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Today I want to talk about the most secret of secret sauce; narrative resonance in games, and why it pays to think like a poet.
Resonance, while easy for me to feel, is hard for me to describe. Resonance is when a body of work rhymes with itself. When things feel like they are aligned, vibrating with meaning. If you ask me what makes my better games truly award winners, its resonance.
I hunt resonance like a tiger hunts a doe in the woods. It's elusive, it spooks easy, and you have to keep a keen nose to the wind to stay on its track. Of all the narrative skills I try to teach folks, this is perhaps the hardest for me to articulate. But I'm gonna try.
Boiled down, resonance is when a work connects to itself; thematically, archetypically, structurally. It has its own internal call and response, patterns, echoes, and other structural and rhythmic forms that *cohere into meaning*
This meaning feels good to our brains. When you hear the structural resonance in music you get large dopamine hits. Resonance in narrative gives a story almost mythic power (in fact, are not all myths resonant stories that have endured due to that very resonance?).
This is heady stuff, and you have to build an ear for it, much like a poet builds an ear for the sound and the feel of their work. But game narrative designers, we're not just putting down purple prose, we have to do the same with play structures.
That means we need to get themes, motifs, characters and MECHANICS to resonate with each other. Ah, there's the magic! To explain what I mean by mechanical resonance, I'm going to use HoloVista and Bluebeard's Bride as examples.
HoloVista is a mobile game in which the protagonist's reality collapses while desperately trying to affirm and cohere their identity through social media.
In this case, during the course of development the mechanics came first, and I molded the story around how they work. The UI and moment to moment gameplay centers around a fantastical social media platform. So what goes with social media? What resonates with us?
Well, self branding, identity, how we present our masks to each other every day over the internet, and how we struggle with how that may or may not match up with who we really are. That's something we can all relate to. That resonates. Now the story and the mechanics jive.
It gets more nuanced than that. Physical distortions happen to UI as reality breaks. Puzzles change and get harder. Characters start acting differently. But that's the gist. They're all in concert. A large part of my job was listening for their lyrical quality coming together.
In the case of Bluebeard's Bride we started with feeling and premise first, and designed mechanics around that. We took the fairy tale of Bluebeard and we wanted you to feel terrified by it.
So of course we broke you down into pieces. In Bluebeard's Bride, players inhabit parts of the Bride's psyche, kind of like in Everybody Is John. Mechanically, we put players in a no-win situation where it was fun to play out the ghoulish consequences of the fairy tale's parable.
This works, honestly, solely because of its resonance. Getting people on board with "playing to loose" is devilishly hard, and only happens because players trust they will get significant *meaning* out of it. That it will feel powerful.
If you've played Bluebeard's Bride, you know that there is not fat in those mechanics. They are precise and sharp, and every piece does heavy lifting. This helped immensely to amplify the game's resonance. In fact, everything we did was an attempt to amplify resonance.
So what are the tools of narrative design resonance? Theme is your strongest ally. Know your themes, know how they translate to mechanics. Thematic patterns echoing in parallel, or like nesting dolls. Characters illustrating themes or challenging them.
Know your payoff. This all needs to arrive somewhere. You need the final bar of the symphony that ties it all together, or that catharizes it, that gives it a final framing meaning. Everything should fit together in a way that feels good.
Engage with other art. ENGAGE WITH OTHER ART. What are other works in your genre saying? Are you familiar with what makes the classics classic? What can you learn from theatre or paintings?
Finally, this is all highly subjective. This is feeling based, intuition based, you cannot derive it from a formula. Perfect your tuning-in skills. Learn how to listen and feel for resonance. Learn how to course correct when resonance is fading from your work.
That's easy to say and hard to do. It takes a lifetime to build these skills. But you know, it couldn't hurt if you read some poetry. Good poets have resonance figured out.
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