Jenkins, Henry
Game Design as Narrative Architecture
2004

121
“I want to introduce an important third term into this discussion – spatiality – and argue for an understanding of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects.”

122f
Definition “environmental storytelling”: see Carson, D ~ Environmental Storytelling. I think Jenkins calls this “embedded storytelling”, p128?

124
“Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia storytelling, one that depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy.”
“One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each a relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels. In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.”
“Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories that respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development.”

125
“Eisenstein used the word “attractions” broadly to describe any element within a work that produces a profound emotional impact, and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicated across and through these discrete elements.” Jenkins calls these elements “micronarratives”. A story can consist of story chunks that consumers put together themselves in their own minds.

126
“As inexperienced storytellers, [game designers] often fall back on rather mechanical exposition through cut scenes, much as early filmmakers were sometimes overly reliant on intertitles rather than learning the skills of visual storytelling. Yet, as with any other aesthetic tradition, game designers are apt to develop craft through a process of experimentation and refinement of basic narrative devices, becoming better at shaping narrative experiences without unduly constraining the space for improvisation within the game.”
“Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or syuzhet) that refers to, in Kristen Thompson’s (1988) terms, “the structured set of all causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself,” and story (or fabula), which refers to the viewer’s mental construction of the chronology of those events (Thompson 1988, 39-40).”
“Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information.”
The “classical Hollywood narrative […] the law of three suggests that any essential plot point needs to be communicated in at least three ways.”

129
Kevin Lynch (1960, The Image of the City, p116) describes city planning as “the deliberate manipulation of the world for sensuous ends.” City planning is like storyworld/-bible building!
“In each of these cases, choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences. In the case of evoked narratives, spatial design can either enhance our sense of immersion within a familiar world or communicate a fresh perspective on that story through the altering of established details. In the case of enacted narratives, the story itself may be structured around the character’s movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory. In the case of embedded narratives, the game space becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot. And in the case of emergent narratives, game spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players. In each case, it makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects.“