Systemic Narrative: A How-To Guide

After my last blog post on Donkey Kong Bananza, I threatened to take what I’d learned and tell you how to do that for yourself. Well here I am, looming in the shadows with the knife of knowledge in my hand. Waiting just for you.

Now you may look at this blog title and think to yourself “But Nathan, Bananza doesn’t really have a systems-driven narrative, why are you talking about that topic?!” and to you I would say “welcome to my unhinged corner of the internet, you must be new here!”. Donkey Kong Bananza, in typical Nintendo fashion, uses a collection of brilliant narrative design techniques to do very little of interest by way of narrative. Today we’re not talking about Bananza, we’re talking about your game and what you can learn from the genius minds at Nintendo, whether they used these techniques to their fullest or not.

We’re going to cover what Bananza does with its world building, how that expands on Nintendo’s past games, and how we can use those same techniques. We’re then going to ask ourselves how that works fundamentally and how it applies to areas beyond level design and worldbuilding. By the end of this blog post, we should have arrived at some fundamental building blocks for all kinds of systemic narrative.

Let’s go!!

Bananza - Singing & Digging

We’re going to start by contradicting my “we’re not talking about Bananza” assertion for a moment just to establish a baseline of what Bananza offered us in terms of tools. Primarily we’re going to talk about our two lead characters for just long enough to understand that they gave us two things; Singing and Digging.

Pauline’s story is about singing, and the game gives us a singing mechanic that we use to trigger Donkey Kong’s Bananza. Donkey Kong’s story is all about smashing things to get his bananas back, and the game allows us to dig through terrain to find them. The two systems work together to allow DK to dig more efficiently thanks to Pauline’s singing. Over time the game pushes the player into using a Bananza more and more often, which in turn pushes forward our narrative as Pauline has to sing more and more to enable that mechanic.

Bananza - World Narratives

The above works great within the two characters, but we also need these systems to interact with the world around us. Each layer of the game has unique features and peoples present for us to interact with. The monkeys of the upper levels are dealing with a flooded home, the ostrich’s forest has been poisoned, the snake’s artificial sun has been put out, each world offers us a unique opportunity to explore it with the same base mechanics. The core loop of our game is always about smashing terrain in search of bananas, but that mechanic is altered for each new story beat and new interactions are thrown in to offer variety.

Next we’re gunna do a little compare and contrast, my favorite way to build mental bridges! Let’s compare the structure Bananza uses with another Nintendo series: Zelda.

Zelda - Items and Abilities

Where Bananza features two characters who use singing and digging to explore the world, Zelda features a protagonist who starts the game with a simple sword and collects a number of different unique items along the way. Each of those items allows him to interact with the world in new ways, swimming or jumping over and through impassable obstacles, hook-shotting himself onto unreachable platforms, etc. Link’s items and abilities allow him to interact with the world around him to give him access to what was inaccessible. His stories hinge on him needing to reach the bottom of the dungeon to find the treasure hidden there. 

Zelda - World Narratives

Just like in Bananza, Zelda games will feature groups of people and the places where they live and, just like Bananza, those places will need to be saved before you can defeat the ultimate evil in the end. The Goron’s mountain is frozen over, a rot has made the waters of the Zora murky or has driven their whale god mad. The core loop of these games is always about collecting magical artifacts that give you access to new spaces and solving the societal problems you find there. Each story beat offers you a new item and that new item helps you see the world in a new way. You can also extend this line of thinking to a Metroidvania setup or any other game genre that gives you new powers which allow for new traversal.

That last part is the critical element of this examination; Over time you gain new abilities that help you to interact with the world in new and exciting ways. In Bananza you gain new ways to dig and traverse, in Zelda you gain new ways to explore, but in all games you progress by unlocking some new way to do the core loop. The game starts off at a baseline and then expands. The way you started off interacting with the world begins to feel simple, and at that point you give the player something new to think about. 

