The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation

This paper argues that narrative in video games is emerging as the design of an immersive simulation, arising from the tension between two game formats: character-oriented games, which build immersion through embodied presence in navigable 3D worlds, and simulation games, which model complex systems and reward the observation and modeling of their behavior over time. The author positions agency, defined as the satisfying power to take meaningful action and witness its consequences, as the foundational premise for games as a narrative form, and contends that the interplay of these two modes could yield a new and promising narrative game format.

The analysis proceeds through several theoretical frameworks. Drawing on Gibson's theory of affordances and the concept of the Umwelt from Jakob and Thure von Uexküll, the paper argues that presence and agency depend on the degree to which a player's virtual body can perform meaningful tasks within the game world, and that embodiment can enable alternative perceptions of reality. Simulation games are distinguished by their lack of fixed victory conditions, their treatment of the process itself as the object of play, and their capacity to reveal interconnected cause-and-effect relationships. The paper suggests that a simulation's history can function as a narrative even without a conventional dramatic structure, though it acknowledges that all simulations rest on arbitrary, conventional assumptions.

The conclusion holds that narrative in simulation games becomes an index of a modeled system that the player experiments with rather than a predetermined chain of events, shifting narrativity toward the possibilities the system opens. The author proposes that literary works such as Kafka's The Process or Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths could be reimagined as simulations, allowing players to experience a world governed by their logic rather than following a fixed path. The paper is a theoretical essay and offers no empirical data, survey results, or quantitative methodology; its claims rest on semiotic and media-theoretical argumentation.