Narrative premise & goals

What this element is

The narrative premise is the story your game tells and the goals it hands the player: who they are, what they're pursuing, what happens along the way, and what they'll have accomplished when the game is "beaten". Flanagan and Nissenbaum's original questions still apply — what is the story, what motivations drive the playable character, and are players actually paying attention to the narrative as they play?

Why it carries values

Story and goals point players towards specific professional identities, emotional stances and definitions of success. A narrative can give people purpose, authenticity and deeper understanding — or it can be deliberately absent. Both are values decisions. When narratives are sparse, that emptiness is usually a choice about what matters most (often: following a process correctly). When stories are elaborate, they are carefully constructed representations of what the designers think we should care about and aspire to become.

Patterns from practice

Job-role narrative

Many serious games tie their narrative to a role, valuing authenticity and professional identity over a creative or complicated plot. In the medical VR training games, the player is a medic: briefed on the patient, dropped into the simulation to perform the right procedures, then debriefed on how they did. The fire warden game follows the same pattern — the player steps into the shoes of the on-site fire chief responding to emergencies and the alarm panel. The story is completely functional and role-oriented.

Sometimes the role is the story because nothing else was affordable. The customs inspection game puts the player in the role of an inspector searching a backpack for hazardous materials; its designer admitted that even if they had wanted a more exciting story, they lacked the money or in-house talent, so they went with a clear-cut approach faithful to the real activity. The learner-driver game works the same way: "the story was essentially, making it simple and guiding them through... it's going to start easy, and then we'll be teaching you things that are more complicated as we go" (P4).

The space exploration game shows a job-role narrative can still carry aspiration. Players are astronauts — humans at the peak of their performance — and the narrative stays true to that, rewarding careful, considered actions and showing realistic consequences for even the smallest mistake. Vigilance and responsibility are written into the premise itself.

Minimal narrative

Other teams treat "less is more" as the value. The physiotherapy system has almost no narrative — a reflection of the team's priorities from the start. Rather than dressing up exercise with story, they made it less boring through simple, well-tuned control mechanics; the underlying value is gamification to motivate physical activity.

The early childhood assessment game goes further, simplifying the story for clinical purposes: very specific, unbranching tasks — clicking on objects in a particular order — because measurement demands it. The conservation games likewise put mechanics ahead of narrative, using strategic interactions to teach scientific concepts. When measurement, reproducibility or scientific modelling become the priority, narrative gets tightly controlled or demoted.

Learning through narrative

Two studios went the other way, using rich narrative to carry messages of dignity, empathy and deep understanding. The youth social services game is built around branching stories that help young people navigate their local services — the player isn't told a story, they're part of it. Local subject matter experts wrote genuine scenarios, and the player's actions determine which information they see: agency within a framework. The game lays out a clear, comprehensible bureaucracy and reassures players that services exist for problems like smoking and mental health, building respect, care and self-assurance into the fiction.

The in-house space exploration game is based on a real 1859 geomagnetic storm, with players witnessing communication systems fail. The designers deliberately chose an historic, believable premise over a clichéd alien invasion: to make space cool, the narrative had to come from awe, reality and consequence rather than fantasy. It's telling that when developers fund a project themselves, the narrative tracks their core beliefs most tightly.

Questions to ask your team

1. What is our story — and if there barely is one, what does that emptiness say about what we value?
2. Whose identity does the player step into, and what definition of success does that role carry?
3. Is our narrative faithful to the real activity, or are we adding fiction that could undermine the learner's trust?
4. If the story is elaborate, what messages about ethics, society or aspiration is it sending — and did we choose those deliberately?
5. Are we cutting narrative because measurement genuinely requires it, or because it's cheaper — and are we honest about which?
6. Who wrote the stories? Do the people whose world we're depicting recognise themselves in them?
7. Will players actually notice the narrative as they play, or is it window dressing we could redirect into the mechanics?