Supernarratives in Games
/We are familiar with the idea that games can tell narratives. However, a game can also be an important element of narratives that are created in the real world by the game’s players. Some examples of such narratives are:
The story of players deciphering a mystery in the game.
The story of players competing against each other in a game tournament.
The story of a player’s mastery over a game.
I couldn’t find a coined term for such narratives, so for the purposes of this blog I’ll call them “Supernarratives” i.e. narratives that are outside the scope of the game’s story but utilise the game as a key object in their story.
Game supernarratives are real-life stories that form about the game and the people playing it. Some people might think ARGs fit into this category, but ARGs are about the game narrative including the real-world in its fictional story. However, a game supernarrative is firmly rooted in the real world and only has the game act as a story element.
I think supernarratives are an underexplored area of games. I will go over the example of the players deciphering a game mystery to show how engaging and powerful supernarratives can be and how games can create supernarratives.
Five Nights at Freddy’s (shortened to FNaF) is a great example of how to create a mystery supernarrative. While the FNaF is a huge franchise now, when the first game came out, it was just a small and low-budget indie horror game. The player’s goal was to survive five days working as a night-shift security guard at an entertainment center where the animatronics were trying to kill you. This first game exploded in popularity. While I do think that the high popularity helped turn the game into a franchise, I think that the supernarrative that formed around the game is the real reason the series is able to last so long. So, what was the supernarrative?
Well, if you play through the first FNaF game, you will find that it has a very light story. You are a guard and you have to survive your shift. The animatronics get more unsettling every night. At the end of your five days, you are fired and the game is over. However, some more dedicated players noticed details in the game that seemed to suggest a more sinister backstory about a child serial killer. Some of these players started posting online theories about the backstory. People became fascinated with these theory videos, many channels like Game Theory would have millions of views on their theory videos. With every new release of a FNaF game that would contain more story details, the question on everyone’s mind would be: were the theorists right or wrong? The supernarrative formed around the community’s goal of solving the mystery. People began to latch on to the story of how these theorists would hit dead ends or discover new clues. Sometimes, paradigm shifts would occur as a new game revealed a new fact and the whole community would scramble to reinterpret old games. Online feuds would be formed between prominent theorists with different theories. As a result, people kept talking about the FNaF games and the theorists analyzing them. The series had a constant presence on Youtube without spending much on marketing and as a result, FNaF still reliably tops the top selling list on Steam whenever a new game is out. Most of the early FNaF games have been made quite fast and on a low budget, but they still manage to out-sell many longer and more polished games.
So, how can games create such a mystery solving supernarrative? Note that as a game developer, I don’t think you can guarantee a supernarrative to form around your game. There are only things that you can do to increase the chance a supernarrative will appear. In this case, consider some of the games that have had more than 1 million views on popular theory videos:
Five Nights at Freddy’s
Undertale
Duck Hunt VR
Hollow Knight
All of these games have an in-depth story that is not fully told in the game. FNaF has the serial killer plot, Undertale has a hidden story about a scientist suffering from a horrible experiment and so on. All of these games utilise environmental storytelling and clues to tell a bigger story than what playing through the game explicitly tells you. So the most important thing to include in your game is a mystery that is not resolved within the game. That way, players will have to put in effort and decipher the story. Furthermore, adding content over time with more hidden story details is a good way to add story beats to the narrative of solving the mystery. As new FNaF games came out, some details forced theorists to scrap a lot of their previous assumptions about the hidden backstory. Those points generated a lot of interest because it felt like a rise of tension in the mystery supernarrative. Furthermore, when a new game falsified old theories, people became more excited for new releases because they expected that a new game would have an impact on the mystery solving. As a result, each installment of the series attracted a huge audience.
There are many more interesting supernarratives to are worth discussing, but for now I’ll end on the above example. I think that games can be designed to foster specific supernarratives and games with supernarratives tend to attract very large audiences. After all, players just want to experience a good story, and that story doesn’t have to be the in-game narrative.