Field Guide to Narrative & Game Design

This is a field guide to the craft of narrative and game design, for anyone who builds experiences that other people play: tabletop roleplaying games, interactive fiction, escape rooms, puzzle hunts, live and immersive events, and the board and video games beside them. It treats design as a set of functions rather than a set of media. A clue behaves much the same whether it is hidden in a novel, a room, or a save file, so the guide is organised by what a mechanism does, not by the medium it happens to appear in. Each article carries the media it touches as tags, so a single idea can be followed across all of them.

The six families

The articles are grouped into six families, each a distinct design discipline.

• Structure & Pacing: how an experience is shaped over time, from branching maps to the rhythm of a single session.
• Puzzles, Clues & Information: the craft of fair challenge and the controlled release of what a player comes to know.
• Story, Character & Voice: the fiction itself, and the craft of character, voice, prose and genre that shapes it.
• Players & Social Dynamics: the people at the table and the trust between them, held together by clear roles and safety tools.
• Space, Props & Materiality: the physical and digital objects of play, from a sealed letter to a lock to a screen.
• Systems & Mechanics: the rules engine, from dice and economies to the loops that keep a game worth replaying.

How an article is built

Every article opens with a one-line Silhouette that names the mechanism in a sentence. The Mechanism then explains how it works, and Where this fits places it among its neighbours, with links to follow. Two kinds of call-out punctuate the text: a Specimen points to a real work where the mechanism can be seen in the wild, and a Hazard marks the way it most often fails.

Each family is introduced by a primer that sketches the terrain before the articles go deep, and closes with a Works & References page crediting the games, films, books and essays the family draws on.

Finding your way in

You can read a family from its primer onward, or follow the cross-links between articles wherever one mechanism leans on another. The Exemplars gazetteer profiles real works, a game or a hunt or a show, and links each back to the mechanisms it demonstrates. The Glossary & Index is an A-to-Z of every mechanism and the other names it goes by.

The Keys route you to articles by what you need rather than by name: by the effect you want to create, the problem you are trying to solve, the components you have to hand, or by genre, medium and format.

Two editions

This guide is both a printed book and a web wiki, built from one source. The wiki is the complete edition. The print edition is curated, leaving some web-native material (the Keys, the wider research trails) to the wiki alone, where links and search make it useful. Where the two differ, the wiki has more.