Unlocking the Truth: Exploring the Discovery Narratives of Video Games

This paper examines and analyzes what Dr. Marcello Arnaldo Picucci termed “discovery narratives” in video games, which is something unique only to the interactive and dynamic video game medium. Discovery narratives exist to give players a level of freedom in engaging with the game’s story and world, requiring the player to explore and interact with the game in specific ways to access these particular narratives. While Dr. Piccuci didn’t focus on discovery narratives too much and only lightly touched upon the topic with a few examples, this paper will categorize six different types of discovery narratives and explore an example of a game for each category. These categories are “Side-stories,” “Character Information,” “Sidequests,” “Main Quests,” “Challenge Narratives,” and “True Endings.” Before categorizing, though, the paper will make important clarifications regarding some possible areas of confusion or conflict in the analysis, such as the definition of narrative itself according to H. Porter Abbott, the methodology of the categorization, the other three models of narrative architecture besides discovery narratives, the distinction between “alternative narrative paths” and discovery narratives, and the external process of how these narratives are discovered. The categories of discovery narrative are not mutually exclusive, however, and in the final part of the paper, the game Dark Souls will be used as a prime example of how these different categories of discovery narrative can be mixed together in order to create a narrative that functions almost entirely on discovery. By exploring these different methods of discovery narrative and analyzing the games that use them, the unique narrative possibilities of video games will be much more understood.