A Functional Perspective on Narrative in Computer Games - Wolf Maul

In The Longest Journey, for example, my engrossment with the fiction frame suffered
when it proved impossible at one point to go to a subway station that I (through April) had
previously visited. This limitation did not make sense within the logic of the world (one of the
stations, in fact, was in an area where April lived). Without any explanation for it, there was
no way to interpret this limitation as anything other than an arbitrary requirement of the game,
and so it drew me into the perspective of the game frame.
If granularity and range are not necessarily desirable at life-like levels, but at lower and
inconsistent levels are detrimental to a player’s sense of agency, how is a satisfying gaming
experience – one in which the player is engrossed in the fiction frame – even possible?
What made it possible in these games was the context in which the agency was enacted,
which maintained my engrossment in the fiction frame despite limited granularity, range and
consistency.
Because the fiction frame acts as a pseudo world frame, appropriate evocative world-based
triggers (the sound of wind in the background, a heartbeat, birds singing, etc.) encourages
engrossment with the fiction frame rather than with the game frame. And because the game’s
context - from the music, sound effects and graphics to dialogue, character development and
plot – draws on the world frame, simple, repetitive player inputs can be made to seem like a
wide range of actions. The result is a perception by the player that there is far more variation
and choice than actually exists. For example, in The Longest Journey, a single player action
sequence (click left mouse button on first object, move pointer over second object, click left
mouse button) is used to construct the illusion of a wide range of possibilities from mixing a
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