Updating Aristotle, freytag & campbell with lakoff and frames: Designing interactive narratives in games

Abstract

This paper discusses approaches to teaching parts of the foundations of interactive narrative for the design of interactive media and games in a course offered to undergraduate New Media and Game Design students. The course is offered to upper division students, most of whom are in the Game Design degree in the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. While traditional approaches to understanding narrative structure and analysis, grounded in theories of drama, myth and cinema, such as Aristotle's Poetics and Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, are valuable and it is important for students to be familiar with this body of thought and practice, a growing body of empirical research and theory can help us understand the neurological basis for cognition, interaction design and narrative structure. Rather than viewing framing and metaphors as purely cinematic or poetic devices, for example, we can understand how they represent the encoding and representation of knowledge and a mechanism for automaticity in comprehension. These theories also provide a framework for analysis of media and interaction and a growing set of tools for designing user experience by basing our analytical and design tools and methodologies more firmly on empirical research. For example, how does one translate fairly abstract ideas and emotions into the procedural mechanics of the underlying systems upon which we implement interaction designs? Do we have predictive models that facilitate our ability to conduct research related to the design, implementation and effects of interactive media and games? As a beneficial side effect, learning about the power and automaticity of these cognitive processes might also help inoculate both students and faculty against the abusive use of neuroscience as it is incorporated into games, marketing, public relations and political propaganda. The paper will look application of the theories of frames and metaphors by Goffman [1], Fillmore [2] and Lakoff & Johnson [3].