Things I'm not doing

And a perfectly great excuse

Writing a book is both consuming and liberating: you always have an excuse for putting things off—because book! So, here's a list of things I haven't been doing so far:

• Designing an oracle deck as part of a photography-based art project;

• Making an interactive piece of art in Unreal Engine;

• Even upgrading said engine;

• Cleaning up my inbox;

• Editing "Perlucidus", my photo project about moving to a new country;

• Playing new games (unless it's research for work or the book);

• Preparing for an 8 km women's race around Sava Lake in October;

• Watching the second season of "House of The Dragon";

• Developing photos from this year's Belgrade Pride;

• Writing newsletters and posts about the book.

Unlike the others, the last one is truly unforgivable. As Arnold Schwarzenegger argues in his (awesome) book 'Be Useful', if you're doing something you consider important, you must 'sell' it—that is, tell everyone about it and explain why they should care. I'm great at designing and launching this kind of communication and extremely bad at maintaining it because I can spend that time actually writing the book instead. Yet, here's something I care about enough to stop not writing these emails for a moment.

When we drafted the outline for the book, our goal was clear: to give our readers an understanding of what interactive storytelling is and the tools to work with it. But as we've started conducting interviews for the games chapter, I realised that it's shaping up to be something bigger: helping our readers learn to think of interactive narratives in different ways.

Every person we interviewed had a different take on the purpose of the story in games in general. This is something, I believe, no book on narrative design has touched on before. Their approaches weren't tied to specific genres, which allowed us to get to more interesting findings than simply looking for frameworks and instruments. The narrative can help players situate themselves in the game; it can work as a hook to make them come back for new sessions; it can be a tool to explore political discourse; an all-encompassing "why" behind every element in the game; or the game's reason to exist; or something else entirely. There is no single answer to why and how the narrative should work in games.

So, before you get to frameworks and diagrams and Excel sheets, you should probably ask yourself: What kind of story can players experience in your game?

I'll be happy to hear your discoveries and thoughts. Have you encountered games where the narrative served a unique or unexpected purpose? How do you think about story when you're playing or creating games? Hit "reply" or comment right here!