Firstly, the narrator is the person who connects the game and the players. The narrative designer is the one who decides how to integrate the story into the gameplay and emotions. You can allow players to truly experience everything from the perspective of the character itself, including all the stories, all the perspectives, and all the decisions. You can also tell the story from a third-person perspective or an omniscient perspective like a narrator, but since our game is of the horror genre, the personal experience and the fear from a real perspective are very important in horror games. Therefore, we chose the first-person perspective as the viewpoint for our game.
When I write stories and dialogues, my main character is both the original self and its reflection in the mirror. The original self narrates the actual situation and meaning as a subjective existence, while the reflection presents the facts as an objective existence. The story mostly involves the objective actions of the main character and the responses made by its reflection after the main character’s narration. This is the preferred narrative method in classic literature. The narrator knows everything, allowing the author to enter anyone’s mind. I often use the third-person perspective to describe the behaviors of both parties, and not using only one perspective is achieved by presenting the protagonist’s embarrassment through external circumstances and using internal thoughts and dialogues to depict the current depressed state of mind and ideas combined with the changes of the two forms to guide players to explore the game plot and narrate the protagonist’s self-struggle in this visual fear and social anxiety situation, as well as the distress caused by external influences.
Beginning
The protagonist has isolated herself in her apartment for a long time due to severe social anxiety and fear of the outside world.
Inciting Incident
She runs out of food. Hunger forces her to finally consider leaving the apartment.
Second Thoughts
She hesitates at the door, overwhelmed by anxiety and fear of being watched.
Plot Point
A confident and cheerful second persona appears through the mirror, encouraging her to go outside and face the world.
Climax
The protagonist either:
suffers a mental breakdown,
successfully completes the shopping trip,
or returns home with regret after partially completing it.
This video has made me understand the significance of narration. It is not about telling a story but about finding ways to make players immerse themselves in the story, allowing them to make choices and for their existence to become part of the story, and integrating them into the story.
（Research）
Mountford, Peter. “Third-Person Limited: Analyzing Fiction’s Most Flexible Point of View”. Writer’s Digest. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
Walter, Liz (26 July 2017). “When no one was looking, she opened the door: Using narrative tenses”. cambridge.org. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
James McCracken, ed. (2011). The Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. Retrieved 16 October 2011.
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