Core Loops are important for game designers because they give the designer something to change as the intensity and difficulty need to increase over time. You want to be able to add stronger enemies or more complex platforming or more difficult bullet patterns. You want to do that because as the player comes to exert mastery, you want to push them into the next level of even greater mastery. If you don’t ramp up difficulty, players will call your game ‘easy’ or ‘boring’ and go find something that develops along with them. This growth is something humans just absolutely love. 

Narrative structures also follow this same pattern of growth over time. Pauline needs to learn to sing in public and we want to see her go slowly from terrified to comfortable as she overcomes obstacles along her path. If you, as a writer, don’t ramp up the emotional intensity over time your readers will call your story ‘boring’ and go find something that develops with them. 

We need to see development in our characters to understand that they can change and grow, because we want to believe that we can change and grow. We also need to feel that growth and change ourselves as we develop and showcase our mastery over the game’s systems, proving to the game that we tangibly have changed and grown.  

The best games are going to tie those two needs together into the same solution.

Sure, I think we can all agree that sounds great, but it’s just hard to actually do. Everyone probably tries their best to do this already, but it’s hard without a shared set of rules to follow. After all, game design and writing are two wildly different fields using wildly different skillsets. How could a game designer possibly know what gameplay design is going to be best for writing when they don’t actually know how to write? Even if you do both of those things, translating the need to make your characters smooch into a mechanic that allows them to smooch without robbing the narrative intensity of the moment is just... Impossible... right?

Let’s go through all of the above one piece at a time and try to develop a vocabulary of design tools and thought processes that can help us do the impossible.

Systems - Items and Abilities

Pauline needs to learn to sing, DK needs his bananas back, Link needs to find the tools to reach the triforce, everyone has a verb that they will use to accomplish their goals, but what verbs tell a good story? Well if we look at Pauline, we learn that we need a mechanic which changes over time. DK and Link gain new abilities over time instead of changing their baseline verb. Whether you’re changing what you already have, or adding something new to the pile, what matters is growth. Characters need to grow and develop over time in order to tell a story about them. 

Those familiar with writing advice will immediately identify that actually there is another kind of character possible here: A static character. That said, a static character will change the people around them instead of growing themselves, but that’s definitely a thing we see in games. Pikmin comes immediately to mind, where the protagonist doesn’t gain new abilities, but rather will surround themselves with new types of pikmin that give the protagonist new abilities by proxy. That kind of character may also still gain new abilities in the form of a map or compass or some other tool that doesn’t actually change who they are, but does still expand the player’s toolset. 

The above means we have both narrative and non-narrative mechanics, but both can change over time and that change gives the player something new. The change itself is what’s important. When choosing a core loop, choose something that can change in a way that aligns with the story you’re trying to tell. While writing you might normally think about how your character grows emotionally, but to work with game design you must think about how they express that growth. Do they sing more often as they overcome their anxiety? Do they start to find non-violent solutions to their problems as they overcome their anger? What kind of growth are you trying to show in your protagonist and how do they express that with the things they do?

Creating Goals aka Quests

Once you’ve chosen a mechanic, what does the player do with it? Donkey Kong can dig through the ground, but if there weren’t bananas hidden there this wouldn’t be very interesting to do. Often you might think of a quest as something that begins and ends with a needy NPC, begging you to kill 4 wolves and rewarding you with magic boots. However, modern games will often leave a “quest” as simply something to do within the world as you play. Collecting Bananas or Stars are both quests of their own, even if no one specifically asks you to do so. What’s important for this discussion is the motivation and tying that into our story and gameplay both. 

Stars are arbitrary. Bananas are a little more tangible, but still somewhat narratively abstract. What is your character seeking within your story? Pauline needs confidence to sing in public, perhaps what you’re collecting could be something which gives her that confidence. Link doesn’t need to collect anything, he just needs the Triforce. To reach that goal, he has to find the right tools. Therefore his quest becomes about seeking out new tools that will hopefully help him, and telling his story means giving him many tools and writing in ways for him to explore which of those tools are most useful.

