Environmental Storytelling: A study on the interface of narrative and space

Anja Gödl

 

As an audio-visual, interactive medium, the digital game offers new possibilities for storytelling, such as the integration of space into the narrative. The most extreme form of this is subsumed under the established term of environmental storytelling and describes the active, plot-guiding role that space takes on in the absence of language (e.g. in the form of a narrative instance). Building on an initial systematisation by Henry Jenkins (2004), this dissertation aims to subject the phenomenon of environmental storytelling to a theoretical differentiation that does not yet exist in this form. What types of environmental storytelling are there and in which genres of digital games do they (particularly) occur? The answer to this research question is intended to contribute to an area of narrative research that has so far been dominated by individual studies, but which has not yet been fully developed. As a result, a categorisation will be created, which will be applied to an exemplary selection of digital games in the subsequent analysis chapter. This categorisation will be as broad as possible and include various game genres, such as open world adventures (e.g. The Legend of Zelda), escape games (e.g. A Ruff Day) or walking simulators (e.g. Gone Home). On the one hand, the study will examine and reinterpret the narrative form specific to digital games and, on the other hand, it will deal with a potential categorisation of digital games according to genre and genre characteristics, but always in relation to the spatial representation.