The hierarchy of narratives

In the last post, I described "the game philosophy triangle" as a space in which we can define any game by reference to three basic components: entertainment, narrative, and hypernarrative. The first two are shared with many other media--Saturday Night Live, caricatures, and stand-up comedy are nearly entirely entertainment, while crime dramas, theater, symphonies, and most movies are narratives.

However, I believe games are the primary (if not the only major) instantiation of the third factor: hypernarratives. The prefix "hyper-" was not chosen arbitrarily; games have a parallel to the standard hierarchy of prefixes, as follows:

• Subnarratives: the various micromotives and the resulting decisions that drive individual scenes of a work
• Narratives: the story of the work, taken as a whole
• Supernarratives: the ideas that underlie and intersect the narrative, refining the context in which the narrative's message is set; the semiotic and conceptual framework within which a narrator is telling the story
  
• Hypernarratives: the framework, built separately from the narrative by the person to whom the story is being told, that fundamentally changes the nature of the narrative

In other words, hypernarratives : narratives :: hypercubes : cubes. They are the result of adding another dimension to the existing ones, orthogonal to all.

For instance, Ben from SLRC implemented a hypernarrative experiment in Far Cry 2 (h/t Clint Hocking), exploring the how the narrative is altered by literally changing the rules of the game.

Open-world games, in particular, are conducive to building hypernarratives. The quintessential example of such games is The Elder Scrolls series, especially the most recent two, wherein the so-called "main quest" can be completely ignored and dozens or hundreds of hours of play derived from entirely ancillary quests.

A final note: hypernarratives are not merely designed to make the game harder (c.f. the Nethack challenges). They are designed to add meaning, to enrich the narrative of the game with a narrative of one's own.


Next: Supernarratives and superheroes