When building a systemic narrative, you need to understand the type of goals you need. Does your core loop require repeating goals the player accomplishes over and over? Each time loop could give them more knowledge or each attempt to escape could bring you a little bit further. This structure works well in a system like a roguelike game often has, where you are repeating randomized content. For something like an open world, you may instead need that repetition to come in the form of bananas to collect, or towers to activate. For metroidvanias and other exploration games, your goals may be to reach and explore a location in search of something. For action titles it may be to reach the big boss and take him down.

No matter what form your individual quests take, ask yourself how that expresses a character need. A violent character’s core loop might be to kill the big boss of every major company in hopes of finally toppling capitalism as a whole. A gluttonous character’s core loop might allow them to devour delicious foods, and their quest is to find all the best foods as they wander the world around them. We can then change the expression of these goals as we go to tell a story.

Example World Narrative

Let’s assume we’ve chosen a character with a core loop about collecting delicious cakes and our quest design centers around exploring the world for the #1 best cake ever. This is our throughline, the central plot that we’re going to spend our story exploring. Andor is a TV show about exploring what it takes to build a rebellion, Jessica Jones is a TV show about abusive relationships, Steven Universe is a TV show about mental health and found family. Each episode of these shows is an exploration of some facet of the theme. The first episode of Andor might set up the struggles the rebellion are having, only for a later episode to pay that off. In a less linear example, an episode of Star Trek will explore something about a character that may or may not be paid off later. 

Each world in Bananza is like an episode of a show, exploring the central theme of Pauline needing to learn to sing and DK needing to collect his bananas. Each community of Majora’s Mask is experiencing some hardship that Link must overcome as he searches for a way to prevent a calamity and get out of the time loop. Individual beats come together to tell a story. You can think of each level or region as a sentence. You can write each sentence in a linear row, or use a generator to select them at random, but at the end of the day a paragraph is created and the player is reading that as their version of the story.

If our story is about finding the best cake ever made, then each episode is a commentary on that. Perhaps we’re building to a larger thesis statement about how all cakes are delicious, there’s no single one winner. Each world narrative within our story then must make a specific commentary. A world might be about how it’s impossible to compare vanilla vs chocolate, another might be about how preferences change over time, another might be about how every time a competition is held the answer comes out different. Each of these is a slightly different lens through which to view the overall narrative of “must find the best cake” and each of them builds up to a consistent ideology. When presented together in the form of a game, they combine to tell a cohesive whole story.

What kind of game mechanics tell a story?

You may now be at the point of asking “what on earth kinds of mechanics do I even use, though?!” because representing a story through gameplay sounds confusing and likely you only have one half of the knowledge required. Whether you’re a game designer or writer, the answer is the same. Any game mechanic can tell a story as long as that game mechanic can change over time. Imagine that your core loop centers shooting bullets at enemy soldiers. Imagine your gun starts suddenly shooting flaming bullets instead. Your protagonist is going to feel a way about that change. Maybe it’s something they don’t understand and have to investigate, maybe they’re embarrassed about it, or maybe this is a sign to them that god is blessing their righteous pursuit of justice. No matter what their feelings about that change may be, they will absolutely feel something and your job is to simply allow that. What matters is how strong of a feeling your protagonist is going to have. If I live in the Bioshock world and shooting flaming bullets happens any time I grab the wrong bottle next to the fridge, I’m not going to react as strongly as if I’m a soldier in a realistic world war 2 setting.

This highlights something important that we need to acknowledge; Change only matters if it’s a noticeable change. If you live in the Bioshock world and your bullets turn to fire, this isn’t going to even register to you because your arms shoot both hornets and horses depending on your mood. In that setting, fire bullets isn’t a novelty, it’s just a tuesday. Telling a story requires a change that is significant enough to matter to the person who is changing. Changing my mind on what to order for dinner isn’t going to be a thrilling tale to tell my friends when we hang out next weekend. Whatever story we are telling must involve a change of some critical part of who we are as a person. For example, Aang in Avatar stops being able to use firebending for a while. An entire skill tree is locked for half the story. That’s a big deal! 

