ed., 2017). A professional craft-focused volume covering dialogue, structure, branching, and production realities. Practical rather than theoretical. Many contributors — useful for seeing multiple practitioner voices.

Evan Skolnick, Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know About Narrative Techniques. Short, accessible, covers the fundamentals for designers who have not come from writing backgrounds. Good for handing to a programmer-designer or producer to create common vocabulary.

Wendy Despain (ed.), 100 Principles of Game Design (2013). Broader than narrative but contains several essential chapters on story structure, agency, and pacing. Despain has also written and edited other volumes specifically on game writing.

Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark, A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design. Short, dense, and unusually clear on the relationship between mechanics and meaning. The section on "authored" vs. "expressive" systems complements Chapter 20's embedded/emergent distinction.

Jeremy Heaton's writing and talks on narrative systems. Heaton has written extensively on AI storytellers, procedural narrative, and systemic design. Search for his GDC talks and writing; he is one of the most practically grounded voices on emergent narrative.

Emily Short, Writing IF. Emily Short is perhaps the most important writer-designer working in interactive fiction. Her blog is a decades-long archive of practical thinking about choice architecture, NPC simulation, and the craft of branching narrative. Start anywhere; keep reading.

On the Specific Games in This Chapter

The Last of Us. The documentary Grounded: The Making of The Last of Us (on the PS3 disc and now available in various archived forms) is essential. Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley on the development process. Halley Gross's later work on Part II extends the creative direction.

Disco Elysium. Robert Kurvitz and the ZA/UM team have given numerous interviews — the developer commentary on the Final Cut, and various long-form interviews (Noclip's documentary on the game is a good starting point). Kurvitz's novel Sacred and Terrible Air (Estonian, partial English translations available) is set in the same world and provides significant backstory.

Uncharted / Naughty Dog. Amy Hennig's talks on writing for games, available on GDC Vault, are valuable both for her craft insights and for the contrast with her later work at Skydance New Media. Her talks on "The Writer's Room" and on adaptive storytelling are particularly useful.

Dwarf Fortress. Tarn and Zach Adams's interviews, especially longer-form ones (the Noclip documentary is the best entry point). Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress by Peter Tyson is the most accessible manual for the game itself. The "Boatmurdered" succession game is available online and remains one of the most legendary emergent narrative artifacts in the medium.

RimWorld. Tynan Sylvester's Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences is a compact, excellent book on design philosophy, written by the creator of RimWorld. Read for his approach to systemic storytelling.

Crusader Kings III. Paradox's development diaries and the community's story transcripts (easily found on the game's subreddit and official forums) are a remarkable corpus of emergent narrative. Read a dozen story transcripts to see what the system can produce.

Talks Worth an Hour

Sam Lake, "The Writer's Journey" and various Remedy talks. On writing for games from the perspective of someone who has consistently wrestled with their interaction.

Greg Kasavin (Supergiant) on writing for Hades and Supergiant's games. Essential on how to build repeated dialogue systems that remain emotionally resonant over hundreds of encounters.

Ken Levine, "Narrative Legos." Levine's post-BioShock explorations of modular, re-combinable narrative systems. Whether or not the approach panned out commercially, the thinking is instructive.

Any Jason Rohrer talk on games and meaning. Rohrer's short indie games (Passage, Gravitation, Sleep Is Death) and his talks about them remain among the most precise short statements about what narrative in games can be.

Amy Hennig, various GDC talks. Especially her talks on collaborative writing in AAA production and on the tension between cinematic ambition and interactive reality.

Academic / Scholarly

If you have access to academic journals, the journals Game Studies, Games and Culture, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds publish ongoing work on narrative in games. The MIT Press "Playful Thinking" series has produced a number of short, accessible books — How Pac-Man Eats by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Making Games by Stefan Werning among them — that intersect narrative concerns.

Play These

More important than any reading: play games with narrative ambition, across the embedded/emergent spectrum. The chapter named many. Beyond those, specific games that will repay close attention:

• Kentucky Route Zero — the art game of the decade on what narrative in games can be.
• Planescape: Torment — the ancestor of Disco Elysium, still unmatched in certain dimensions.
• Outer Wilds — narrative through discovery, the closest thing to a true "knowledge as progression" game.
• Return of the Obra Dinn — deduction as a narrative mechanic, mechanically pure.
• Her Story — full-motion-video detective work, narrative as search.
• Undertale — agency taken seriously in an aesthetically modest package.
• NieR: Automata — metafiction and narrative structure as mechanic.
• Firewatch — walking, talking, and the shape of a summer.
• Citizen Sleeper — RPG system as narrative system, a spiritual descendant of Disco Elysium on a smaller scale.

Play at least one you have not played. Play it slowly. Take notes.

The next chapter will focus on dialogue and character. Before moving to it, return to your one-page story arc from the progressive project and revise it in light of anything you have absorbed from this reading list.