So let’s break all that down into digestible bullet points.

• Your core loop establishes a baseline system that shows who the character is now.

• Changes to that system express changes in that character.

• Obstacles in the world require the use of that system, and represent the struggles your protagonist must overcome in order to express their growth.

• Quests are sentences (AKA parts of a story) created from all of the above. 

• Quests build into a paragraph, each one working together to convey some idea or ideas.

• All of these things together combine to create your story.

Let’s look at one last example, just to nail this all home.

Pretend we’re working on a First Person Shooter title that’s a hyper realistic military affair telling the story of a pretend war against a terrorist organization hell bent on toppling our grand and glorious regime. We want to show growth and change over time without breaking the realistic tone of our game, and we also don’t want to balloon scope by changing the game into something else entirely, not to mention that our audience is expecting a standard FPS title that doesn’t break convention too much. Let’s say that writing has decided this game is about the stress of endlessly fighting, and the PTSD that many veterans suffer from in the end of such an experience.

The core loop of this game is obviously about shooting bad guys, but we need some way to show that fighting takes a toll. The simplest way to do this is to have the act of shooting itself be what changes to express differences in the character state. Maybe your shots get less accurate the longer you’re in battle, maybe each battle arena you enter increases your stress levels and you need to rest at a campfire to reset that stress. These are examples of immediate changes to your gameplay that could be considered. It may also be useful to consider a larger, lasting change for a more impactful moment. Maybe at some point your character starts to hallucinate enemies even in times of peace, maybe at some point the act of shooting starts to reduce their hitpoints because they physically cannot do this anymore, it’s impacting their health. Each of these options will need to be discussed with the team and considered in terms of what your team considers to be the most viable given your skillsets.

Narratively, opposition to this mechanic means forcing your main character to continue fighting. Enemies could appear which ambush the main character, creating situations where they cannot escape combat. Other enemies might tempt the main character with rest at times when stakes are high, forcing them to choose between their needs and the needs of the war at large.

Quests in this hypothetical game should center different perspectives on personal needs vs collective needs. Your CO might demand that you dive into the fight when you need rest because there is some dire situation, maybe the terrorists have taken hostages and you have an hour to free them or else. You might see a long-running plotline about rejecting orders because you are no longer capable of accomplishing the required task at the required level of finesse. You might see quests discussing topics of burnout or psychological trauma.

Once we make the decision that our story is about the stress of constant fighting, we can immediately understand that our main character wants to rest and that their enemies must therefore be all about preventing that rest. Once we understand that our story is about that push and pull, we can start playing the game of demanding rest and preventing that rest over and over with each quest we write. Do that enough, and the story will be told no matter how we write the words that the game speaks to the player.

I choose the example of a first person shooter title because historically that genre is deeply resistant to telling meaningful narratives. One of the main reasons for that is because the players don’t want to be exposited at for long periods, they just want to shoot things. DOOM gets worse when you spend hours and hours in cutscenes. I don’t want to watch an action movie that spends 20 minutes telling me about the emotional trauma the main character experienced when he was a boy, and an action movie is a passive experience. Put me into an interactive experience, like a video game, and I will interact my way right past all your talking every single chance I am given.

However, if the act of shooting itself is what tells the story, I will have no choice but to experience it. If the gameplay is about finding moments of peace and rest between all the fighting, I will understand the importance of that rest. If the story keeps trying to rob me of my rest, I will start to actively demand it. Even if you remove all the cutscenes and backstory, I will still spend all my time seeking rest among an endless series of battles. No matter how you write things, I will walk away having enacted the story you’re trying to tell, even if I read no words at all.

Systemic narrative of this style is something I believe the games industry needs in order to evolve into a better version of itself. The techniques we have now are fine, but they tell stories you have to stop to watch instead of stories you can play. My goal is to understand how to tell stories with play itself. Donkey Kong Bananza has pushed me that little bit further towards that goal. Hopefully this blog post has done the same for you.Thanks for reading!